Discussion:
Ubuntu moving towards Wayland
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-05 01:11:22 UTC
Permalink
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

Regards,
Dennis
Rahul Sundaram
2010-11-05 02:10:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Considering that it was started by a Red Hat employee, I would say there
has already been some involvement

Rahul
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-05 02:26:49 UTC
Permalink
Post by Rahul Sundaram
Considering that it was started by a Red Hat employee, I would say there
has already been some involvement
a cursory look at who has private branches of it on
git.freedesktop.org is also good indication as to where the
involvement has been and where it hasn't. All I'll say is talk is
cheap.

A cursory look tells me things are still coming together and that the
_right_ people have a roadmap in place...well ahead of any
announcement of Unity.

I'm more than happy to give Shuttleworth the benefit of the doubt
about the sincerity of his interest and I will be watching the Wayland
commit logs closely looking for Canonical sponsored contributions to
_start_ trickling in.

-jef
Thomas Bendler
2010-11-05 12:23:45 UTC
Permalink
2010/11/5 Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com>
Post by Jeff Spaleta
[...]
I'm more than happy to give Shuttleworth the benefit of the doubt
about the sincerity of his interest and I will be watching the Wayland
commit logs closely looking for Canonical sponsored contributions to
_start_ trickling in.
[...]
What does this mean, wait until Canoncial provides patches before taking a
look at interresting technologies? Or even better, don't use applications
where Canoncial don't provide patches? That means that a lot of application
can't be used in the future and I don't think that this is an useful
approach.

Kind regards, Thomas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101105/5517f7af/attachment.html
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-05 17:07:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Thomas Bendler
What does this mean, wait until Canoncial provides patches before taking a
look at interresting technologies? Or even better, don't use applications
where Canoncial don't provide patches? That means that a lot of application
can't be used in the future and I don't think that this is an useful
approach.
Wait for Canonical? No of course not. I'm saying that for anyone who
cares the history of the actual Wayland development tells a certain
story of existing involvement in bringing the technology forward by a
number of individuals, some of them active members of other upstream
communities (and who just happen to be members of Fedora's development
community as well). Work to make Wayland an integral part of the
standard plumbing stack is already underway as part of substantiate
upstream work with input from developers from this community. Anyone
under the impression that somehow Shuttleworth's announcement is in
any way significant outside the scope of Unity as a new and
differentiated interface offering hasn't been watching what has
already been going on. The head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone
development work that has been going on as part of upstream
interactions around Wayland and X and Qt and gtk has been going on and
will continue to go on regardless of what Canonical does or does not
do moving forward.

The final packaging at the distribution level as a binary blob is
literally the last 0.1% of the work going on to make it a usable piece
of the technology plumbing. Once you look at the history, its obvious
that things need a little more work, and its just as obvious that
there is a real intention to see support for Wayland deeply integrated
into upstream stacks suck as GNOME. It means that people associated
with our development community are already working on it..well before
the human hype machine decided to blog about it and bring up the
visibility of the already ongoing effort.

-jef
Haïkel Guémar
2010-11-05 07:17:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Rahul Sundaram
Considering that it was started by a Red Hat employee, I would say there
has already been some involvement
Rahul
Kristian does not work for Red Hat anymore but at Intel OSTC.
Will Ubuntu really move towards Wayland and furthermore start working
upstream on it ? let's wait and see.
By the way, is Wayland really usable and since Kristian's departure, is
Red Hat still involved in the project ?

H.
Jaroslav Reznik
2010-11-05 12:53:15 UTC
Permalink
Post by Haïkel Guémar
Post by Rahul Sundaram
Considering that it was started by a Red Hat employee, I would say there
has already been some involvement
Rahul
Kristian does not work for Red Hat anymore but at Intel OSTC.
Will Ubuntu really move towards Wayland and furthermore start working
upstream on it ? let's wait and see.
By the way, is Wayland really usable and since Kristian's departure, is
Red Hat still involved in the project ?
Intel and Nokia seems to be very interested in this project for MeeGo stuff and
embedded systems (like smartphones etc.). So I think it has a quite good backing
to be further developed. Even Qt is now ported to Wayland, I expected just
another graphics system port but they are working on complete own architecture -
next to win, x11, macosx (not only gfx, but events etc.)

Jaroslav
Post by Haïkel Guémar
H.
--
Jaroslav ?ezn?k <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

Office: +420 532 294 275
Mobile: +420 602 797 774
Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-05 11:57:56 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/
See what it can do: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html
Daniel P. Berrange
2010-11-05 12:07:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
You can run an X server as a client of Wayland, so you should get full
compat with any existing X app usage. Similar to how you can run an X
server under OS-X or Win32.

Regards,
Daniel
--
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-05 17:17:46 UTC
Permalink
Post by Daniel P. Berrange
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
You can run an X server as a client of Wayland, so you should get full
compat with any existing X app usage. Similar to how you can run an X
server under OS-X or Win32.
The situation on OS X is pretty sucky (and Win32 as well, but for many
more reasons).

Native OS X apps aren't network transparent. You just can't run them
remotely at all without some horrible thing like VNC.

X11 apps are second-class citizens, requiring longer start-up times,
incompatible menus, poor cut and paste and poor font rendering.

If we're advocating that situation, then this is a huge step
backwards. Network transparency in particular is absolutely essential
to me as a user. Stepping to a pre-Internet non-network-aware single
user model is simply crazy.

Nevertheless, no one has actually answered the question as to whether
Wayland native apps are network transparent or not. Do they use the X
protocol at all? $DISPLAY? (And I admit I ain't looked at the code
to try to answer these questions either).

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v
Jaroslav Reznik
2010-11-05 12:39:20 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be
the right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
You can run standard X server on top of Wayland. See Wayland architecture link
[1]. For native Wayland apps you have to use different approach.

[1] http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

Jaroslav
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Rich.
--
Jaroslav ?ezn?k <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

Office: +420 532 294 275
Mobile: +420 602 797 774
Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-05 16:40:46 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
I believe the idea for the overall plan is that the traditional X
server grows the ability to be a Wayland client and that any normal
distribution would be shipping and X server as Wayland client.

Now if you aren't a traditional distribution and plan to build
something like a mobileOS with its own walled garden...the X server as
Wayland client isn't so necessary.
-jef
Bill Nottingham
2010-11-05 19:16:11 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)

Bill
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-05 23:21:34 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-06 00:36:43 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.

On the net I read that Ubuntu wants to "ditch X" in favor of Wayland but
that's not what I read in Marks post. As I understand it the plan is to
introduce Wayland but not get rid of X for years to come. Sounds like a
reasonable plan if it can be implemented in a technically feasible way.

Regards,
Dennis
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 08:43:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?

If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 09:20:08 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
I wonder if there will be someone saying (when all the apps are native
Wayland apps) "If I wanted to step back to the pre-stetic* era, I'd
run X"

I get the impression that comparing current Fedora and Linux in
general running on varied hardware to the latest Windows and MacOS
examples reveals a lack of slickness that is easy for Linux fans to
make excuses for. I frequently see low frame rates, tearing and high
CPU usage (and put up with them). But it shows that current X based
desktops are hitting a barrier that there isn't sufficient development
effort to overcome. I have a rough idea of the hoops that software has
to jump through to provide a smooth scrolling browser window (for
example). Something that improves this can only be good for the
desktop.

I don't think that there is a realistic threat that GUI based tools
etc will ever need tight media integration or be balkanised so that
they are not usable over the net. And I don't think it's a valid
reason to shun technologies that might bring the desktop experience up
to modern standards.

-Cam

* I nearly wrote haptic but it's really more than that.
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 10:57:27 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
I wonder if there will be someone saying (when all the apps are native
Wayland apps) "If I wanted to step back to the pre-stetic* era, I'd
run X"
I get the impression that comparing current Fedora and Linux in
general running on varied hardware to the latest Windows and MacOS
examples reveals a lack of slickness that is easy for Linux fans to
make excuses for. I frequently see low frame rates, tearing and high
CPU usage (and put up with them). But it shows that current X based
desktops are hitting a barrier that there isn't sufficient development
effort to overcome. I have a rough idea of the hoops that software has
to jump through to provide a smooth scrolling browser window (for
example). Something that improves this can only be good for the
desktop.
I don't think that there is a realistic threat that GUI based tools
etc will ever need tight media integration or be balkanised so that
they are not usable over the net. And I don't think it's a valid
reason to shun technologies that might bring the desktop experience up
to modern standards.
Is Fedora for developers or what?

We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window? [I do *not* see any of
those issues incidentally -- maybe you want to check your set-up and
make sure you're not using non-free drivers]

You have no evidence anyway that this tearing and high CPU load that
you are seeing is caused by network transparency.

It's pretty unlikely since X messages are passed from application to
server using shared memory in the local case, and how exactly did you
expect the app to communicate with a Wayland server except using the
precise same mechanisms? There are only a limited number of ways that
two processes on a Unix machine can talk to each other.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/
See what it can do: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 11:51:37 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Is Fedora for developers or what?
If it is exclusively for developers with the exclusion of general
purpose features such as web browsing, photo management, and
multimedia consumption then I'll have to find a more general purpose
OS. I count myself as a developer but concede that I have a life too
and a general purpose computer has to fit into that as a whole.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window? [I do *not* see any of
those issues incidentally -- maybe you want to check your set-up and
make sure you're not using non-free drivers]
Historically there have been plenty of problems like the Firefox
smooth scrolling under compiz bugs (at the time I understood the bugs
to be caused by the difficulties of providing compiz features within
the framework of X, I could be wrong). I last noticed tearing in
fullscreen video on radeon HW... on other hardware I use the nvidia
driver as it's generally better performing than the free one, really
there is no argument here regarding free drivers as a platform for a
multimedia desktop. As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
You have no evidence anyway that this tearing and high CPU load that
you are seeing is caused by network transparency.
No, but I can guess that something in the architecture as a whole is
causing it to underperform, exploring an alternative might provide
that evidence. I don't want to throw X away per se, but I would like
comparable performance to other OSs.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
It's pretty unlikely since X messages are passed from application to
server using shared memory in the local case, and how exactly did you
expect the app to communicate with a Wayland server except using the
precise same mechanisms? ?There are only a limited number of ways that
two processes on a Unix machine can talk to each other.
I can hope that an architecture with the lofty aims of "every frame
perfect" would make a more usable desktop. It looks like the
alternative is to stick with X and see other OSs lead the way in
slickness.

Maybe I'm biased because I overwhelmingly tend to use a command line
for remote machines. What is the use case for remote X applications?
The only thing I can think of that I've personally used this way is
gparted, and I probably could have used fdisk without much effort.

