Wayland and Weston 1.0

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2012 16:33:56 +0100 (CET)
Jan Engelhardt <jengelh at inai.de> wrote:

> 
> 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..

Right, I am confident it will. There will still be the overhead of
compositing, as clients cannot render directly to the (shadow)
framebuffer, except maybe the compositor's shadow buffer can be
bypassed for a fullscreen application.

> >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.

The renderer separation has advanced quite much since that time.


Thanks,
pq