Posts by ilpr 7 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2023
As always, solution is not in overworking the few, but distributing the work to many. The wealthy try to squeeze most out the few people they have to maximize their own margins, they are not truly talking about benefit to others.
Of course distributing work to more people needs investments in education and such. Guess who don't like that idea either..
Frankly, what did you think patents are for? Their only purpose is to collect money - either by licensing to others or preventing competition to use it.
Earlier it would not have been worth it to start a case if there was no money to be had so it is possible they have been monitoring the situation.
That said, software patents are ridiculous, patents are not meant to prevent ideas to be shared but implementation, yet they are too vague and too broad and used in all the wrong ways. Software is mainly an application of mathematics and shares many concepts with it, one being that there are only so many ways to implement algorithm to get a correct result. So software patents should not be given as easily as they are currently being given. Copyright legislation already has sufficient rights protection for software.
Yes, Xwayland has been used for a long time. It is a "proxy" translating between X11 clients and Wayland compositor.
Note that they are planning to drop Xserver-based session, Xwayland will still be available for compatibility in a Wayland-session.
GLX has been replaced by EGL is various applications like Firefox. Even better, many application use DRI which bypasses the need for GLX entirely.
VNC is a working solution for remote desktops. X11 hasn't been network transparent for ages since DRI uses shared memory: it has been "network aware" but the transparency has been in the minds of the users for a long time. This isn't the 1980's X11 any more..
The Bergamo performance might have improved thanks to other changes in the kernel (less migrations from near-idle cores on EPYC-CPUs). EEVDF mainly helps with task latencies and not specifically any CPU specific things. EEVDF is there to replace CFS scheduler and reduces the amount of heuristics that has accumulated.
XWayland does support the X11 clients. The difference is that it isn't interfacing with the hardware, but it is simply Wayland-client.
So, you can use all the testing you use otherwise.
X11 was always a message-based protocol over sockets. So you can use the Xlib-library that sends the commands to Xwayland.
You never called X-server directly since it was supposed to be "network transparent" (in practice that required a lot of low-level code to do that but that was what user saw).
Wayland does the same thing: it is message-based but the protocol is different.
Why is the protocol different? Imagine you are switching to a modern locomotive (a train) from a coal-powered one: what can you re-use? Not a lot.
More efficient than one set of "drawing commands" is to have no drawing commands at all. This is what practically every implementation uses these days - including X. The drawing commands for X11 were designed in the 1980s and seemed like a good idea at the time. Soon afterwards people started sending bitmaps instead of commands for performance reasons. And then there are all the various needs that software like electronic design tools and word processing want different commands. These days with DRI-interface all of the old X11 drawing is bypassed but it is still carried along to be able to say that the protocol is supported.
Another example are the fonts. Back when X emerged (with all the terminals and thin clients) it was though of as a good idea to have a font server. When personal computers were used the fonts were on the same computer so that wasn't needed. Instead, fontconfig appeared and clients choose what fonts they want to use directly. There's of course all kinds of fonts these days like OpenType, TrueType, PostScript etc. in addition to the X fonts and some use bitmaps and some use vectors and so on. So clients can pick the library they want to use and render the fonts with that instead of expection X server to have support for every case.
Having a single place to do everything (like a server) sounds good until people start to come with ideas of how they want to do things differently. And there are tons of different GUI toolkits that all want to draw in different ways.
XWayland is basically lightened X-server without the things that Wayland does, namely rendering.
Wayland itself is much lighter than X since it has no "drawing" commands and such - these are explicitly in the client toolkits.
Here's the thing: most X-clients already use client-side drawing in their toolkits, but X carries a lot of legacy baggage to keep backwards compatibility with ancient applications. Not that they are ever used these days..
Wayland is designed so that applications can't see each other: something that X never enforced but trusted that application developers "play nice" with it. X11 was rather horrid thing that is often misunderstood these days..
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