-Cam
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 12:54:48 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Is Fedora for developers or what?
If it is exclusively for developers with the exclusion of general
purpose features such as web browsing, photo management, and
multimedia consumption then I'll have to find a more general purpose
OS. I count myself as a developer but concede that I have a life too
and a general purpose computer has to fit into that as a whole.
I believe it is possible to do photo management, web browsing and
watching video, even on the current version of Fedora.
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window? [I do *not* see any of
those issues incidentally -- maybe you want to check your set-up and
make sure you're not using non-free drivers]
Historically there have been plenty of problems like the Firefox
smooth scrolling under compiz bugs (at the time I understood the bugs
to be caused by the difficulties of providing compiz features within
the framework of X, I could be wrong). I last noticed tearing in
fullscreen video on radeon HW... on other hardware I use the nvidia
driver as it's generally better performing than the free one, really
there is no argument here regarding free drivers as a platform for a
multimedia desktop. As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
So in fact you are running non-free drivers. I have none of these
problems with the free (Intel) drivers, and the performance is great,
certainly more than adequate for web browsing, watching DVDs and
video, and a little gaming.
Post by Camilo Mesias
Maybe I'm biased because I overwhelmingly tend to use a command line
for remote machines. What is the use case for remote X applications?
The only thing I can think of that I've personally used this way is
gparted, and I probably could have used fdisk without much effort.
With virtualization I have more Linux machines than ever (about 50 in
active use at last count). All on my local 1GB network. Consequently
I use X to them and to other physical machines _all the time_.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 13:51:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
I believe it is possible to do photo management, web browsing and
watching video, even on the current version of Fedora.
Indeed. It's not the point that it's possible or not. I could do much
of that on a Windows 3.11 machine... Be honest with yourself, is it
every bit as good as the experience on a non-free OS and software
stack? I don't think it is.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
So in fact you are running non-free drivers. ?I have none of these
problems with the free (Intel) drivers, and the performance is great,
certainly more than adequate for web browsing, watching DVDs and
video, and a little gaming.
I am running several machines, including Intel based, low end radeon
and Nvidia, like a lot of users... I also use, shock horror, non free
software, because I am pragmatic about getting the most out of the
machine rather than living in a free software hairshirt. I think that
if the infrastructure was more geared towards performance then maybe
the free apps would provide a more Mac-like experience instead of
being also-rans. But I don't want to beat up free software or X, I
just want the best possible experience from the desktop.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
With virtualization I have more Linux machines than ever (about 50 in
active use at last count). ?All on my local 1GB network. ?Consequently
I use X to them and to other physical machines _all the time_.
Out of interest, do you use individual shells/terms or something that
provides a more remote desktop like experience? I have to use a
Windows laptop for work, and use many Linux VM servers, often set up
for specific tasks or with specific networking. The way our
organisation works (having tried lots of different approaches) is
using NoMachines (which is X in a way). My point is that although X is
involved at some point there are significant parts of the solution
that aren't X - it still works.

If there is no way to provide remote access for Weyland based systems
(and I hope there will be a way that is "more than adequate") then I
can see the day when desktop users wanting a high quality experience
and server users part company...

-Cam
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 13:56:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
I believe it is possible to do photo management, web browsing and
watching video, even on the current version of Fedora.
Indeed. It's not the point that it's possible or not. I could do much
of that on a Windows 3.11 machine... Be honest with yourself, is it
every bit as good as the experience on a non-free OS and software
stack? I don't think it is.
Perfectly honestly, yes, it's much better than OS X now.
Post by Camilo Mesias
Out of interest, do you use individual shells/terms or something that
provides a more remote desktop like experience?
I use ssh -Y. Anything that sits in a huge window showing an entire
desktop-in-a-desktop is so obviously the wrong way to do it, from both
a usability and efficiency perspective, that I'm just astonished that
people suggest I use something like VNC.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 14:56:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
I believe it is possible to do photo management, web browsing and
watching video, even on the current version of Fedora.
Indeed. It's not the point that it's possible or not. I could do much
of that on a Windows 3.11 machine... Be honest with yourself, is it
every bit as good as the experience on a non-free OS and software
stack? I don't think it is.
Perfectly honestly, yes, it's much better than OS X now.
I really can't see this, so I will be keen to vote with my desktop and
test Wayland as soon as possible.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Camilo Mesias
Out of interest, do you use individual shells/terms or something that
provides a more remote desktop like experience?
I use ssh -Y. ?Anything that sits in a huge window showing an entire
desktop-in-a-desktop is so obviously the wrong way to do it, from both
a usability and efficiency perspective, that I'm just astonished that
people suggest I use something like VNC.
We use both approaches, I suppose both have their merits, and we
shouldn't rule out either method of working.

-Cam
Mark Bidewell
2010-11-06 15:16:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Camilo Mesias
Out of interest, do you use individual shells/terms or something that
provides a more remote desktop like experience?
I use ssh -Y. ?Anything that sits in a huge window showing an entire
desktop-in-a-desktop is so obviously the wrong way to do it, from both
a usability and efficiency perspective, that I'm just astonished that
people suggest I use something like VNC.
We use both approaches, I suppose both have their merits, and we
shouldn't rule out either method of working.
-Cam
--
devel mailing list
devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
One of the many concerns I have with Wayland involves VNC. Right now
VNC on X uses some of the multiuser functions to enable multiple VNC
consoles. Will Wayland still allow for this or will we be back to
Windows with only one VNC session per computer. Linux/Unix is
designed around multiuser/multisession, I believe we would be amiss to
remove those capabilities from the OS.
--
Mark Bidewell
http://www.linkedin.com/in/markbidewell
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-06 16:28:08 UTC
Permalink
Post by Mark Bidewell
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Camilo Mesias
Out of interest, do you use individual shells/terms or something that
provides a more remote desktop like experience?
I use ssh -Y. Anything that sits in a huge window showing an entire
desktop-in-a-desktop is so obviously the wrong way to do it, from both
a usability and efficiency perspective, that I'm just astonished that
people suggest I use something like VNC.
We use both approaches, I suppose both have their merits, and we
shouldn't rule out either method of working.
-Cam
--
devel mailing list
devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
One of the many concerns I have with Wayland involves VNC. Right now
VNC on X uses some of the multiuser functions to enable multiple VNC
consoles. Will Wayland still allow for this or will we be back to
Windows with only one VNC session per computer. Linux/Unix is
designed around multiuser/multisession, I believe we would be amiss to
remove those capabilities from the OS.
First I think you should probably head over to the Wayland mailing list and
get involved there. That's something I also recommend to Richard because if
you want certain features to be present now is a good time to make your
voices heard over there. That's the reason I brought the topic up in here
so people can have a discussion over what the requirements are to make this
work well with Fedora as a project and then push for inclusions of these
requirements in Wayland.

Second I am a bit surprised by the "unless feature X is implemented 1:1 we
shouldn't allow progess" sort of argument that is going on here.
The main reason I'm excited about Wayland is the fact that it creates
competition. I agree with Camilo that X doesn't seem to cope with the
requirements of modern desktops well and I believe the reason for that is
the fact that in the absence of a competitor it's very easy to settle for
"good enough". Yes X is good enough for basic desktop especially after the
great improvements that happened after the Xorg split but being good enough
doesn't really jive well with Fedoras claim of being a showcase for
technical innovation. I've lurked on the Xorg mailing list long enough to
see the various attempts of improving X being stomped by the fact that
compatibility with decade old protocols that no one really cares about on a
modern desktop must be maintained.

The fact that X can be run as a client on Wayland makes for a pretty
perfect situation in my eyes. Wayland can make design decision unhampered
by the past while people who rely on specific X features can keep using
these applications without change. If the advantages of Wayland weigh so
heavily then X will at some point be obsoleted. I these advantages don't
materialize then Wayland will disappear and we will return to X. But a
third possible outcome - and one that in my opinion is pretty likely to
occur - could be that a lot of the features of X (like remote applications)
will actually be implemented in Wayland precisely because they have enough
merit to survive and that looks like a great future to me: a modern
implementation of all the features we love and care about.

As for the "if all apps are ported to Wayland I will not be able to use
them remotely anymore" I think this is bogus. Nowadays virtually all
application aren't X application but gtk/qt applications and the toolkits
tend to support different backends. So you will be able to use your apps as
long as the toolkits support X and I think that's going to be a long time
unless Wayland is dramatically successfull.

Regards,
Dennis
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 18:39:33 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
First I think you should probably head over to the Wayland mailing list and
get involved there. That's something I also recommend to Richard because if
you want certain features to be present now is a good time to make your
voices heard over there.
It's already been done, and the developers have been busily rejecting
them out of hand, eg:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000028.html
[1]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000031.html

https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/browse_thread/thread/e7ed0c0118fb31b4?hl=en.#

Rich.

[1] As an aside, the point the original poster in that thread makes
about client-side decorations is very valid. If you've used Windows
or OS X at all, you'll have seen how a buggy application can
monopolize the display so nothing can be moved or killed or switched.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-07 17:32:10 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
First I think you should probably head over to the Wayland mailing list and
get involved there. That's something I also recommend to Richard because if
you want certain features to be present now is a good time to make your
voices heard over there.
It's already been done, and the developers have been busily rejecting
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000028.html
[1]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000031.html
https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/browse_thread/thread/e7ed0c0118fb31b4?hl=en.#
Rich.
[1] As an aside, the point the original poster in that thread makes
about client-side decorations is very valid. If you've used Windows
or OS X at all, you'll have seen how a buggy application can
monopolize the display so nothing can be moved or killed or switched.
So they consider this a layering violation which makes sense given that
Wayland has a much smaller scope than X. That doesn't mean you cannot
implement remote applications at all it just means you have to implemented
in a different way.

Regards,
Dennis
Garrett Holmstrom
2010-11-06 18:55:47 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
As for the "if all apps are ported to Wayland I will not be able to use
them remotely anymore" I think this is bogus. Nowadays virtually all
application aren't X application but gtk/qt applications and the toolkits
tend to support different backends. So you will be able to use your apps as
long as the toolkits support X and I think that's going to be a long time
unless Wayland is dramatically successfull.
Does this sort of portability make any difference in a distribution
where package maintainers make that decision at compilation time?
Pierre Carrier
2010-11-06 15:14:57 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
With virtualization I have more Linux machines than ever (about 50 in
active use at last count). ?All on my local 1GB network. ?Consequently
I use X to them and to other physical machines _all the time_.
If there is no way to provide remote access for Weyland based systems
(and I hope there will be a way that is "more than adequate") then I
can see the day when desktop users wanting a high quality experience
and server users part company...
Am I the only one would wants to scream SPICE since the beginning of
this discussion?

We could have a virtualization-free userspace SPICE server and I
believe that could be an excellent replacement to VNC, with
significantly better performance and features (stuff like sound,
anyone?).

