Legacy X and network transparency

Posted Nov 6, 2010 4:22 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Legacy X and network transparency by drag
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

> 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.