 koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:19 | reply to Cabal
Re: Wayland 1.0 Officially Released Wikipedia article: »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%2···tocol%29
But here's the part that scares the living bejeezus out of me:
quote:
What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango etc) and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process. ... [An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. ... This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extension such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE ... With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path. Getting to a point where the X server is a compatibility option instead of the core rendering system will take a while, but we'll never get there if [we] don't plan for it.
It absolutely blows my mind how much stuff in Linux is shoved into kernel space, and for no real justified reason. I'm not trying to start an OS war -- honest folks -- but this is one thing the BSDs do not do. Keeping things in userland is good, and if you need an interface between the userland bits and the kernel, there are many interfaces for that (on the BSDs we tend to use ioctl() the most).
I imagine howardfine  and I have the same opinion here. 
As for moving some of the other bits into libraries (also userspace), that's good. Although all of the programs/libraries listed are what I classify as "dependency hell" (especially pango).
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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