Richard, you're even specifying virtualization! SPICE is already here!

rootless remote apps, ie Wayland network clients, that's a need I can
understand. But with my near-to-zero knowledge about Wayland, I don't
see why we couldn't do that.
--
Pierre Carrier
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 16:32:42 UTC
Permalink
Post by Pierre Carrier
Post by Camilo Mesias
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
With virtualization I have more Linux machines than ever (about 50 in
active use at last count). ?All on my local 1GB network. ?Consequently
I use X to them and to other physical machines _all the time_.
If there is no way to provide remote access for Weyland based systems
(and I hope there will be a way that is "more than adequate") then I
can see the day when desktop users wanting a high quality experience
and server users part company...
Am I the only one would wants to scream SPICE since the beginning of
this discussion?
We could have a virtualization-free userspace SPICE server and I
believe that could be an excellent replacement to VNC, with
significantly better performance and features (stuff like sound,
anyone?).
Richard, you're even specifying virtualization! SPICE is already here!
AFAIK SPICE is just faster, better VNC with more features. It doesn't
allow you to remote a single app, doesn't work transparently through
ssh, and doesn't allow multiple servers and clients connecting in ad
hoc ways at the same time.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
Ben Boeckel
2010-11-06 15:48:44 UTC
Permalink
[..] As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
I was doing that back in November[1].

--Ben

[1]http://blipper.dev.benboeckel.net/one-soap-box/2009/11/03/gnome-day-2-gnome-shell/
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 16:00:55 UTC
Permalink
Hi,
Post by Ben Boeckel
[..] As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
I was doing that back in November[1].
--Ben
[1]http://blipper.dev.benboeckel.net/one-soap-box/2009/11/03/gnome-day-2-gnome-shell/
You mention gnome shell but not nouveau, how do you enable the missing
3d support for Nouveau? And does it only work for a subset of
hardware? I'd be interested to try it. Lately I just get:

Accelerated 3D graphics is not available
Desktop effects require hardware 3D support.

I have switched between nvidia and nouveau in testing F14, I prefer
gnome shell but using it can lead to fragility (eg. install nvidia,
configure gnome shell, update; temporarily disabling nvidia -> broken
desktop)

-Cam
Ben Boeckel
2010-11-06 16:25:33 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
Hi,
Post by Ben Boeckel
[..] As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
I was doing that back in November[1].
--Ben
[1]http://blipper.dev.benboeckel.net/one-soap-box/2009/11/03/gnome-day-2-gnome-shell/
You mention gnome shell but not nouveau,
Ah. true. Once nouveau came out, I pretty much dropped nvidia at that
point since I'm not much of a "gamer" anymore (transparency in KWin was
about the most taxing thing I used around that time).
Post by Camilo Mesias
how do you enable the missing 3d support for Nouveau?
It came with mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. I remember playing Neverball
with full acceleration during the F13 Beta on nouveau (though Kobo
Deluxe was not). My nvidia machine has since been shipped back home to
be the main laptop there (the 256MB XP laptop wasn't cutting it anymore
and I've been bad about updating the desktop which is still on F10 yet).
Post by Camilo Mesias
And does it only work for a subset of hardware?
It was a Quadro NVS 140M.
Post by Camilo Mesias
Accelerated 3D graphics is not available
Desktop effects require hardware 3D support.
Don't know. Maybe Shell needs more things since then? The experimental
driver package may also be missing.
Post by Camilo Mesias
I have switched between nvidia and nouveau in testing F14, I prefer
gnome shell but using it can lead to fragility (eg. install nvidia,
configure gnome shell, update; temporarily disabling nvidia -> broken
desktop)
Switching between the two has always been an absolute nightmare. If I
need to go nvidia -> nouveau, a reinstall was the easiest and most
reliable way to nuke the blob driver.

--Ben
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-06 21:41:15 UTC
Permalink
Hi,
Post by Ben Boeckel
Post by Camilo Mesias
how do you enable the missing 3d support for Nouveau?
It came with mesa-dri-drivers-experimental.
I just wanted to say thanks, I am running with this now, it seems to
be "certainly more than adequate" ;-) to run gnome shell. No more
akmod-nvidia for a while!

-Cam
Adam Williamson
2010-11-06 19:49:04 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
You mention gnome shell but not nouveau, how do you enable the missing
3d support for Nouveau? And does it only work for a subset of
Accelerated 3D graphics is not available
Desktop effects require hardware 3D support.
yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Alex Hudson
2010-11-07 09:45:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by Camilo Mesias
You mention gnome shell but not nouveau, how do you enable the missing
3d support for Nouveau?
There's an Mesa package labelled "experimental" you need to install.

I don't know what the subset of hardware it works for is, but my Quadro
NVS 135M has been running smoothly so far: it's not fast, and the frame
rate is not great, but it's out of the box and usable.

I blogged about this yesterday, but nouveau has taken serious strides in
F14 - I've been using it the past couple of releases, and the progress
has been stark.

Cheers

Alex.


--
This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean.
http://www.betterhosted.com
Camilo Mesias
2010-11-09 21:05:43 UTC
Permalink
I'm using the experimental 3d now with gnome shell. After a few days,
it seems like it performs OK although it locks up for a few seconds
now and then. It seems to recover and I can't see any obvious log
messages around the time of the freeze. It does survive
suspend/resume, which is great. My impression is that it runs slightly
hotter than the nvidia driver but I could be imagining this (I don't
have any figures).

-Cam
Adam Williamson
2010-11-06 19:47:25 UTC
Permalink
Post by Ben Boeckel
[..] As much as I love Nouveau's freeness, last time I
checked I couldn't even run gnome shell on it.
I was doing that back in November[1].
It depends on your hardware. Works on some cards, doesn't on others.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Nicolas Mailhot
2010-11-06 14:07:04 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Is Fedora for developers or what?
We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window?
Well it would be mightily nice to have an infrastructure that can handle
keyboard extended keys (almost every new keyboard sold in the last
decade has one or more of those) without barfing because the original
x11 protocol designers thought 8 bits would be enough for everyone.

The ground breaking parts can come afterwards. Input on X is so bad this
is becoming ridiculous (another example being X has no notion of
language, just layouts, so there's no way for apps to know the language
being typed and auto-select the correct spellchecker)
--
Nicolas Mailhot
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 14:21:48 UTC
Permalink
Post by Nicolas Mailhot
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Is Fedora for developers or what?
We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window?
Well it would be mightily nice to have an infrastructure that can handle
keyboard extended keys (almost every new keyboard sold in the last
decade has one or more of those) without barfing because the original
x11 protocol designers thought 8 bits would be enough for everyone.
The ground breaking parts can come afterwards. Input on X is so bad this
is becoming ridiculous (another example being X has no notion of
language, just layouts, so there's no way for apps to know the language
being typed and auto-select the correct spellchecker)
Why throw away everything just so we can make input better?

(And in any case wasn't evdev supposed to fix this?)

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/
See what it can do: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html
Nicolas Mailhot
2010-11-06 15:52:02 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Why throw away everything just so we can make input better?
Because those are just the examples I know where X11 has been blocking
progress for *years*. I'm sure there are lots of others.
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
(And in any case wasn't evdev supposed to fix this?)
The kernel knows all the keys. They are broken at the X11 layer (because
modern keys can not be represented via the original X11 protocol, and no
one dares touching it)

If you want to know why wayland needs to happen, search the freedesktop
bugzilla for "x12". It's a synonym for "we really need to do this, but
it's not possible in x11, so > /dev/null"
--
Nicolas Mailhot
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-06 16:41:59 UTC
Permalink
Post by Nicolas Mailhot
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Why throw away everything just so we can make input better?
Because those are just the examples I know where X11 has been blocking
progress for *years*. I'm sure there are lots of others.
And yet despite all this, it's working fine. Really, I have no
problem using my keyboard, managing photographs, scrolling through web
pages, or anything else people have been talking about. The proposed
solution [possibly] omits a vital feature which sets X apart from
being just another windowing system, and for me at least it will be
far less useful.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v
Josh Boyer
2010-11-07 16:45:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Nicolas Mailhot
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Why throw away everything just so we can make input better?
Because those are just the examples I know where X11 has been blocking
progress for *years*. I'm sure there are lots of others.
And yet despite all this, it's working fine. ?Really, I have no
problem using my keyboard, managing photographs, scrolling through web
pages, or anything else people have been talking about. ?The proposed
solution [possibly] omits a vital feature which sets X apart from
being just another windowing system, and for me at least it will be
far less useful.
I find the fact that there is this much argumentation against something that:

1) isn't even proposed for Fedora at the moment
2) isn't even complete (or close to) in the distro it _is_ proposed for
and
3) none of this discussion is taking place on any list relevant to the
actual subject

a bit hilarious.

I think I'll just start new threads with subjects like "Arch Linux
moving towards KDE as default" or "Gentoo moving towards razor package
management" just to see how much time this community is capable of
wasting. It should be lolz.

josh
Nicolas Mailhot
2010-11-07 19:45:58 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Nicolas Mailhot
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Why throw away everything just so we can make input better?
Because those are just the examples I know where X11 has been blocking
progress for *years*. I'm sure there are lots of others.
And yet despite all this, it's working fine.
It is working fine for a "don't look there it is broken" definition of
fine. You don't notice it because you've been formatted not to use the
bits where it falls over.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
Adam Williamson
2010-11-08 22:50:15 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Really, I have no
problem using my keyboard,
Given your location and native language, I suspect your keyboard layout
is en_US, in which case this isn't much of a surprise - it's one of the
simplest cases (it requires one of the fewest numbers of characters of
any layout) and it's also the one which gets most attention, development
and testing.

If you spoke Chinese - or, even better, something Indic - you may have a
different perspective. =)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-09 12:29:11 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Williamson
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Really, I have no
problem using my keyboard,
Given your location and native language, I suspect your keyboard layout
is en_US, in which case this isn't much of a surprise - it's one of the
simplest cases (it requires one of the fewest numbers of characters of
any layout) and it's also the one which gets most attention, development
and testing.
If you spoke Chinese - or, even better, something Indic - you may have a
different perspective. =)
Just to clear this up, I'm using a UK keyboard and switch
between English and Japanese input (Anthy).

