*** We are no longer moving to Mir and now switching back to Gnome-Shell which already has a wayland implementation in it. This section likely needs a lot of review. It was originally written for moving Unity to Wayland ***

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Wayland and Ubuntu

With a few changes, the Xorg server can be modified to use wayland input devices for input and forward either the root window or individual top-level windows as wayland surfaces. The server still runs the same 2D driver with the same acceleration code as it does when it runs natively. Finally, it is a big deal to add network transparency to Wayland: it is architecturally feasible, but it is still a lot of work. If Wayland is designed with assumption that everything is done on client side and that client and rendering runs in the same process, they whole system is bound to be created in such a way that creating network. Adam jackson said. @Unknown Those are all valid criticisms of many of the existing wayland servers. I'm of the opinion that keeping xfree86 alive as a viable alternative since wayland started getting real traction in 2010ish is part of the reason those are still issues, time and effort that could have gone into wayland has been diverted into xfree86.

What is Wayland?

Wayland is a protocol, while Xorg is a display server (using X11 protocol). Wayland is the 'new' thing and works diffrenetly than x11. Back when x11 was created, it was common to have one poweful (time sharing) server and multiple clients that are connecting to it. Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.

Wayland is a new protocol that enables 3D compositors to be used as primary display servers, instead of running the 3D compositor as an extension under the (2D) X.org display server.

Or, in layman's terms, it assumes you're using a 3D desktop from the start, instead of bolting on 3D capabilities to an 2D framework.

See the Wayland website for more details.

Is Ubuntu dropping X?

No, X will be retained for backwards compatibility. It will be run inside the Wayland/Unity instance when needed.

When will Wayland become the default on Ubuntu?

This has not been decided. This decision will be made at a future Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS).

It's possible we'll roll it out for some limited scope initially, since it may take time before it's adequately supported across a broad enough range of hardware.

What is the reason for making Wayland? Why does X have to be replaced?

These days we only use a fraction of what X was originally designed to do. X11, by definition, is a big protocol of rendering primitives and font management and lots of other stuff. Most of that stuff we don't really need or use in modern desktops.

At the same time, with today's 3D-centric desktops, toolkits, and window managers, the compositor is a critically important piece and in the future will likely become a hard requirement, yet in X11 it is limited to being merely an out-of-process extension to the X server.

Thus Wayland, from a high-level view, is about making the compositor the central process and the X server the optional add-on you can activate for legacy X applications.

Will video drivers need to be rewritten for Wayland?

No. Most of the open source drivers have been undergoing rewrites in recent years to support KMS, GEM, and other modern graphics technologies which move more of the graphical functionality into the Linux kernel. Wayland leverages (and requires) these technologies; indeed the whole reason Wayland can exist is because of these changes. But those changes were underway for X in general. In the future Wayland and X will both be using the same graphics drivers.

What about the graphics drivers still in X?

Graphics drivers such as Intel, Nouveau, and Radeon include both kernel drivers and an X driver. With Wayland we only need the kernel drivers. Under the KMS/DRM/GEM architecture, that's where most of the real functionality is, such as modesetting, memory management, and graphics rendering. The remaining bits on the X side of things are used just to interface with the X server and aren't needed by Wayland.

Can Wayland be used with the closed source proprietary graphics drivers?

No, not at this time. fglrx, nvidia, psb, and other closed source drivers are developed externally to X.org and externally to Ubuntu. As far as we know, work to update them to conform to the new KMS/GEM/etc. architecture is not planned (at least, not publicly) and would need to be done before they could be used under Wayland.

According to Kristian closed drivers need 2 things:

A way to set the graphics mode (like KMS, but it could also be a standalone library)
A way to share video memory buffers (for example an EGLImage) between processes

psb already is capable of mode setting. I (adamw) don't know if it can share buffers.

What about network transparency?

The X11 protocol was designed around running graphical apps across the network. While some people use this feature, it's far from common. Wayland drops this requirement as a way to greatly simplify its architecture.

There are other ways to share graphical sessions and applications across a network. Wayland also permits running an X11 server inside itself, so you also always have the option of just running X11 clients on top of the server.

Another possible idea is discussed here: NetworkTransparency.

Will toolkits (Qt, GTK+, etc.) need to be ported to work on Wayland?

Yes. This is an area of heavy development currently. The toolkits must be ported as one of the pre-requisites to getting existing applications running on Wayland. Much progress has been made on Qt, GTK+, Clutter, SDL, and EFL.

Will applications need to be rewritten or modified to work on Wayland?

Yes, due to the technical design differences of the Wayland protocol compared with X11, changes need to be made to client applications. In some cases, a simple recompilation using Wayland-enabled GTK+/Qt will be enough; in other cases minor changes are needed; in a few cases where extensive X11 functionality is used directly in the app, it will necessitate more extensive porting work.

Elevated (sudo -H, gksudo) permissions with GUI application programs on Wayland

Wayland is designed to not allow elevated (sudo -H, gksu ..) permissions with GUI application programs. It is a good idea to do such tasks with command line tools. But there are work-arounds, that are described at the link /gks

I have more questions not answered here

You might also like this FAQ: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/wayland-display-server

In case you still have questions after that, this is a wiki, so add your questions above this one.

Wayland (last edited 2017-10-31 20:24:59 by nio-wiklund)

FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 16, 2012 11:10 UTC (Thu) by dps (guest, #5725)
Parent article: FOSDEM: The Wayland display serverOne of the nice things about X clients is that they work on remote displays with none of limitations you get with things like VNC (e.g. no cut and paste does not work between local and remote applications). If wayland breeds clients that can't do this then it is a giant leap backwards.

I *don't care* about flicker free movement of windows, video, or hardware accelerated graphics because I rarely do anything which would benefit. Sacrificing network transparency, which I *do* need, to get those is completely stupid.

Does Wayland Server Still Exist

That said I am writing software for very expensive server hardware.

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FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 16, 2012 12:05 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

This was already discussed to the death and beyond in the previous post about Wayland on LWN, please lets not have another 400-comment thread about this here.