Proof-of-Concept Port of XBMC to SDL 2.0 and Wayland 81
hypnosec wrote in with news that XBMC has experimental Wayland support now. Even better, it's implemented by porting XBMC to SDL 2.0, something that will become important as SDL 1.2 development officially ended and SDL 2.0 should be out in the wild in the not-too-distant-future. The code is only a few days old and has a few serious limitations (input is broken and a bug in weston with threaded clients causes rendering hangs) , but it seems like a pretty good start. The port should also bring SDL 2.0 support to the X11 backend.
WHAT (Score:4, Insightful)
What is XBMC?
What is SDL?
What is Wayland?
FFS TFS needs some TLC.
Re:WHAT (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
No, he meant Xbox Media Center.
I don't care that they ridiculously changed themselves to an abbreviation, it started as Xbox, and as far as I'm concerned, shall remain as.
Re: (Score:1)
We don't even support the Xbox any more. So "XBMC Media Center" is correct
Re: (Score:2)
Recursive project acronyms are SO 1996.
Re:WHAT (Score:5, Informative)
What is XBMC? What is SDL? What is Wayland?
FFS TFS needs some TLC.
XBMC [xbmc.org] is a "software media player and entertainment hub for digital media".
SDL [libsdl.org] is Simple DirectMedia Layer and "is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer".
"Wayland [wikipedia.org] is a computer display server protocol and a library for Linux implementing that protocol."
Re: (Score:2)
SDL is also System Description Language, and probably several other things. I suspect that XBMC may really be unique, at least within the field of computers, and Wayland also, but a tiny bit of description for each (perhaps with a link) would not have been amiss.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
wrong, this is slashdot, not the sunday paper
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Because the average slashdotter is so new to the internet that they dont know what Google is for? Really?
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect the OP was being sarcastic and indirectly pointing out the key missing piece there that everyone seems to have forgotten. It's one of those key things that Wayland people in general tend to forget when they are pushing Wayland and bashing X.
Rendering the UI is really the least of your worries.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Seems like every third article on /. I have to run to Wikipedia just to figure out what piece of software or what abbreviation someone's blabbering about.
It's like trying to read a forum for a game you're not familiar with.
Re: (Score:1)
No, FFS you need to GTFO /.
If you don't know what XBMC is, don't come onto a comment board to ask. If you want to stay at slashdot and learn what XBMC is, click on any of the previous story links or type that term in the search box. Asking is kind of rude because it diverts the discussion to the place it is now.
Slashdot doesn't need to handhold and add citations everywhere for what are actually common terms in submissions. You should mostly know what XBMC is, as it makes the front page every few mon
Re: (Score:3)
So what you got out of this is that XBMC has something to do with games?! You might better hit the search engine again
Re: (Score:1)
Who are you, and how can you be this new?
Re: (Score:2)
what is ffs?
what is tfs?
what is tlc?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, there are really people on slashdot that do not know what SDL is?
Re: And what is SDL? (Score:2)
Why should everyone know what SDL is? You assume it is relevant to everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
It is frequently mentionned on slashdot. Many emblematic games when they are ported to new architectures are ported by porting SDL on the new architecture.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? I thought the story was "Ubuntu team declares interoperability and standards are for losers."
Re:Wise use of time and effort? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wayland is not an interoperable standard.
You've got ubuntu wanting Mir.
You've got Fedora wanting Wayland.
And everyone else uses X, the ancient legacy (and therefore old bad crufty and slow---even though it can run happily on a Sun 3/60) display server that inexplicably has cool features that the others lack. But that's OK because we keep being told how no one uses those features anyway.
X is the interoperable standard, and frankly much better.
Re: (Score:1)
You can run X on top of wayland. The misinformation and misunderstanding of what wayland is and what it's trying to accomplish is astounding given the information is a click away. I suggest you visit LWN and consult Corbet's two articles on the subject and educate yourself about what wayland is and what it's trying to accomplish. Wayland is likely to replace X as the default desktop in every distribution and in fact almost every distribution has already announced plans to migrate when it's ready. Remember,
Re:Wise use of time and effort? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can run X on top of wayland. The misinformation and misunderstanding of what wayland is and what it's trying to accomplish is astounding given the information is a click away.
Touche.
You can run X on top of anything. That really means very little: you can run it on top of OSX and Windows too. You can't remote Windows or OSX apps using X11 and X11 apps on OSX and Windows are second class citizens: copy/paste is non functional beyond plain text and DnD does not work. Furthermore, you cannot manage the native windows with an X11 Window Manager.
Make no mistake: X11 on Windows and OSX is a poor user experience and it wil be the same on Wayland for the same reasons.
Remember, you can still run X on top of Wayland.
Stop saying that. It's an idiotic think to keep saying because whit true, it is entirely deceptive.
Re: (Score:1)
All excellent points -
relatedly, noone is developing or releasing X windows applications *targeted* at these other platforms -
which is the same 'position' X will be in in this 'run x on wayland' world - further implying that over time
less and less applications will run on X, further implying that over time network transparency will
decrease more and more (since only the new firefox or libreoffice or whatever major software decides not to support X),
so this is a bad *direction* to be headed in.
I have no probl
Re: (Score:2)
people complaining about so-called 'crufty x' are talking about -
People also love whinging about the old drawing code. The stuff from 1987 which must take *kilobytes* of code space and reqiure hundreds of hours of absoloutely no maintainance whatsoever.
nono, we need some crappy daemon writting using the hairball that is GLib-object-C being tied into *everything*
on the system.