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/
See what it can do: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/recipes.html
Adam Williamson
2010-11-09 16:53:36 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Adam Williamson
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Really, I have no
problem using my keyboard,
Given your location and native language, I suspect your keyboard layout
is en_US, in which case this isn't much of a surprise - it's one of the
simplest cases (it requires one of the fewest numbers of characters of
any layout) and it's also the one which gets most attention, development
and testing.
If you spoke Chinese - or, even better, something Indic - you may have a
different perspective. =)
Just to clear this up, I'm using a UK keyboard and switch
between English and Japanese input (Anthy).
d'oh, right, too many Joneses around, I forgot you were the one who uses
Japanese too. =)

well, I imagine you know more about this than me, but I run with
Japanese input support at least occasionally, and my impression is that
a lot of it is a fragile tower necessitated by the fact that the deep
underlying stuff was coded with the assumption that all anyone ever
wanted to type was ASCII. It feels to me like CJK input breaks a lot
more than it really *should*, if you step back and look at it from first
principles - it's just an input method, and we'd feel pretty dumb if we
shipped a release where you can't type the letter Q, yet this sort of
thing seems to happen all the time with non-en_US input. From a QA
perspective, I know keyboard layout selection and complex character
input is one of the things that breaks so often we had to stick an
explicit validation test in for it. I don't know how much of this is
related to X specifically, but I know it's certainly one of the things
involved which makes the whole process of providing switchable input
methods so icky.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-09 21:00:31 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Williamson
well, I imagine you know more about this than me, but I run with
Japanese input support at least occasionally, and my impression is that
a lot of it is a fragile tower necessitated by the fact that the deep
underlying stuff was coded with the assumption that all anyone ever
wanted to type was ASCII. It feels to me like CJK input breaks a lot
more than it really *should*, if you step back and look at it from first
principles - it's just an input method, and we'd feel pretty dumb if we
shipped a release where you can't type the letter Q, yet this sort of
thing seems to happen all the time with non-en_US input. From a QA
perspective, I know keyboard layout selection and complex character
input is one of the things that breaks so often we had to stick an
explicit validation test in for it. I don't know how much of this is
related to X specifically, but I know it's certainly one of the things
involved which makes the whole process of providing switchable input
methods so icky.
I've yet to reliably compose a Japanese email through my non-Red Hat
email address, but that's going over gnome-terminal -> ssh -> Debian
-> mutt, and to be honest absolutely anything could be the problem
there. I wouldn't blame X for that one ... It generally works for
gtk2 apps. The actual implementation of the input mode switching is
pretty horrible, but I sort of assume that's the usual open-source-
developers-can't-do UI issue.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw
Casey Dahlin
2010-11-06 19:45:31 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
We want to ditch extremely useful, ground-breaking features because of
"tearing" when scrolling in a browser window? [I do *not* see any of
I actually read it as we want to ditch features that were groundbreaking in
1975 since the limits on technology from back then no longer mandate them and
the advances in technology today are not as easily taken advantage of with
those considerations.

Not saying you're wrong, just offering another viewpoint.

--CJD
Stephen John Smoogen
2010-11-06 19:04:53 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
?From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
Well when the X people say there is a limit to what X can do over a
network reasonably and that a different approach is needed then maybe
just maybe they know what they are talking about. Jeez. its not like
people are taking X away tomorrow. Nor are they saying X is going away
just that the monolithic nature it was designed around does not make
sense anymore and changes need to be done.

But hey.. it is fun to be the guy who yells "They will take X away
from me when they can pry it from my cold dead hand!" I wonder if "X
doesn't kill people, I do." sounds as good.. nah..
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. ?Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
--
devel mailing list
devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren
Jon Masters
2010-11-09 09:05:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.

Jon.
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-09 15:09:50 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
Looks more like a case of crying wolf to me. It's probably going to take a
year before Wayland can be turned on as the default desktop and it's
probably going to take several years before X can possibly go away so to
use this kind of hyperbole is really just flamebait.

It's fine to bring your concerns up but please postpone this "we are all
going to die" routine until we *actually* have something to complain about.

Regards,
Dennis
Jon Masters
2010-11-09 15:23:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Jon Masters
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
What's the implication for people who absolutely need to use
X applications remotely?
Use VNC. (Or your similar protocol of choice.)
That's not a serious alternative.
From what I've read so far you can run rootless X as a Wayland client so
you can just use your remote X apps like you did in the past next to native
Wayland apps. Also if there is a real interest in this feature then this
could be implemented for Wayland it would just not be part of the core.
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
Looks more like a case of crying wolf to me. It's probably going to take a
year before Wayland can be turned on as the default desktop and it's
probably going to take several years before X can possibly go away so to
use this kind of hyperbole is really just flamebait.
It's fine to bring your concerns up but please postpone this "we are all
going to die" routine until we *actually* have something to complain about.
At which point, it's too late. Unless Server-y people point out that
things like network apps actually matter, the default path may be to do
what will look nice on a local desktop (for the record, I can see full
screen tearing-free graphics both using upstream Intel and upstream ATI
drivers - one on a laptop, one dual headed desktop - just fine already).

Like Rich, I enjoy being able to start e.g. rawhide apps running on a
virtual machine and have them render to my local X server, or start a
second X and have an entire gnome-session running from a rawhide "box"
sitting on my virt server. Also, although there are other ways to do it,
my typical use of virt-manager these days is by forwarded X over ssh.

Jon.
Jesse Keating
2010-11-09 15:57:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
At which point, it's too late. Unless Server-y people point out that
things like network apps actually matter, the default path may be to do
what will look nice on a local desktop (for the record, I can see full
screen tearing-free graphics both using upstream Intel and upstream ATI
drivers - one on a laptop, one dual headed desktop - just fine already).
Like Rich, I enjoy being able to start e.g. rawhide apps running on a
virtual machine and have them render to my local X server, or start a
second X and have an entire gnome-session running from a rawhide "box"
sitting on my virt server. Also, although there are other ways to do it,
my typical use of virt-manager these days is by forwarded X over ssh.
Perhaps you should take your concerns to a mailing list the Wayland
developers actually read and participate on. Banging on about it here,
when nobody in Fedora has actually suggested we make use of Wayland,
seems like a big waste of everybody's time.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom? is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 258 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/e7136c43/attachment.bin
Andrew Haley
2010-11-09 16:23:37 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jesse Keating
Post by Jon Masters
At which point, it's too late. Unless Server-y people point out that
things like network apps actually matter, the default path may be to do
what will look nice on a local desktop (for the record, I can see full
screen tearing-free graphics both using upstream Intel and upstream ATI
drivers - one on a laptop, one dual headed desktop - just fine already).
Like Rich, I enjoy being able to start e.g. rawhide apps running on a
virtual machine and have them render to my local X server, or start a
second X and have an entire gnome-session running from a rawhide "box"
sitting on my virt server. Also, although there are other ways to do it,
my typical use of virt-manager these days is by forwarded X over ssh.
Perhaps you should take your concerns to a mailing list the Wayland
developers actually read and participate on. Banging on about it here,
when nobody in Fedora has actually suggested we make use of Wayland,
seems like a big waste of everybody's time.
I've seen the responses on the Wayland list, and it's always "Wayland
isn't intended to do that." So, there's no point raising objections
there.

The risk is that Wayland gets developed and a bunch of key
applications in Fedora get broken. The Wayland guys are not the
people to talk to, since network transparency isn't on their radar,
from what I can see.

Andrew.
Jesse Keating
2010-11-09 16:35:00 UTC
Permalink
Post by Andrew Haley
I've seen the responses on the Wayland list, and it's always "Wayland
isn't intended to do that." So, there's no point raising objections
there.
The risk is that Wayland gets developed and a bunch of key
applications in Fedora get broken. The Wayland guys are not the
people to talk to, since network transparency isn't on their radar,
from what I can see.
What makes you think that carping about it here will have any effect,
particularly because NOBODY HAS PROPOSED WE USE WAYLAND yet.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom? is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 258 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/d6d61ae3/attachment.bin
Gregory Maxwell
2010-11-09 16:44:49 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jesse Keating
Post by Andrew Haley
I've seen the responses on the Wayland list, and it's always "Wayland
isn't intended to do that." ?So, there's no point raising objections
there.
The risk is that Wayland gets developed and a bunch of key
applications in Fedora get broken. ?The Wayland guys are not the
people to talk to, since network transparency isn't on their radar,
from what I can see.
What makes you think that carping about it here will have any effect,
particularly because NOBODY HAS PROPOSED WE USE WAYLAND yet.
I think we'd like to see the Fedora community figure out its position
on the subject? so that it can tell the Wayland developers "If you
continue on this track, then as things stand, Fedora will not be
making it a part of the default Fedora install".

If that is indeed the position of the Fedora community then it would
carry a lot more weight in someone's planning than individual people
whining on the wayland list.
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 17:13:56 UTC
Permalink
Post by Gregory Maxwell
I think we'd like to see the Fedora community figure out its position
on the subject? so that it can tell the Wayland developers "If you
continue on this track, then as things stand, Fedora will not be
making it a part of the default Fedora install".
Well, the Fedora graphics cabal is basically me, Kevin Martin, and Dave
Airlie, and since we were hanging out at Plumbers last week and talked
about this, here's the rough consensus I think we reached:

Wayland's not a usable default yet. It'll probably be packaged in F15
as something you can play with. We don't even have a complete list of
transition criteria yet, let alone a timeframe for switching the
default. But it's likely to happen eventually because it's a serious
win for a lot of things, and the downsides are pretty negligible despite
the fear from the peanut gallery.

Feel free to quote me.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/67fda301/attachment.bin
Andrew Haley
2010-11-09 17:40:46 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Gregory Maxwell
I think we'd like to see the Fedora community figure out its position
on the subject? so that it can tell the Wayland developers "If you
continue on this track, then as things stand, Fedora will not be
making it a part of the default Fedora install".
Well, the Fedora graphics cabal is basically me, Kevin Martin, and Dave
Airlie, and since we were hanging out at Plumbers last week and talked
Wayland's not a usable default yet. It'll probably be packaged in F15
as something you can play with. We don't even have a complete list of
transition criteria yet, let alone a timeframe for switching the
default. But it's likely to happen eventually because it's a serious
win for a lot of things, and the downsides are pretty negligible despite
the fear from the peanut gallery.
I'm wondering of I'm reading this correctly. The downsides that have
been described are quite severe in contrast to the possible benefits.
It is, of course, possible that a mistake has been made, and the acute
loss of functionality is just scaremongering. It's also possible that
I've misunderstood something.

Andrew.
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 18:43:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Andrew Haley
I'm wondering of I'm reading this correctly. The downsides that have
been described are quite severe in contrast to the possible benefits.
It is, of course, possible that a mistake has been made, and the acute
loss of functionality is just scaremongering. It's also possible that
I've misunderstood something.
The downsides that have been described include:

- We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have
that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a
modest amount of additional wayland protocol (or just inter-client
conventions) you can do spice-like things. This is good, not bad,
because efficient remoting protocols do not look like X. Now we get to
design a good one, and in the meantime vnc-style remoting sure does go a
long way towards being good enough. (But, we can't switch yet, because
we don't even have vnc-style remoting yet; so we're not switching yet.)

