Wayland and Weston 1.0

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Wednesday 2012-10-24 13:51, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
>
>>A few folks around me, and myself included, have pondered...
>> 
>>It would seem that wayland and its possible compositors all require
>>3D support, which may require, if no accelerating GPU is installed,
>>the use of software rendering when doing purely "2D workloads",
>>such as libreoffice - xterms - and simple web page browsing,[...]
>
>what issues do you have in mind, exactly? That Wayland is not at all
>usable without a performant GPU (software GL considered too slow or
>power-hungry)?

That Wayland may be slower than what we have today, especially in
cases with sufficiently dumb framebuffers.
For example, within an Xvnc session, `mplayer -vo gl` takes up so
much more CPU time than `mplayer -vo x11`. Clearly that is due to
software GL rendering, got no problem with that. But I can switch to
-vo x11 if I want. With Wayland/Weston, I do not see any such
"disable GL" command line option. The pixman renderer may resolve
that worry..

>A Pixman-based software renderer for Weston has been talked about in
>passing several times, that it would be good to have. No-one just got
>around to it yet, AFAIK. It could also allow to run Weston on legacy
>(dumb) framebuffers. The GLESv2 renderer has been somewhat separated
>from the compositor core, but is not a clean cut yet.
>
>If we start waving our hands very hard, I could foresee dynamic
>switching between software and hardware based renderers, on-demand,
>coupled with multi-GPU-support. Though if any client uses EGL,
>I don't know how you could switch to a software renderer in the server.

Dynamic switching is not that much required (for me, at least).