Wayland preview

Yes, I saw that too.  One thing I like about RasPi is that it currently draws my X Windows graphics properly, as opposed to my Ubuntu 11.10 machine which sometimes has delayed rendering problems with diagonal lines and arcs.  They sometimes don't show up until I click the window's title bar, and I have no idea where in the Emperor's Old Clothes the problem might be.

So when I read that an adaptation layer (XWayland) will be provided, I have misgivings.  When I read that Wayland flings images around instead of graphical objects, my misgivings intensify.  At this point, I'm wondering if the gift horse is really a white elephant?

[Edit: changed "Emperor's New Clothes" to "Emperor's Old Clothes".  Sorry about that, C.A.R.]

Yes, it sounds like existing X applications will need to use an adaptation layer,

which will make them slower than they already are, but applications that use

GTK or Qt instead of X can run without an adaptation layer, with the potential

of a speedup.

coder27 wrote:

 

Yes, it sounds like existing X applications will need to use an adaptation layer,

which will make them slower than they already are, but applications that use

GTK or Qt instead of X can run without an adaptation layer, with the potential

of a speedup.

OK, so what do they use for drawing graphics and text and clipboard, so I can bypass them as well?  I have my own adaptation layer, so it's easy for me to switch from Xlib and Xft calls to something else.  I've just haven't come across something that's given me a good enough reason to switch.  I've found Xlib and Xft on every GNU/Linux system I've ported to.

from the faq:

What is the drawing API?

"Whatever you want it to be, honey". Wayland doesn't render on behalf of the clients, it expects the clients to use whatever means they prefer to render into a shareable buffer. When the client is done, it informs the Wayland server of the new contents. The current test clients use either cairo software rendering, cairo on OpenGL or hardware accelerated OpenGL directly. As long as you have a userspace driver library that will let you render into a sharable buffer, you're good to go.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_3

from the faq:

What is the drawing API?

"Whatever you want it to be, honey". Wayland doesn't render on behalf of the clients, it expects the clients to use whatever means they prefer to render into a shareable buffer. When the client is done, it informs the Wayland server of the new contents. The current test clients use either cairo software rendering, cairo on OpenGL or hardware accelerated OpenGL directly. As long as you have a userspace driver library that will let you render into a sharable buffer, you're good to go.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_3

"Will this be backwards-compatible with the 256MB Raspberry Pi Model B?"  -- Corbin Davenport

"Yes. All the work’s being done by the GPU."  -- Liz

"We’re still working to improve performance and memory consumption"  -- Eben

gpu_mem=128

    How much memory to reserve for the VideoCore, i.e. framebuffers, GL textures,

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/raspberrypi.html