Xwayland

Xwayland(blog.mecheye.net)

57 points by untrothy 12 years ago | 15 comments

lisper 12 years ago |

I clicked through three levels of reference links and I still have no idea what Xwayland is, except that it is some kind of refactoring of the Linux graphics stack. Could someone please explain why people seem so excited about it?

forgottenpass 12 years ago | |

The larger idea this fits into is getting rid of X11 all together. The inevitable replacement is Wayland.* One of the challenges of such a switch will that once you start using wayland, you'll have some older applications that cant talk to wayland, you'd have to start an X server to run that old application.

If you have a wayland session on your computer, you don't want to hit ctrl-alt-8 to switch over to an X session running that single application, and then switch back and forth to wayland to use every other program. It would be nice if there was a X server that worked as a wayland client and could put the X-only application on your wayland desktop. That's Xwayland.

* For a better explanation on ditching X, and what Wayland is: see this talk from one of the X dudes working on Wayland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

runeks 12 years ago | | |

Also, if you've ever run an X11 application inside Mac OS X, you've used something similar: XQuartz.

XQuartz is for running X11 applications inside Quartz (Mac OS X's window server/compositor), XWayland is for running X11 applications inside a window server/compositor that uses the Wayland protocol.

Jasper_ 12 years ago | |

It's the component that makes Wayland backwards-compatible with traditional X11, allowing traditional X11 apps to run under Wayland.

hornetblack 12 years ago | |

It's an Xserver that runs inside Wayland. Wayland is a new graphics server (made for Linux), that replaces X. But most applications will still need X. So you run a small X server inside Wayland so you can still use those applications.

(N.B graphics are run as a server in Linux, you send requests to the server and it places you graphics on the screen (if applicable))

notastartup 12 years ago | |

from my limited understanding, it's supposed to replace the X display server which is bloated and not lean. One potential I see is it will be easier and more efficient to run applications in headless mode. I'd like to know more about Wayland.

bronson 12 years ago |

I'm shocked at how fast Wayland is coming together. It's inspiring to watch.

Rovanion 12 years ago | |

Could it be that competition is the mother of productivity?

Jasper_ 12 years ago | | |

It's more that we have people working on it at several companies full-time now, including me.

throwaway812 12 years ago | | |

Competition with what? Windows, OS X? Xorg?

Edit: Can't seem to reply to child, but Mir isn't really a credible competitor (See: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display-serve... . Unfortunately Mir seems to be mostly NIH; everyone else is cooperating on Wayland.)

general_failure 12 years ago | |

I guess this is sarcasm. Wayland started in 2008.,yup, its like 6 years old and we still don't have it adopted enough for general use.

forgottenpass 12 years ago | | |

So, how many man hours should it take to design and implement a new display server architecture? I've been watching it's development without a clue how it's going because it's a big undertaking in a field I hardly understand, I don't know how many people are on the project or how much time they're putting in. If you could clear those up for me, that'd be cool.