Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 5, 2010 15:19 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Legacy X and network transparency by i3839
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

YES THIS.

Wayland is much simpler because it depends on a modern graphic stack. It'll be faster then X, though, simply because it's much less overhead and cleaner implementation. It won't be magical, of course. Only modest improvements. Probably be better in terms of battery life....

There is also no reason why you need to give up X Windows to use Wayland. I use X Windows just fine in Microsoft Windows. Also lots of people use X Windows just fine in OS X. Given that Wayland is naturally composited interface then having a Wayland-specific X Server that draws to off-screen buffers will allow natural integration and backwards compatibility with current applications.

Not that there is a Wayland DDX like there is for MS Windows DDX and XQuartz DDX, but it's certainly going to be a requirement. It's one of those things that will have to be made before Wayland is usable.

Applications that use Wayland will immediately be able to benefit from being 'native wayland', but X apps won't get lost out in the cold.

Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 6, 2010 4:22 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (3 responses)

> Applications that use Wayland will immediately be able to benefit from being 'native wayland'

These native Wayland apps use DRI2 to draw to offscreen buffers, right? So, isn't it true that there's no reason why X clients couldn't also be made to use DRI2 to draw to offscreen buffers?

And in that case, there's no significant speed penalty to using X (because the X clients then are doing direct rendering without needing to go through the X server (as in AIGLX)), right?

And if Wayland doesn't have a speed advantage over X, then what is its advantage?

Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 6, 2010 6:04 UTC (Sat) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link] (2 responses)

The big advantage of Wayland is simplicity. Because it is so much simpler to implement than X, our tiny pool of X developers is better leveraged. Because modern applications typically just want to emit OpenGL at the end of the day (albeit maybe by some client-side library such as Cairo) and most modern hardware directly supports OpenGL, having X "get in the way" just ticks app developers off by making their job harder. At some point, X starts looking like a huge bag on the side of app interactions with the display, hence Wayland.

Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 8, 2010 16:14 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

Given that apparently you still need to keep an X Server for legacy application AND the ability for application/toolkit to speak X when they want to have network transparency, adding Wayland will add code, not remove code..
So this 'simplicity' isn't very convincing: yes, Wayland itself is simple, but as it's not a complete solution, the result won't be simple!

Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 9, 2010 0:19 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Well, hopefully a method to move a single application's window over network can be found, somehow. If Wayland is to win, it absolutely has to replace X, and that includes some kind of support for this feature. So you can be pretty sure that use of X will be seen as a bug if we actually do get Wayland-managed display system going.