- We lose support for older hardware! Yep. Here's a nickel. We have
sufficient kernel support for this for the big three hardware vendors,
and we're probably going to see more ports to the marginal hardware in
the next year or two. Losing <1% of the hardware support isn't keeping
me up at night. (But, we can't switch yet, because there's not a good
fallback design to classic X on that kind of hardware, and it includes
things enterprisey people run on; so we're not switching yet.)

- All my X apps have to be ported! Yes, if they want to be native
wayland clients, they do. If they don't, you can run a nested X server
like on OSX. They'll still work as well as they ever did, and you even
get to keep ssh forwarding of them. You can run a wayland server that
does nothing but run a nested X server and you wouldn't ever know the
difference. Except of course that your shell and your screensaver can
be wayland apps, which means your screen locker will still work even if
an app has a menu open, and you can actually do secure password input,
and and and. (But, we really don't have _any_ good native wayland apps
yet, thus the benefit of native apps are at the moment theoretical; so
we're not switching yet.)

Anything I'm missing?

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/8537b778/attachment.bin
Adam Williamson
2010-11-09 18:54:41 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
- All my X apps have to be ported! Yes, if they want to be native
wayland clients, they do.
Minor correction (I think?) - the apps don't really need to be ported,
the toolkits do. Once GTK+ is ported to Wayland, fr'instance, all GTK+
apps are ported, right? It's not like we need to go in and poke all ten
zillion apps we ship separately.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 19:12:34 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Williamson
Post by Adam Jackson
- All my X apps have to be ported! Yes, if they want to be native
wayland clients, they do.
Minor correction (I think?) - the apps don't really need to be ported,
the toolkits do. Once GTK+ is ported to Wayland, fr'instance, all GTK+
apps are ported, right? It's not like we need to go in and poke all ten
zillion apps we ship separately.
To the extent that those apps call (and link) only against the toolkit
and not against an assumed backend, sure. The strict linking changes in
F12 or F13 or whichever it was helped a lot with this, and gtk3 will
help more, but to pick an arbitrary example:

% ldd `which gcalctool` | grep libX
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x05f1a000)
libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x001c1000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x00d42000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x001c6000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x001cf000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x0094e000)
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x0095d000)
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x009c8000)
libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcomposite.so.1 (0x001d2000)
libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXdamage.so.1 (0x001d5000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x006f8000)

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/9ddb0a5d/attachment.bin
Björn Persson
2010-11-09 19:23:54 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
% ldd `which gcalctool` | grep libX
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x05f1a000)
libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x001c1000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x00d42000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x001c6000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x001cf000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x0094e000)
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x0095d000)
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x009c8000)
libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcomposite.so.1 (0x001d2000)
libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXdamage.so.1 (0x001d5000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x006f8000)
ldd appears to resolve dependencies recursively. I typically use readelf to
see what a program links to.

$ readelf --dynamic `which gcalctool` | grep 'Shared library'
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libatk-1.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libpangoft2-1.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libpangocairo-1.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libcairo.so.2]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libpango-1.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libfreetype.so.6]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libfontconfig.so.1]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgconf-2.so.4]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgio-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgobject-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgthread-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libxml2.so.2]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libgmodule-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [librt.so.1]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libglib-2.0.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libm.so.6]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libpthread.so.0]
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libc.so.6]

Bj?rn Persson
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/d1cb6898/attachment.bin
Matthias Clasen
2010-11-09 19:27:33 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
To the extent that those apps call (and link) only against the toolkit
and not against an assumed backend, sure. The strict linking changes in
F12 or F13 or whichever it was helped a lot with this, and gtk3 will
% ldd `which gcalctool` | grep libX
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x05f1a000)
libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x001c1000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x00d42000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x001c6000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x001cf000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x0094e000)
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x0095d000)
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x009c8000)
libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcomposite.so.1 (0x001d2000)
libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXdamage.so.1 (0x001d5000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x006f8000)
GTK+ backends are linked in at this time.
One of the things that we will need to address before switching to
wayland-with-X-fallback-for-remote-or-poor-hw becomes a realistic
possibility.
Andrew Haley
2010-11-09 19:09:10 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Andrew Haley
I'm wondering of I'm reading this correctly. The downsides that have
been described are quite severe in contrast to the possible benefits.
It is, of course, possible that a mistake has been made, and the acute
loss of functionality is just scaremongering. It's also possible that
I've misunderstood something.
- We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have
that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a
modest amount of additional wayland protocol (or just inter-client
conventions) you can do spice-like things. This is good, not bad,
because efficient remoting protocols do not look like X. Now we get to
design a good one, and in the meantime vnc-style remoting sure does go a
long way towards being good enough. (But, we can't switch yet, because
we don't even have vnc-style remoting yet; so we're not switching yet.)
OK, so it's likely that everything will just continue to work
remotely, and people won't experience any problems. And they won't
have to run VNC just to get their favourite app to display remotely.

If this had been explained clearly to begin with, we could have
avoided all this pain.
Post by Adam Jackson
- All my X apps have to be ported! Yes, if they want to be native
wayland clients, they do. If they don't, you can run a nested X server
like on OSX. They'll still work as well as they ever did, and you even
get to keep ssh forwarding of them. You can run a wayland server that
does nothing but run a nested X server and you wouldn't ever know the
difference. Except of course that your shell and your screensaver can
be wayland apps, which means your screen locker will still work even if
an app has a menu open, and you can actually do secure password input,
and and and. (But, we really don't have _any_ good native wayland apps
yet, thus the benefit of native apps are at the moment theoretical; so
we're not switching yet.)
Anything I'm missing?
It looked like a bunch of kiddies who had never used remote X
applications had decided we didn't need to do that anymore, and it was
more important to get kewl features like smooth scrolling and rotating
3D whatnots. It seems that isn't true, and we don't need to worry.
The lunatics have not, in fact, taken over the asylum.

Andrew.
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-09 19:29:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by Andrew Haley
OK, so it's likely that everything will just continue to work
remotely, and people won't experience any problems. ?And they won't
have to run VNC just to get their favourite app to display remotely.
If this had been explained clearly to begin with, we could have
avoided all this pain.
All participants need to take responsibility for being situationally
aware to keep things from spiralling out of control.

The person starting this conversation is not involved in the work.
Because of that there is no initial clarity or statement of
purpose..no expert opinion to rely on at the outset. The people
involved in the work are bravely walking into a discussion they didn't
expect to be having at this point in time to pour water on reactions
that have already grown somewhat overheated by the lack of clarity
which was created through no fault of their own.
Post by Andrew Haley
It looked like a bunch of kiddies who had never used remote X
applications had decided we didn't need to do that anymore, and it was
more important to get kewl features like smooth scrolling and rotating
3D whatnots. ?It seems that isn't true, and we don't need to worry.
The lunatics have not, in fact, taken over the asylum.
If you thought that, if anyone thought that, they are bringing a huge
amount of mental baggage into the discussion with them and are setting
everyone up for a passionate overheated argument instead of a
dispassionate informative discussion. A quick look over at
freedesktop's git at the people who have had personal wayland branches
in recent history would eradicate this particular characterization.

-jef
Chris Adams
2010-11-09 19:34:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
- We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have
that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a
VNC-like remoting is a significant loss for server environments compared
to X-like remoting.

With an X-based GUI management tool on a server, you fire up an SSH (or
if you are old style you can even "xhost +foo", or manually copy magic
cookies) and run just the app on the server, exporting the display of
the app to your local system. All the "heavy-lifting" runs on your
local system, not the server. When you close the app, there's nothing
left running on the server.

If you have to use a VNC-like remoting, you have to run a desktop
environment on the server (at least some minimal thing). You either
have to have it running all the time, or start it up on demand. Then
you can log in to start your app. When you shut down the app, you have
to remember to shut down the desktop environment as well. This is much
more overhead on the server for an occasional use GUI app.

None of my servers even have any desktop-environment type stuff install.
In virtualized environments, making the servers run desktop stuff could
greatly increase the overhead.
--
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 19:43:07 UTC
Permalink
Post by Chris Adams
Post by Adam Jackson
- We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have
that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a
VNC-like remoting is a significant loss for server environments compared
to X-like remoting.
See that other email where I say that "VNC-like" means "pixel scraping"
and not "full-desktop".

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/ab23380b/attachment.bin
Richard W.M. Jones
2010-11-09 21:03:38 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
- We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have
that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a
modest amount of additional wayland protocol (or just inter-client
conventions) you can do spice-like things. This is good, not bad,
because efficient remoting protocols do not look like X. Now we get to
design a good one, and in the meantime vnc-style remoting sure does go a
long way towards being good enough. (But, we can't switch yet, because
we don't even have vnc-style remoting yet; so we're not switching yet.)
Just so we don't lose the point: VNC-style remoting is *not*
a suitable alternative.

Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)
http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
Matthew Garrett
2010-11-09 17:25:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
At which point, it's too late. Unless Server-y people
I object strongly to this perception that nobody involved in developing
desktop technologies has any idea what server admins want. What we're
seeing is the development of technologies that bear little resemblance
to the Unix way of doing things, but which will in many cases make life
better for server admins. systemd is a wonderful example, and Wayland
has the potential to be used in such a way that it will work much better
for what you want than X currently does.

To put it plainly: we know that people use X remoting. We're not going
to change the default to something that makes that use-case impossible.
Nobody who has any understanding of any of this is suggesting that we do
so. It would be *stupid* to do so. But if you're asking for something
that's identical to what we currently have (a reliance on a protocol
that has an irritating number of round trips for something as simple as
a keypress) then you're not going to get it, any more than us still
providing support for a.out applications.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
seth vidal
2010-11-09 17:37:34 UTC
Permalink
Post by Matthew Garrett
Post by Jon Masters
At which point, it's too late. Unless Server-y people
I object strongly to this perception that nobody involved in developing
desktop technologies has any idea what server admins want. What we're
seeing is the development of technologies that bear little resemblance
to the Unix way of doing things, but which will in many cases make life
better for server admins. systemd is a wonderful example, and Wayland
has the potential to be used in such a way that it will work much better
for what you want than X currently does.
I can agree with that.


I'd like for something in return - could the folks working on desktop
technologies acknowledge that those of us who are more server-oriented
have an idea of what users want?

B/c the perception I get is that only the desktop-oriented folks know
what users want or need and the server-oriented folks do not.

I think that's in error, too.

-sv
Matthew Miller
2010-11-09 18:08:23 UTC
Permalink
Post by seth vidal
B/c the perception I get is that only the desktop-oriented folks know
what users want or need and the server-oriented folks do not.
I think that's in error, too.
In fact, us server-oriented folks are often blessed with working directly
with actual users every day.
--
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Bill Nottingham
2010-11-09 18:27:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Matthew Miller
Post by seth vidal
B/c the perception I get is that only the desktop-oriented folks know
what users want or need and the server-oriented folks do not.
I think that's in error, too.
In fact, us server-oriented folks are often blessed with working directly
with actual users every day.
Right, but that just leads to informing people that what users desparately
need is a beating.

