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A bit lopsidedA bit lopsidedPosted Mar 5, 2013 2:32 UTC (Tue) by tetley80 (guest, #88691)In reply to: A bit lopsided by man_ls Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)
Except that they got the "mistakes" factually wrong, as evidenced by the discussion going on here. This strongly indicates Canonical didn't bother engaging with Wayland developers, even on a rudimentary level. It also indicates they didn't bother reading Wayland's specs. Seriously, how hard is it to ask on the Wayland mailing list, "Hey, we're thinking of adopting Wayland, but we have concerns about area XYZ. Can you shed some light on this?" Or even this would have been better-than-nothing: "Hey, we're doing our own display server, and have run into issue XYZ. How did you solve it in Wayland?" Instead, Canonical hasn't learned from other people's mistakes and is going to put a smaller engineering team (than Wayland et al) on their own display server. As Wayland folks (and X11 folks before them) know, making a display server is not a small task. So a few pertinent questions to Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth are: (1) What substantial value does your own Mir display server provide that's beyond what Wayland does? (2) Wouldn't it be more cost effective to send patches to Wayland developers? (3) Is keeping the development in-house worth the sacrifice of not leveraging the efforts of other organisations and developers? (4) How does fragmenting the ecosystem/software stack help Ubuntu and Canonical?
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A bit lopsided Posted Mar 5, 2013 13:41 UTC (Tue) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
I'll reiterate the question voiced above -- why didn't Wayland people adopt SurfaceFlinger?
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 5, 2013 15:10 UTC (Tue) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link]
That's a good point. To be honest, I'm not that familiar with SurfaceFlinger. To (partly) answer your question: two wrongs don't make a right. Perhaps Canonical/Ubuntu should adopt and extend SurfaceFlinger instead of rolling their own display server? On a related note, I'm starting to think that the most effective method to make Linux more relevant in the desktop space (and at the same time get a relatively sane OS stack: kernel, graphics, sound, input, UI) is to make Android self-hosting.
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 1:14 UTC (Wed) by robclark (subscriber, #74945) [Link]
because it didn't exist at the time. And is less complete than wayland.. maybe the question should be "why didn't surface flinger people adopt wayland" :-P
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 4:04 UTC (Wed) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
Was Wayland around in 2006 when we wrote SurfaceFlinger?
Other discussion in this thread seems to imply Wayland only recently declared the protocol stable. Is this another "Android should abandon <thing they built that works today> in favor of <thing that's not done yet that's clearly going to be better because!>" discussion?
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 4:15 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
two words: bluetooth stack.
why oh why? those days (4.2.2), two out of five times I have to restart BT on my Nexus when I enter my car, just "because!"
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 12:35 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Your comment prompted me to try my BT keyboard that stopped working with 4.2 - it works again! Yay! And the mouse no longer seems to need a dance of turning off and on and re-pairing and praying to Eris and sacrificing a chicken.
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 8, 2013 19:12 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
My car stereo still acts out 20% of the time.
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 4:39 UTC (Wed) by robclark (subscriber, #74945) [Link]
ok, then SF slightly predates wayland.. I couldn't find (and maybe I didn't look hard enough) any evidence of SF prior to 2008. My bad.
Anyways, certainly in the early days, SF wasn't in good shape for hotplug, multiple displays, vblank support, and these sorts of things that matter on desktop.
Anyways, re: protocol stability, I somehow doubt you could claim that SF is backwards compatible to SF from 2006. The protocol stability milestone should have mattered very little to something that is distributed and updated in the manner that android is.
And re: abandoning SF and going to wayland.. well, android has made equally big changes in it's plumbing from release to release. So it doesn't seem too big a stretch of the imagination.
A bit lopsided Posted Mar 6, 2013 7:03 UTC (Wed) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
I wasn't pointing to protocol stability as a SF feature, just as a "it sounded like Wayland was only recently declared 'done'", but I haven't followed Wayland development very closely, so it's possibly I completely misunderstood things here.
First public exposure to SurfaceFlinger would be Fall 2007 (SDK preview release and emulator) and first code drop would be Fall 2008 (Android 1.0 and G1 launch), but it's certainly something that was there from the very early days of the platform -- possibly late 2005, but certainly early 2006.
The hwcomposer HAL actually aims for some level for forward/backward binary compatibility (to ease development and upgrades), and while it doesn't reach back to the early days of SF (which has definitely evolved over the years), I just this week have been writing some test code for the HWC HAL that happily runs on a variety of devices from different OEMs and with different versions of the platform.
I'd be pretty doubtful about us shifting away from SF (especially now that hwcomposer and sync support is looking pretty solid), but we certainly are willing to pull things up and rebuild if necessary -- though the other commenter with his bluetooth complaint may be actually arguing *against* that, I guess.
From the other direction, though, unlike the earlier (now abandoned, I gather) work to stack Wayland on top of Android underpinnings, the hwcomposer HAL provides a much more flexible and richer surface than the old fb HAL, which certainly should be useful to the Canonical folks with their Mir compositor, as well as to anyone wanting to revisit a Wayland-on-Android world, though in both cases I'd assume the goal would be to get access to a wide variety of hardware ready to run "out of the box" rather than to actually use much of Android.
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