Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 12, 2013 8:22 UTC (Tue) by rossburton (subscriber, #7254)
In reply to: Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak by pjhacnau
Parent article: LCA: The X-men speak

Just watch http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/The_rea..., it explains what's broken with X and why Wayland is going to be the future. This future isn't ready yet, but it's getting close!

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 13, 2013 0:06 UTC (Wed) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link] (1 responses)

I was initially very skeptical about Wayland but after some long (and sometimes painful!) discussion here on LWN, I am really looking forward to what this will bring.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 8:30 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link]

> I am really looking forward to what this will bring.

You can see it for yourself. There're wayland livecds. Download http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/ burn it to DVD or manually unpack to a bootable USB stick and try it.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 6:21 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link] (4 responses)

Why people always talk about Wayland as an alternative to X and never mention DirectFB? It should be better than wayland in every aspect. It's fast and small, it works even on embedded devices. And looks nice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ_YieaGDBM

DirectFB people never attempted taking the place of X.Org. They could, just never tried.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 13:56 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

It's definitely not "better in every aspect". DirectFB is a very lightweight X-server look-alike moved into the kernel. It has no real support for running OpenGL applications and can only do simple compositions.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 19:15 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's definitely not "better in every aspect".

Maybe. :) But it's not that obvious.

> DirectFB is a very lightweight X-server look-alike moved into the kernel.

It does not require kernel patches. It only builds a fusion kernel module for fast IPC. And it's much farther from X-server than Wayland.

> It has no real support for running OpenGL applications

DirectFBGL? You can see some 3D-looking samples in http://ilixi.org/ video.

> and can only do simple compositions.

Weston can also do simple compositions. It's up to the compositor, I guess.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 19:25 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I had been watching DirectFB development very close back in early 2000-s. As far as I remember:
1) It uses Linux FB support for modesetting. So no multiple monitors, rotation, etc.
2) It has its own input stack.
3) It required custom kernel modules and direct hardware access from the userspace (ugh).

I don't remember it ever trying to support OpenGL, but I guess that blitting from a texture to framebuffer is not that complex to add if you have a working EGL.

In short, DirectFB is more like a classic framebuffer with several hardware accelerated operations. It's not nearly enough for modern graphics.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 15:14 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

> Why people always talk about Wayland as an alternative to X and never mention DirectFB?

Probably because DirectFB's documentations and introductory materials suck so much that I've never been able to understand how it works (I'm probably not the only one considering that all the discussions about DirectFB I've seen are "it works like this, no it works like that, no, etc").

> DirectFB people never attempted taking the place of X.Org. They could, just never tried.

You don't get to be successful by not trying.