XDS 2010

I’m here in Toulouse, France (a charming example of an old French city) for XDS 2010, which is going well so far. The venue is good, we have a relatively large number of attendees compared to some of the recent X conferences we’ve had, and there has been good discussion in many of the talks and of course in the hallways

Kristian and I have been working more on the Qt Wayland port, and have basic apps like analogclock drawing. I’m working on fixing the Qt Wayland code to support more complete drawing so that other apps run; I hope to have sliders and other examples going by next week. At that point we can start the process of building libmeegotouch on top of the Qt Wayland environment and seeing what it will take to get some sample MeeGo apps running.

The ultimate goal of the work is to remove the X server (which acts as an obtrusive middle man in handset configurations especially) from the graphics stack for certain environments. We felt MeeGo was a good target because its apps are relatively new and shouldn’t have many X dependencies, and the philosophy of MeeGo is consistent with what we want to achieve. Overall, we hope for a reduction in the number of context switches (down from 3 or more to get stuff on to the screen with X and a compositor to 2 with Wayland), a reduction in the amount of code and memory needed to run the environment, and a massive simplification of the architecture, which should allow for faster and more robust development.

more to come (off to get drinks with krh, DrJakob, ickle, rib and others now)

4 comments • Trackback (0)

Comments:

Comment from: Kelly [Visitor]

>The ultimate goal of the work is to remove the X server

I really wish people would stop trying to kill X

Permalink 09/18/10 @ 10:37

Comment from: jbarnes [Member]

X won't go away as long as people want to run X applications. But there's no reason X has to be your main display server or network transparent protocol. X will run just fine under Wayland, even in rootless configuration.

Permalink 09/18/10 @ 12:20

Comment from: markc [Visitor]

It may not be the fault of X, perhaps it is, but I would give anything for a windowing system on linux that does not tear when dragged and absolutely NEVER flickers. I would trade all the fanciest composite tricks in the world for an instant appearing and rock solid window and widget system. If starting from scratch and replacing X can do that, and I'll believe it when I see it too, then I can't wait for our new windowing overlord.

Permalink 09/19/10 @ 07:55

Comment from: jbarnes [Member]

We could add some hacks to the Intel X driver to prevent tearing for normal X drawing (right now we only guarantee tear free drawing for GL swaps), but it would likely have a very high performance cost. The architecture of Wayland makes this easy however, without any more cost than our current implementation (and in many cases much less).

Permalink 09/19/10 @ 20:20

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