Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet? [LWN.net]

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 22, 2016 23:25 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet? by Cyberax
Parent article: Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

"Wayland is getting used in lots of embedded devices."

Really? Like what? The only Linux display server that really matters in the embedded space is SurfaceFlinger. Unless you think you can convince Google to move to Wayland. The next most relevant might be Mir, though I really don't see Canonical doing more than a niche business. The Linux desktop, in restrospect, and much to my sorrow, was always DOA, having been stuck at 1% for as long as I've been watching and promoting it, which is 19 years. The one place I have ever found that I can really sell the idea of the Linux Desktop is centralized business desktops running from a terminal server like NX. And there, Wayland and 3D desktops are nonstarters. Servers certainly don't need Wayland. Color me completely unimpressed. Before we ever even get to "Oh, but Wayland can "fill in the blank with some esoteric tech feature", we have to get past the fact that whatever it can or can't do... it doesn't really matter. Maybe it will find some little niche in the embedded space, and we can seek those devices out, buy them, and feel somehow triumphant. But that's hardly anything to get excited about.

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Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 1:45 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Like Tizen devices. Chromebooks use Ozone which is pretty much a NIH-ed Wayland and it's possible that they might switch to it.

BTW, servers are actually making good use of technologies implemented for Wayland - for the GPGPU stuff.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 2:46 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

IIRC Google has already said they are going to move to Wayland for all their products. It's just how long it's going to take at this point.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 24, 2016 1:03 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Link, please.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 19:19 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Maybe they're Tizen based but I thought one of the major IVI vendors has been shipping Wayland based media players for a while now.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 21:37 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

I must say, I'm not impressed. Tizen? How many Tizen devices are out there, again? Practically none? Or is it literally none? Chrome OS used Freon, last I heard. If Google went to the trouble to do another display manager, as they did with SurfaceFlinger for Android, they are not about to switch to Wayland, any more than they are likely to switch to it for Android. As long as all this special purpose embedded stuff stays where it belongs, I'm fine with it. I'm quite happy to see developers play around wherever they like. But start talking about replacing our perfectly functional and performant desktops with it... and that's where I start to get "Pulseaudio" angry about needless, years-long setbacks in functionality, performance, and reliability. And face it, outside of desktops, It's really just Android (and *maybe* Chrome OS) that matter for Linux. Do you really think Tizen is going anywhere?

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 23:05 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

For the record, Sailfish OS uses Wayland, too.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 25, 2016 15:58 UTC (Mon) by javispedro (guest, #83660) [Link]

Note that most mobile Tizen devices one can buy use Xorg (mobile/smartwatch profile). Dunno about IVI, but despite my interest I never saw one of those in the wild.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 14:37 UTC (Sat) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]

> Really? Like what?

LG's Smart TVs come to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-DGijemc7M

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 18:31 UTC (Sat) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (2 responses)

> The only Linux display server that really matters in the embedded space is SurfaceFlinger

Actually I highly doubt that unless you define "embedded" to mean "mobile".

A lot of the embedded projects I've come across use either linuxfb or EGLFS because they don't need any windows, they run one application only.
For devices that actually need multiple windows there is a transition from X to Wayland, often because the vendors get easy to use building blocks like Qt's Wayland compositor library to create custom window management facilities specific to the device's function.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 23, 2016 21:46 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (1 responses)

Mobile is embedded. And it dwarfs the rest of the embedded market hardware-capable of using either X or Wayland. Most of the embedded market doesn't even have a display. Most of the Linux devices in my house only communicate via ssh. The only 3 which have displays are my Desktop and Laptop, which both run splendidly on X, and my phone, which runs fine on SurfaceFlinger, but which would likely do about about as well running Xorg.

Hutterer: Is Wayland ready yet?

Posted Jan 24, 2016 9:06 UTC (Sun) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

While one could technically see mobile as a subvariant of embedded, the usage is different enough to consider them separate.

In the embedded space the device often has just one application using the screen, hence the wide use of direct access like linuxfb, EGLFS, and similar on other platforms than Linux (e.g. QNX)

When it comes to Embedded Linux with a multi window requirement, when traditionally one would use X or some vendor specific windowing system like QWS when using Qt, there is now considerably uptake of Wayland.

There are probably devices that run Android instead and thus SurfaceFlinger, but that is more likely in the home consumer product space where device vendors might even want to have user installable apps.