Bill
seth vidal
2010-11-09 18:42:42 UTC
Permalink
Post by Bill Nottingham
Post by Matthew Miller
Post by seth vidal
B/c the perception I get is that only the desktop-oriented folks know
what users want or need and the server-oriented folks do not.
I think that's in error, too.
In fact, us server-oriented folks are often blessed with working directly
with actual users every day.
Right, but that just leads to informing people that what users desparately
need is a beating.
Or it leads to the development of an expertise or an intuition about the
complaints and issues a user actually runs into or about how the systems
are actually being used.

For example - talking to my former co-workers at a .edu I've determined
that a LARGE number of users are no longer using local mail tools at
all. They've transitioned exclusively to using gmail for all their
accounts.

The younger users in particular are expecting access to their
information from all their devices independently - which gmail provides.

-sv
Adam Williamson
2010-11-09 16:49:42 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
AIUI the Grand Plan is for everyone to write apps in GTK+ and Qt (which
is more or less the case already), and for GTK+ and Qt to be compatible
with *both* Wayland and X. Again AIUI, there's no impediment to this in
the design of Wayland and it's actually what Wayland's designers expect
to happen, in order to make sure things still work on platforms where
Wayland isn't available, and to deal with exactly this kind of case.

So I think the future vision is that if you're running on your system
you get a shiny Wayland-y version, and if you run something via ssh -x
you get a slightly less pretty X version. And all the Hard Stuff happens
in the background and you don't really have to care about it. If I'm
wrong, someone correct me, but I think I'm right and people are getting
a rather misleading vision of a glorious future where everything only
runs on Wayland, which I don't think is the idea at all.

(presumably if you're one of the few apps which don't use a toolkit, you
should yourself make sure you support both Wayland and X. Or make sure
no-one wants to run your apps over a network, or there's another way to
do it.)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Andrew Haley
2010-11-09 17:42:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Williamson
Post by Jon Masters
Post by Richard W.M. Jones
And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
none of those can be run remotely?
If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
AIUI the Grand Plan is for everyone to write apps in GTK+ and Qt (which
is more or less the case already), and for GTK+ and Qt to be compatible
with *both* Wayland and X. Again AIUI, there's no impediment to this in
the design of Wayland and it's actually what Wayland's designers expect
to happen, in order to make sure things still work on platforms where
Wayland isn't available, and to deal with exactly this kind of case.
So I think the future vision is that if you're running on your system
you get a shiny Wayland-y version, and if you run something via ssh -x
you get a slightly less pretty X version. And all the Hard Stuff happens
in the background and you don't really have to care about it.
Well, that would be an excellent result.

All it takes is someone who is a member of the cabal (TINC) to confirm
this, and everyone will be happy.

Andrew.
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 16:55:55 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
No. You see the system you know and understand being replaced by one
you don't. You have an emotional attachment to the old system because
it gives you a feature you like and the dozens of problems with it
aren't important to you. And you claim that the replacement is less
flexible because you don't understand or don't want to learn the new
thing.

You are, in short, scared.

It's well established by now that the problems of "window system",
"rendering system", "input system", and "application remoting" are in
fact pretty dang separate, and that the more you conflate them the worse
your solution ends up being. You can thank X for being ~24 years of
research into just how badly you can conflate them and get away with it,
but it's just about reached the limits of what it can do. I'm sad to
see it go too, but I've been working to knock X out of hegemony for the
last six years, and I'm quite sure that the sooner that happens the
better for all concerned.

Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/a0875363/attachment-0001.bin
Gregory Maxwell
2010-11-09 17:12:37 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jon Masters
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
No. ?You see the system you know and understand being replaced by one
you don't. ?You have an emotional attachment to the old system because
it gives you a feature you like and the dozens of problems with it
aren't important to you. ?And you claim that the replacement is less
flexible because you don't understand or don't want to learn the new
thing.
I've mostly been watching here and I think people have been fairly
clearly about their concerns: Network transparency is important to
them, and they understand that the wayland message is that it will not
be supported. This message has been clear enough to me here and
elsewhere? with people arguing things like applications which need
network transparency are all now web based.

So,
You are, in short, scared.
... I think this is a rather unfair characterization.

Perhaps the concerns that people have are misplaced?? perhaps a switch
to somehow wayland doesn't imply a loss of reasonably functioning
network transparency. If so, then clarifying it beyond your "gtk/qt"
will offer both X and wayland would be helpful. Especially since
providing both TUI and GUI administrative tools hasn't really panned
out in practice.

In any case, I can't see that there has been any real concern raised
about _change_. Fedora is full of change. People are raising and
arguing specific concerns about the nature of the changes. Please
treat your list co-habitants with a little more respect.

[snip]
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. ?Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. ?It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. ?So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?

I'm rather confused. Can you help me understand? So long as
integrated network transparency doesn't get any worse I don't think
that anyone raising concerns would have an issue.
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-09 18:12:39 UTC
Permalink
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Jon Masters
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
No. You see the system you know and understand being replaced by one
you don't. You have an emotional attachment to the old system because
it gives you a feature you like and the dozens of problems with it
aren't important to you. And you claim that the replacement is less
flexible because you don't understand or don't want to learn the new
thing.
I've mostly been watching here and I think people have been fairly
clearly about their concerns: Network transparency is important to
them, and they understand that the wayland message is that it will not
be supported. This message has been clear enough to me here and
elsewhere? with people arguing things like applications which need
network transparency are all now web based.
You are mis-interpreting the message probably because you are not a
developer and as a result don't know how software is designed in layers.
Wayland handles the visual aspects of the desktop. Networking doesn't
belong there. A remote app layer will sit on top of Wayland and deal with
the communication between both ends.
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
You are, in short, scared.
... I think this is a rather unfair characterization.
Given the fact that people are heading for their nuclear vaults for reasons
that only exist in their fantasies I'd say that's an accurate description.
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Perhaps the concerns that people have are misplaced?? perhaps a switch
to somehow wayland doesn't imply a loss of reasonably functioning
network transparency. If so, then clarifying it beyond your "gtk/qt"
will offer both X and wayland would be helpful. Especially since
providing both TUI and GUI administrative tools hasn't really panned
out in practice.
In any case, I can't see that there has been any real concern raised
about _change_. Fedora is full of change. People are raising and
arguing specific concerns about the nature of the changes. Please
treat your list co-habitants with a little more respect.
Then why are people already calling for the rejection of Wayland even
though Wayland is still far from being finished and hasn't even touched
Fedora yet.

raising concerns != screaming the sky is falling
Post by Gregory Maxwell
[snip]
Post by Adam Jackson
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?
I'm rather confused. Can you help me understand? So long as
integrated network transparency doesn't get any worse I don't think
that anyone raising concerns would have an issue.
X will run as a Wayland client. That means all applications that support X
will be able to run remotely without change. Since QT and GTK both run on X
and virtually all apps out there are programmed to use QT and/or GTK for
most people nothing will change in the next couple of years.

That's why it's so hard to understand why people are already bringing out
their torches and pitchforks over this.

Now let's assume Wayland is really successull. In that case people will
want to get rid of X altogether and then you'd also lose the remote app
support of X and in that case you obviously would need a replacement for
this so apps can run remotely on an X-less Wayland desktop.

What's puzzling is why people are willing to form hardened opinions on
things they apparently don't understand. It's baffling.

Regards,
Dennis
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-09 18:33:40 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Then why are people already calling for the rejection of Wayland even
though Wayland is still far from being finished and hasn't even touched
Fedora yet.
raising concerns != screaming the sky is falling
Actually, if we go back to the first post in the thread... it was the
premature suggestion by a by stander of bringing a "still far from
being finished technology" into Fedora because another entity has
prematurely decided to announce to the world that its going to be
their default. That triggered a certain amount of bloodletting. If
the original poster had come to the conclusion that it was "far from
being finished" before writing the first post do you think that the
original poster would have written that post in exactly the say way?
Something the original poster should probably ruminate on.

Generally speaking, if you aren't prepared to talk in detail about the
suitability of a technology, you shouldn't bring it up for discussion
like that. If you are personally interested in it, you should inquire
as to whether there are people in our development community who are
currently working on it and ask them questions about it. To come out
of the gate suggesting its time to discuss it for inclusion is putting
the card before the horse.

What the original post is, is a classic enthusiast blunder. The active
developers working on the problem space are more than capable of
proposing wayland for inclusion and answer questions about
wayland...when they feel its ready. By introducing it for discussion
before they were ready to engage in that discussion you've actually
made it more difficult for the discussion to move forward as you've
taken away their best shot to me a good first impression with the
tech.

-jef
mike cloaked
2010-11-09 18:47:41 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jeff Spaleta
wayland...when they feel its ready. By introducing it for discussion
before they were ready to engage in that discussion you've actually
made it more difficult for the discussion to move forward as you've
taken away their best shot to me a good first impression with the
tech.
I have been watching this growing thread with some bewilderment - is
it possible for someone who knows by direct experience how Wayland has
been moving, but who is also a Fedora developer, to give a more
detailed description of where the project has been heading in terms of
both what it *may* be able to provide in functionality beyond the
discussion in this thread, as well as how it is envisaged it may yet
satisfy the needs of the critics concerning the loss of essential
functionality - I guess that if the project is still being defined
then it is important to understand its potential for the future, and
not just what has been planned at this point in time?

Jeff makes a good point here - it sounds like this is still nascent at
a level where *we* don't really know the extent of its capabilities,
but has the potential to be developed in directions that have not yet
been clarified in the developer's minds - and a considered discussion
between the experts could say what its limitations might be? However
there must be many unknowns and until the development gets to the
stage where some code can be tested as part of a rawhide level system
then it is perfectly possible that the developers could make the
system work in a way that the critics are currently implying cannot
happen - or am I being naive?
--
mike c
Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
2010-11-09 21:09:06 UTC
Permalink
Post by Jeff Spaleta
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Then why are people already calling for the rejection of Wayland even
though Wayland is still far from being finished and hasn't even touched
Fedora yet.
raising concerns != screaming the sky is falling
Actually, if we go back to the first post in the thread... it was the
premature suggestion by a by stander of bringing a "still far from
being finished technology" into Fedora because another entity has
prematurely decided to announce to the world that its going to be
their default. That triggered a certain amount of bloodletting. If
the original poster had come to the conclusion that it was "far from
being finished" before writing the first post do you think that the
original poster would have written that post in exactly the say way?
Something the original poster should probably ruminate on.
Generally speaking, if you aren't prepared to talk in detail about the
suitability of a technology, you shouldn't bring it up for discussion
like that. If you are personally interested in it, you should inquire
as to whether there are people in our development community who are
currently working on it and ask them questions about it. To come out
of the gate suggesting its time to discuss it for inclusion is putting
the card before the horse.
What the original post is, is a classic enthusiast blunder. The active
developers working on the problem space are more than capable of
proposing wayland for inclusion and answer questions about
wayland...when they feel its ready. By introducing it for discussion
before they were ready to engage in that discussion you've actually
made it more difficult for the discussion to move forward as you've
taken away their best shot to me a good first impression with the
tech.
No. I'm sorry but it's fundamentaly unfair to hold me responsible for the
behaviour of others. If you think this shouldn't have been brought up fine
but if others decide to draw premature conclusions from this it's their
fault and not mine.

