Mir 1.0 released

[Posted September 21, 2018 by jake]

The Ubuntu blog has announced the release of version 1.0.0 of the Mir display server. "Whether for building a device or for writing a shell for the desktop, Mir can give you a graphics stack that is fast, light, and secure. The Mir graphical stack works across different graphics platforms and driver models and is easy to integrate into your kiosk, digital signage, or purpose built graphical solution. It was first conceived over 6 years ago as part of an initiative by Canonical to unify the graphical environment across all devices, including desktop, TV, and mobile devices and continues to be developed with new features and modern standards."

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 21, 2018 21:10 UTC (Fri) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

Eh? https://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=night%20of%...

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 21, 2018 23:09 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (6 responses)

Interesting, I hadn't heard that they'd rewritten Mir to build on Wayland.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 25, 2018 10:17 UTC (Tue) by alan_g (guest, #127465) [Link] (5 responses)

> Interesting, I hadn't heard that they'd rewritten Mir to build on Wayland.

Mir was not rewritten. Some new code was written that added support for Wayland clients.

From last year's announcement (https://community.ubuntu.com/t/mir-release-0-28/):

"The start of Wayland support

The desktop community has adopted Wayland as the client-server protocol of choice for replacing X11. This is already supported by several server implementations (Weston, Kwin and Mutter are the best known). By providing Wayland support we will make Mir servers compatible with the various toolkits and libraries that already have Wayland backends."

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 25, 2018 22:48 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (4 responses)

Oh come on. Mir was supposed to be a full display server. Canonical and Shuttleworth lambasted Wayland when they announcement Mir, claimed they were aiming for something completely different and a full window server.

At best you can claim it wasn't rewritten because they'd only gotten far enough to realize that they bit off more than they could chew and that wayland had already taken mindshare. But you can't claim this product is what they intended. I'd call it a rewrite. They stopped trying to write a full window manger and created a wrapper, a drastically different product than they'd started out with.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 26, 2018 3:00 UTC (Wed) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link] (2 responses)

Mir is a full display server. Is mutter not a “full display server”? Is kwin not a “full display server”? Is Weston not a “full display server”? I'm not sure what you mean by the term.

Mir has had several different “frontends” over time - there's the Unix socket+protobuf one you'd be familiar with, but there was also a Binder frontend in the early days and even a Wayland+Mir-specific-xml experiment for a while. Wayland is quite a nice IPC mechanism for display servers, and I was sick of protobuf's limitations!

We certainly had different ideas for window management - our goal of convergence required a window management API with much richer semantics than xdg_shell. Those live on in the UBports project, but Canonical is, indeed, no longer investing in that idea.

I'm a bit sad that xdg_shell is so bare of semantics, but maybe that's the result of xdg_shell's consensus-driven development and the relative paucity of contributors.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 27, 2018 19:28 UTC (Thu) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link] (1 responses)

Isnt's Canonical still using Mir for things like digital signage applications?

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 28, 2018 3:05 UTC (Fri) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link]

Yes. Although it is astounding to me that “show a static image or a looped video on a single always-connected display” isn't a solved problem, the number of shop displays I wander past with “Windows needs to update now” banners in the centre of screen indicate that it clearly isn't a solved problem. miral-kiosk is a simple project built on Mir¹ to provide that, among other use-cases.

There are also a surprising number of IoT devices that have, or would benefit from, a display - or even a touchscreen.

¹: It's in the Mir source tree, but miral-kiosk is one of the example servers we use to prove the API.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 28, 2018 10:06 UTC (Fri) by alan_g (guest, #127465) [Link]

I don't think adding 20KLOC to a 200KLOC project counts as a rewrite.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 22, 2018 1:00 UTC (Sat) by sciurus (guest, #58832) [Link] (7 responses)

Now that it's been rebuilt on Wayland, what is Mir, exactly? And what products use it? Presumably not Ubuntu Desktop given Canonical dropping Unity in favor of Gnome. Can't be Ubuntu Mobile, since they dropped that too. It sounds like Canonical has repurposed it for their IoT-focused distribution, but I'm unsure how it's useful there since the typical IoT device doesn't have a display.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 22, 2018 7:19 UTC (Sat) by thomas.poulsen (subscriber, #22480) [Link] (6 responses)

It looks like it's a library for writing desktop-shells and full screen apps on top of Wayland.

Apparently both Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch are healthy community projects now.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 22, 2018 15:05 UTC (Sat) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link]

The main page mentions building things like digital signage and such on top of Ubuntu's core.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Sep 26, 2018 3:05 UTC (Wed) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link] (4 responses)

Point of order: it has always been a library for writing desktop shells - primarily for Unity 8 while we were still developing it, but generally useful for anyone.

The difference now is that desktop shells using the Mir libraries also support Wayland clients using the wl_shell or xdg_shell protocols.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Oct 1, 2018 1:49 UTC (Mon) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (3 responses)

what is the running process name? and does it support --version on the command line? If so, what is the output?

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Oct 1, 2018 5:55 UTC (Mon) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link] (2 responses)

what is the running process name? and does it support --version on the command line? If so, what is the output?

The process name is the name of whatever binary the Mir libraries have been linked into; so, for the example(ish) servers in the Mir source tree they're miral-shell.bin, miral-kiosk.bin, or mir_demo_server.bin.

For egmde, it's egmde.

For Unity8, it's unity8.

We don't handle the --version option; maybe we could.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Oct 2, 2018 21:10 UTC (Tue) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (1 responses)

--version wouldn't do much good if there's no consistent display server name running. Like compton, weston, rustland, etc. Have you thought about making this a bit less random and a bit more consistent so it can be supported as one thing, not a random set of possible values that are not predictable? Something wild, like, say, mir?

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Oct 3, 2018 10:16 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If it's a library, your suggestion is equivalent to asking that all programs that use glib be renamed to 'glib' to emphasise the fact.

Mir 1.0 released

Posted Oct 1, 2018 6:28 UTC (Mon) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link]

From some of the comments here it seems people tend to have an incorrect idea of what “Wayland” actually is. I wrote about this some time ago when Mir was first made public; maybe it'll help again. It's mostly still accurate, except that we're no longer trying to maintain GTK and Qt backends using mir_toolkit, and weston is a bit more of a project you might expect to use.