Wayland Archive

Phoronix provides a status update on the Wayland Display Server project. The Wayland Display Server aims to be a mini-display server which makes use of the latest X and kernel technologies such as the Graphics Execution Manager and kernel mode-setting. It also comes with its own built-in compositing manager.

"Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter. It has some fantastic features (like the ability to run application over the network) and some shortcoming. One thing is sure: it has evolved over the last year or so, immensely, especially as far as 3D and hardware acceleration."

Kristian Hogsberg, Red Hat Xorg developer started a new project for creating a display manager called Wayland a while back. Now, a Clutter backend has been developed for it. Last month, Wayland got DRI2 support which itself was initiated by the same developer. Direct Rendering Infrastructure improvements are among one of the key Fedora 11 features.

Plymouth is a freedesktop.org project to create a flicker free graphical bootup system designed and developed by Red Hat and included in Fedora 10. Red Hat has been working on Xorg drivers and within the Linux kernel to improve and enhance the kernel mode support needed for Plymouth. Fedora 10 included support for many ATI cards and this is being developed further in Fedora 11 to cover Intel and Nvidia cards as well. Plymouth supports a flexible and powerful plug-in system which can be used to create Plymouth themes. Fedora includes several of them including a simple progress bar and the solar plugin. Now additional work is being done to improve many things and this will land up in Fedora 11 as well.

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has actively been working on improving power management with graphics processors via the various open-source X.Org drivers. There is quite a lot of work involved, but at the FOSDEM x.org meeting he shared an update on his progress. In particular, Matthew is trying to conserve power with the GPU, memory, outputs, and displays. Read on to understand Red Hat's work on power management.

Ever since its inception, there have been problems with Compiz; people unsatisfied with the direction of the project forked it, then they merged again. Recently, the project, now known as Compiz Fusion, faced other problems, such as multiple branches and a lack of direction. A major reorganisation of the project is supposed to fix all this.

Kristian Hogsberg, Red Hat Xorg developer and the key person behind successful projects such as AIGLX, has now started working on a new project called Wayland, a tiny display server and compositing manager.

Most of you will be familiar with Silicon Graphics, Inc., once the proud leader in the graphics workstations market with their high-end MIPS workstations, running the UNIX System V based IRIX operating system. The company has been in steady decline for a long time now, and two years ago it put an end to its MIPS product line, favouring processors from Intel. Back to IRIX - it has many assets and good features (XFS, for instance), and the IRIX Interactive Desktop was certainly one of them. Sadly, it never properly made its way out of IRIX, but this is now being worked on, with the full support from SGI.

It has been one year and four days since X.Org 7.3 was released and a number of months since X.Org 7.4 was supposed to be released, but today X.Org 7.4 is scheduled to finally make it out the door! This release is shipping quite late and with a slimmed down set of features, but in this article we have more details on what this release holds in store for the Linux desktop community and why it may be a short-lived release.

"Maybe I'm just naive, but designing a graphics API such that all image data had to be sent over a socket to another process every time the image needed to be drawn seems like complete idiocy. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the X Window System forces a program to do, and exactly what Cairo does when drawing images in Linux - a full copy of the image data, send to another process, no less, every time it is drawn. One would think there would be some room for improvement. Unsurprisingly, others felt the same way about X, and decided to write an extension, Xlib Shm or XShm for short, that allows images to placed in a shared memory segment from which the X server reads which allows the program to avoid the memory copy. GTK already makes use of the XShm extension, and it seems like a good idea to see if Gecko couldn't do the same."

The X Windowing System is the graphical backbone of most UNIX-like operating systems (and OpenVMS) - despite lots and lots of criticism, the system has withstood the test of time. Despite its age, development on X has not slowed down - in fact, it only seems to have picked up. A few weeks ago, we had kernel-based mode setting, and today we have the X server running as user instead of root.

Even though some users of the two desktops take every opportunity to make fun or flat-out attack one another, it is no secret to more reasonable people that the KDE and GNOME projects strive to make their respective desktops interoperate, and that the developers working on either of the two projects have a great deal of respect for one another. This has lead to an attempt to jointly organise the desktops' flagship conferences, in one place, in 2009.

"For the next round of Linux Releases (Ubuntu Gutsy, Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3, Mandriva 2008, etc.) Compiz Fusion should be installed by default in those releases and with the release date looming not far ahead the time is ripe to give you a preview of what to expect from the latest Compiz Fusion."

X.org 7.3 was released earlier today, but because the X.org website was unreachable, we bring you this news a bit late. X.org 7.3 includes RandR 1.2, input hotplug (both enable hotplugging of devices), improvements in KDrive, DTrace support, and more.