As for the "the developers will come forward when it's done" you apparently
seem to know know about the behind the scenes connections between Wayland
and Fedora than others. I was aware of the initial anouncement of Wayland
when the project was started at long time ago and wouldn't have dreamed of
bringing it up precisely because it would have been premature. However now
Ubuntu is apparently going to introduce its influence so I thought it to be
fair to make Fedora aware of the project.

Regards,
Dennis

Brian Wheeler
2010-11-09 18:44:19 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Jon Masters
+1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.
No. You see the system you know and understand being replaced by one
you don't. You have an emotional attachment to the old system because
it gives you a feature you like and the dozens of problems with it
aren't important to you. And you claim that the replacement is less
flexible because you don't understand or don't want to learn the new
thing.
I've mostly been watching here and I think people have been fairly
clearly about their concerns: Network transparency is important to
them, and they understand that the wayland message is that it will not
be supported. This message has been clear enough to me here and
elsewhere? with people arguing things like applications which need
network transparency are all now web based.
You are mis-interpreting the message probably because you are not a
developer and as a result don't know how software is designed in layers.
Wayland handles the visual aspects of the desktop. Networking doesn't
belong there. A remote app layer will sit on top of Wayland and deal with
the communication between both ends.
And where does that sit in the architecture?

Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.

Answering that you can still use X on top of Wayland doesn't do
anything: it is the native Wayland clients that are the issue. If they
are not network transparent then it cannot be a suitable replacement for
X because native clients _will_ appear and we end up with the situation
of OSX and Windows where some clients are more equal than others.
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Gregory Maxwell
[snip]
Post by Adam Jackson
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?
I'm rather confused. Can you help me understand? So long as
integrated network transparency doesn't get any worse I don't think
that anyone raising concerns would have an issue.
X will run as a Wayland client. That means all applications that support X
will be able to run remotely without change. Since QT and GTK both run on X
and virtually all apps out there are programmed to use QT and/or GTK for
most people nothing will change in the next couple of years.
Are the native wayland clients network transparent? If they are not,
then it isn't a suitable replacement for X for my usage (or my 2 dozen
users) and it means that either the native wayland clients or X clients
will be second class citizens as time goes on.
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
That's why it's so hard to understand why people are already bringing out
their torches and pitchforks over this.
Now let's assume Wayland is really successull. In that case people will
want to get rid of X altogether and then you'd also lose the remote app
support of X and in that case you obviously would need a replacement for
this so apps can run remotely on an X-less Wayland desktop.
Which should be considered now. VNC screen scraping sucks. If the
native clients cannot be networked from the beginning, then they will
never be able to be networked in a suitable fashon. Its not something
you can bolt on later "if [it] is really successful"

I like the concept of the project and I like the energy, but the bottom
line is: if you want to make a replacement for X it needs to offer at
least the same feature set. That includes network transparency.

Brian
Casey Dahlin
2010-11-09 19:05:22 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian Wheeler
And where does that sit in the architecture?
Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.
Basically you'd run an alternate compositor in your ssh session that
would read out the buffers, compress them, and send them over the
network instead of compositing them into a larger buffer and scanning
them out.

--CJD
Brian Wheeler
2010-11-09 19:14:32 UTC
Permalink
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
And where does that sit in the architecture?
Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.
Basically you'd run an alternate compositor in your ssh session that
would read out the buffers, compress them, and send them over the
network instead of compositing them into a larger buffer and scanning
them out.
--CJD
That's an interesting solution. If I logged into a remote machine would
I have to run a separate compositor for every application or one per
remote connection? I suppose the compositor could be started
automatically if the wayland libraries looked for an env setting (the
same way X looks for DISPLAY).

Brian
Casey Dahlin
2010-11-09 19:24:25 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
And where does that sit in the architecture?
Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.
Basically you'd run an alternate compositor in your ssh session that
would read out the buffers, compress them, and send them over the
network instead of compositing them into a larger buffer and scanning
them out.
--CJD
That's an interesting solution. If I logged into a remote machine would
I have to run a separate compositor for every application or one per
remote connection? I suppose the compositor could be started
automatically if the wayland libraries looked for an env setting (the
same way X looks for DISPLAY).
When you did ssh --wayland, the remote ssh session daemon would start
that special compositor and inject its address into the environment so
things you launched under that session would use it. Then your ssh
client would start a proxy wayland client to recieve the compressed
buffers and create windows on your local wayland compositor.

Best part is, if you composited the buffers beforehand and then sent the
result as a giant window, you get VNC functionality, so you only need
one protocol for both.

--CJD
Brian Wheeler
2010-11-09 19:28:10 UTC
Permalink
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
And where does that sit in the architecture?
Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.
Basically you'd run an alternate compositor in your ssh session that
would read out the buffers, compress them, and send them over the
network instead of compositing them into a larger buffer and scanning
them out.
--CJD
That's an interesting solution. If I logged into a remote machine would
I have to run a separate compositor for every application or one per
remote connection? I suppose the compositor could be started
automatically if the wayland libraries looked for an env setting (the
same way X looks for DISPLAY).
When you did ssh --wayland, the remote ssh session daemon would start
that special compositor and inject its address into the environment so
things you launched under that session would use it. Then your ssh
client would start a proxy wayland client to recieve the compressed
buffers and create windows on your local wayland compositor.
Best part is, if you composited the buffers beforehand and then sent the
result as a giant window, you get VNC functionality, so you only need
one protocol for both.
I assume there would be a fallback method for older ssh clients?

In any case, combined with the stuff that ajax has said in the last
couple of emails it sounds like it could be a workable solution.

Brian
Post by Casey Dahlin
--CJD
Casey Dahlin
2010-11-09 20:21:01 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Casey Dahlin
Post by Brian Wheeler
And where does that sit in the architecture?
Looking over the architecture page (2nd figure) it looks like the only
way to get the kind of network transparency that X has under Wayland is
to put the network between the Wayland client and Wayland Compositor.
Which would mean that the passing of events has to be networkable from
the start. If its put on top it ends up being the VNC model of doing
things and that sucks in a big way.
Basically you'd run an alternate compositor in your ssh session that
would read out the buffers, compress them, and send them over the
network instead of compositing them into a larger buffer and scanning
them out.
--CJD
That's an interesting solution. If I logged into a remote machine would
I have to run a separate compositor for every application or one per
remote connection? I suppose the compositor could be started
automatically if the wayland libraries looked for an env setting (the
same way X looks for DISPLAY).
When you did ssh --wayland, the remote ssh session daemon would start
that special compositor and inject its address into the environment so
things you launched under that session would use it. Then your ssh
client would start a proxy wayland client to recieve the compressed
buffers and create windows on your local wayland compositor.
Best part is, if you composited the buffers beforehand and then sent the
result as a giant window, you get VNC functionality, so you only need
one protocol for both.
I assume there would be a fallback method for older ssh clients?
It would involve a bit more effort on the user's part (most of which
could be rolled into a script) but you could set up the final scenario
using present-day ssh assuming you had the wayland bits on both ends.

--CJD
Gregory Maxwell
2010-11-09 19:04:16 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Gregory Maxwell
I've mostly been watching here and I think people have been fairly
clearly about their concerns: Network transparency is important to
them, and they understand that the wayland message is that it will not
be supported. ?This message has been clear enough to me here and
elsewhere? with people arguing things like ?applications which need
network transparency are all now web based.
You are mis-interpreting the message probably because you are not a
developer and as a result don't know how software is designed in layers.
Wayland handles the visual aspects of the desktop. Networking doesn't
belong there. A remote app layer will sit on top of Wayland and deal with
the communication between both ends.
Nice way to assume. Its pretty likely that you use software I wrote every day.

So long as the _system_ provides robust and fully integrated network
transparency I don't really care which sub-components are actually
providing it. I think I already made that clear enough. I don't think
anyone here really cares about the internal details so long as the
functionality works well and is well integrated.

What hasn't been made clear to me so far is that this is the case. I
see you saying this, it's also argued that network transparency is not
required in wayland because some toolkits will support falling back to
X. Other people have argued that network transparency is no longer
required because of the existence of web applications.

If is so clear-cut for wayland then why can't a clear message be provided?

Please don't blame me the lack of clarity in the communications on
Wayland's intended capabilities and confusion that other people have
created by arguing the network transparency isn't a requirement.

Miscommunication happens. It doesn't even require anyone to be
uniformed or incompetent.

I'm perfectly capable of understanding a statement like
"Cairo^wWayland is just a rendering layer, the communications is
provided by FooBar, and that will provide good network transparency or
at least as good as X11, so there is no need to worry if network
transparency is important to you."

[snip]
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Gregory Maxwell
In any case, I can't see that there has been any real concern raised
about _change_. Fedora is full of change. People are raising and
arguing specific concerns about the nature of the changes. Please
treat your list co-habitants with a little more respect.
Then why are people already calling for the rejection of Wayland even
though Wayland is still far from being finished and hasn't even touched
Fedora yet.
raising concerns != screaming the sky is falling
Well _I_ certainly didn't intend to call for a rejection of wayland?
it seems to be far too immature to even talk about rejecting it at
this point. But I think Fedora ought to make clear that network
transparency is requirement. It seems that at least a few people in
this thread don't believe that it is, and I think that ought to be
cleared up sooner rather than later because I'd hate to hear that a
lot of effort was put in building a system that won't really meet the
needs.

If the need for network transparency is already well understood then I
don't think there is much more to discuss.

[snip]
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
X will run as a Wayland client. That means all applications that support X
will be able to run remotely without change. Since QT and GTK both run on X
and virtually all apps out there are programmed to use QT and/or GTK for
most people nothing will change in the next couple of years.
This is exactly the sort of non-comforting communication that I was
complaining about above.

The fact that 'legacy' apps will continue to function in a network
transparent manner for some time is nice thing... but it suggests a
future which will be increasingly boxed in if it becomes a central
component of common GNU/Linux distributions.

You're giving a really confused message here. In some parts of the
thread it's being argued that the complaints are unfounded because the
system will provide network transparency, but it's also argued that
transparency isn't required because old applications will continue to
work the old way, or because people don't actually need the
functionality.
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
That's why it's so hard to understand why people are already bringing out
their torches and pitchforks over this.
Keep your windowing system out of my network transparency!!!! ;)
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Now let's assume Wayland is really successull. In that case people will
want to get rid of X altogether and then you'd also lose the remote app
support of X and in that case you obviously would need a replacement for
this so apps can run remotely on an X-less Wayland desktop.
I think it's needed on the first day that wayland desktop applications
are widely deployed? someone shouldn't have to choose between the
"wayland ui" and network transparency.

I suppose there is plenty of room to disagree with this but I would
point out that other operating systems have not had a lot of luck with
after-the-fact network transparency.

Remote X is actually pretty terrible from a protocol perspective. It's
very chatty. But at least on a reasonable network (and by reasonable I
should note that doesn't just mean a local network) it's quite usable.
It would be sad not to make an _improvement_ on this, but I really
can't see how something could even match it without having it as a
design consideration at the start.

I don't mean this as an insult or a lack of faith against the people
working on the system? the same pattern of treating network
transparency as an afterthought has not worked where anywhere as far
as I can tell.
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
What's puzzling is why people are willing to form hardened opinions on
things they apparently don't understand. It's baffling.
The only hardened opinion I have is that network transparency is an
essential opinion. Beyond that I have no clue. I'm waiting to be
educated. If only Adam Jackson were responding I would have walked
away satisfied by now. Perhaps I should ignore everyone else. :)
Bill Nottingham
2010-11-09 18:22:40 UTC
Permalink
Post by Gregory Maxwell
So,
Post by Adam Jackson
You are, in short, scared.
... I think this is a rather unfair characterization.
I don't know about that. Something new is discussed, and not everyone
understands it, and they have concerns about how it may handle some particular
cases.

Now, people can go about the discussion in multiple ways.

People can ask questions... get more info... try and understand the
architecture... work on ways to fit into it, or move it, or discover better
ways to accomplish that usage case.

Or people can start posting how WE agree that THOSE people are coming into
OUR space and I see how they're moving towards THEIR way doing things that
are against OUR way of life, and how this is going to be a DISASTER and
THOSE people must be STOPPED because THEY can't be reasoned with. (Paid for
by the committee to elect blah blah fishcakes send your donations now so we
can stop THOSE people and their AGENDA today.)

And that's argumentation that's based on fear and instilling fear, and
the more that an argument tends down those lines, the more I'd expect a
response with condescension.

Bill
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 18:47:52 UTC
Permalink
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?
I'm Adam Jackson. That was Adam Williamson. We look a bit alike over
ASCII I suppose, but in meatspace my hair is more likely to be
interesting colors.

And I'm saying you can get the network remoting effect you like in X, in
Wayland. It's not built into the local Wayland rendering system, but
there are both trivial ways to add it (vnc-like) and complicated ways to
add it (rdp-like) and both will work.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/822231be/attachment.bin
Adam Williamson
2010-11-09 18:56:44 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?
I'm Adam Jackson. That was Adam Williamson. We look a bit alike over
ASCII I suppose, but in meatspace my hair is more likely to be
interesting colors.
Also, those two things are not at all incompatible (though ajax, please
do correct me if I was wrong in what I wrote, or if I'm wrong in this).
It's perfectly possible (and I think likely) both for Wayland to be
implemented in such a way that you can use X remoting more or less
transparently, *and* for there to be some kind of native remoting
protocol for Wayland.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Brian Wheeler
2010-11-09 19:01:43 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Gregory Maxwell
Post by Adam Jackson
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
One message ago you were saying that the network transparency concern
was a non-issue because GTK/QT apps would support both wayland and X.
Here you're saying that wayland will have network transparency?
I'm Adam Jackson. That was Adam Williamson. We look a bit alike over
ASCII I suppose, but in meatspace my hair is more likely to be
interesting colors.
And I'm saying you can get the network remoting effect you like in X, in
Wayland. It's not built into the local Wayland rendering system, but
there are both trivial ways to add it (vnc-like) and complicated ways to
add it (rdp-like) and both will work.
So would it be a rooted VNC? If so, that simply sucks. The rdp style
is better, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be hit or
miss in different toolkits the same way that GUI/TUI admin tools are
always "kept in sync".

The truth is, I think this could be an interesting project, and I think
most people are raising their concerns now to make sure that should it
become a successful project we're not stuck with either VNC or
local-only.

Brian
Post by Adam Jackson
- ajax
--
devel mailing list
devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Adam Jackson
2010-11-09 19:19:00 UTC
Permalink
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Adam Jackson
And I'm saying you can get the network remoting effect you like in X, in
Wayland. It's not built into the local Wayland rendering system, but
there are both trivial ways to add it (vnc-like) and complicated ways to
add it (rdp-like) and both will work.
So would it be a rooted VNC? If so, that simply sucks. The rdp style
is better, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be hit or
miss in different toolkits the same way that GUI/TUI admin tools are
always "kept in sync".
Sorry, I assumed a bit much domain knowledge here.

When I say "vnc-like" I mean "let's scrape the pixels out of the
rendering buffer and shove them over the wire". VNC itself is rooted,
but vnc-like remoting can be rooted or rootless. In wayland the
fundamental object of composition is a whole window, so you have
scrapeable surfaces both at the window level and at the top level. Take
your pick.

When I say "rdp-like" I mean "instill enough awareness of the
possibility of remoting in the rendering system that remoting can send a
rendering command stream instead of raw pixels if that seems to be a
win". Wordy, I admit. And, obviously, much more work than just
vnc-like scraping. But it's a serious win for WAN links, and is the
only viable way to remote 3D, etc.

And, of course, you can have both at once. rdp-like remoting probably
requires toolkit awareness (in this bizarro world, the nested X server
counts as a toolkit!), so if you end up remoting an app that lacks that
level of toolkit support, you can fall back to vnc-like.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20101109/24650e53/attachment.bin
Brian Wheeler
2010-11-09 19:24:48 UTC
Permalink
Post by Adam Jackson
Post by Brian Wheeler
Post by Adam Jackson
And I'm saying you can get the network remoting effect you like in X, in
Wayland. It's not built into the local Wayland rendering system, but
there are both trivial ways to add it (vnc-like) and complicated ways to
add it (rdp-like) and both will work.
So would it be a rooted VNC? If so, that simply sucks. The rdp style
is better, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be hit or
miss in different toolkits the same way that GUI/TUI admin tools are
always "kept in sync".
Sorry, I assumed a bit much domain knowledge here.
No worries
Post by Adam Jackson
When I say "vnc-like" I mean "let's scrape the pixels out of the
rendering buffer and shove them over the wire". VNC itself is rooted,
but vnc-like remoting can be rooted or rootless. In wayland the
fundamental object of composition is a whole window, so you have
scrapeable surfaces both at the window level and at the top level. Take
your pick.
I was hoping that window-level scraping was possible but I wasn't sure
how to phrase it.
Post by Adam Jackson
When I say "rdp-like" I mean "instill enough awareness of the
possibility of remoting in the rendering system that remoting can send a
rendering command stream instead of raw pixels if that seems to be a
win". Wordy, I admit. And, obviously, much more work than just
vnc-like scraping. But it's a serious win for WAN links, and is the
only viable way to remote 3D, etc.
Wordy, true, but I think its the kind of detail necessary to calm a lot
of the fears that people have.
Post by Adam Jackson
And, of course, you can have both at once. rdp-like remoting probably
requires toolkit awareness (in this bizarro world, the nested X server
counts as a toolkit!), so if you end up remoting an app that lacks that
level of toolkit support, you can fall back to vnc-like.
Sounds reasonable enough

Brian
Jeff Spaleta
2010-11-09 17:55:33 UTC
Permalink
Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_. ?Either to an X or to a
wayland view system. ?It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content. ?So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.
I think what's missing is a concrete demonstration to point to of
remoting of a Wayland native client window to wrap our heads around
how different (easy or hard) it is. When the time comes to introduce
initial wayland packages into Fedora having the ability to demonstrate
a native toy Wayland client rendered remotely (and securely from say
a virtualized host) is probably something to shoot for.

-jef
Matthias Clasen
2010-11-05 15:12:09 UTC
Permalink
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Until recently, wayland required private branches of quite a few
dependencies. But it should be possible to build wayland against F15
packages now, or at least it should be soon. If somebody wants to give
this a try, I'd be happy to review packages.

Wayland certainly still has a way to go before we can think about
replacing X altogether, but many pieces of this puzzle have been falling
into place, and with the increased interest (and hopefully
contribution), we may see it happen sooner rather than later.

Watch out for that 'gnome-shell on wayland' post... :-)
Casey Dahlin
2010-11-05 17:00:44 UTC
Permalink
Post by Matthias Clasen
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Until recently, wayland required private branches of quite a few
dependencies. But it should be possible to build wayland against F15
packages now, or at least it should be soon. If somebody wants to give
this a try, I'd be happy to review packages.
Last time I tried the big problem was Cairo-drm wasn't enabled in our cairo
packages. Granted that was a while ago. Also I don't know the status of drivers
other than Intel getting the page-flip ioctl in the kernel, which is the other
major prerequisite.
Post by Matthias Clasen
Wayland certainly still has a way to go before we can think about
replacing X altogether, but many pieces of this puzzle have been falling
into place, and with the increased interest (and hopefully
contribution), we may see it happen sooner rather than later.
The code definitely needed some more eyes last time I poked it. Its completely
undocumented in most places, duplicates macro declarations across multiple
files, and essentially implements its own version of point-to-point dbus (the
politics there aren't quite so simple, as there may be an argument for Wayland
doing its own IPC, even if it does seem rather too elaborate).

I'd love to see things move this way though.

--CJD
Stephen John Smoogen
2010-11-05 21:41:32 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 19:11, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
There is an interesting article on LWN currently that outlines not
Ubuntu's reasons but core X hacker Keith Packards on the changes:

http://lwn.net/Articles/413335/

for those with LWN subscriptions.
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Regards,
? Dennis
--
devel mailing list
devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren
Adam Williamson
2010-11-05 22:01:42 UTC
Permalink
Post by Stephen John Smoogen
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 19:11, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Post by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
Interesting move: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
Has anyone looked into bringing Wayland to Fedora? If not this might be the
right time getting involved in the discussion.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
There is an interesting article on LWN currently that outlines not
http://lwn.net/Articles/413335/
for those with LWN subscriptions.
thanks for the pointer, that was interesting indeed. (reminder to RHers:
we have a site subscription to LWN, details on the intranet.)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
Loading...