And now we need systemd as well, so the whole lot is tied together with a poorly documented weird-ass daemon which provices little of
Re: (Score:1)
Because when the wayland display manager crashes, you don't lose any applications at the time? or explorer.exe? or QuartzCompositor or whatever its called on osx, etc?
what is the point of this post?
are you saying that the single-process managing X displays is less stable than the single process running these others?
umm.. because if you are, you are probably wrong.
and if you're not, you're not making any sense.
I'm more excited by emulator support :-) (Score:3)
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=146711 [xbmc.org]
NES, SNES, MAME, and others. I'll admit Wayland and SDL are interesting but my hardware already runs XBMC fine using VDPAU and I'm more excited about getting the ability to run games vs a different display technology...
Re: (Score:2)
Or perhaps where people who's hardware console has died or who no longer have room for arcade machines but still wish to enjoy the software could enjoy them yes. I'm okay with double standards too occasionally, especially for things that are no longer supported or produced. Emulate say a PS3 and yeah, I think I'd have some issues with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you tried setting the dirty regions option [xbmc.org]? For whatever reason the default re-renders the entire screen 60 times per second... but you can flip it to only updating when regions are damaged. Once I flipped that on I was able to use xbmc alright on my ancient athlon.
Re: (Score:1)
At first it made sense not using X.org since it's such a terrible mess.
What people usually mean when they say xorg is a mess (without any qualification or substantiation) is that they're bored with it. In reality, xorg is pretty damn powerful: it has a hell of a lot to do, and on the whole it does it remarkably well.
Re: (Score:1)
In reality, xorg is pretty damn powerful: it has a hell of a lot to do, and on the whole it does it remarkably well.
FFS it works on my phone. I don't see what problem people have with poor old X.
Translation (Score:1)
Somebody ported some code and it's buggy and it's just another day on da net!
"Proof of Concept" (Score:4, Interesting)
A good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
It is always a good idea to use a platform independant library to make porting between different platforms easier. Now that it is working on Wayland, one hopes that Ubuntus plans to fracture the Linux ecosystem can be averted. One thing that people need to remember about the situation situation with Canonicals arrogant plan to attempt a coup d'etat of the Linux graphics stack, is that unlike the window manager where choice is a good thing, having a lot of competing window systems is NOT a good thing. Lets imagine that Canonical announced that it would start using its own kernel, and that this Kernel would not support POSIX, but its own proprietary API. Now Linux applications would not be able to easily run on Ubuntu, and applications for Ubuntu would not be able to easily run on Linux. Having a bunch of incompatible window systems is as bad as that. The Window System is basically the kernel for GUI applications. Basically Canonicals Mir announcement is pretty much does the same, applications must talk to the Window system, so the Window system is as important as the kernel for application cross compatibility between OSs. Canonical is fracturing the Linux ecosystem and trying to greedily and arrogantly grab control of the Linux graphics stack and basically one of the most critical parts of the Linux ecosystem. Canonical's behaviour is outrageous and the Linux community should not tolerate this.
I think now is the time for other Linux Distros to commit to Wayland, leaving Canonical isolated.
We also need to start a petition to get Canonical to commit to wayland and stop trying to develop its own window system.
I also think that Wayland should be made a part of the Linux Standards Base. Perhaps the rights to use of the Linux trademark for companies such as Canonical who blatantly ignore Linux standards should be revoked.
Re:A good idea (Score:4, Informative)
Or just install x.org or wayland from the repository while your at it throw another DE like cinnimon kde or xfce and while you are at
wipe out unity problem solved
Re:A good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats fine if its a word processor. The problem is that all applications rely on the Window System. You can choose your own word processor, and it affects little else. But, a bunch of incompatable window systems would be a disaster, it would actually take away your choices because now some software runs on window System A, but not window system B, so you end up not being able to use one block of software or another block of software. The good thing about X is that it has been used on all distributions, meaning you could run all Linux software on any Linux distribution, or on any other Unix OS, such as FreeBSD.
It is important to have standards. The same thing applies to web pages. If every person who made a web page decided to make their own incompatable HTML and use their browser to look at it, it means if you used another browser you could not get to their web page.
Re: (Score:1)
The problem is that all applications rely on the Window System.
;)
And therein lies Ubuntu's future relevance, or lack of it. A few individuals have complained about certain flaws in X11 without offering anything useful or complete as an alternative, and I rather doubt if Canonical has the resources to do any better, given the vast amount of work involved. If Canonical insists on pursuing this path, I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu slips from being the most commonly-used(*) distribution to the least.
* This is from the perspective of an ancient Slackware user who doesn't give a fuck one way or another.
Re: (Score:2)
Adding Wayland to the Linux standard base would be a bad idea as many if not most Gnu Linux installs are headless and don't need a graphics stack or if they do would need the networking advantages of xorg
Re: (Score:2)
It would be a good idea. it would not require text only distributions to carry Wayland. If you have a Linux distro that is text only, then the GUI standards would not apply. If the distro does have a GUI, then wayland would be required by the standard.
Re: (Score:2)
no i am not say that you should take away freedom but that incorporation wayland into the Linux Sandard Base is not a good idea because there is a much more mature and full featured OS independent standard graphics server in place already, X.org. Sure through it in the repo but don't make it part of the LSB, putting it in there would be folly because it is not yet stable is poorly documented and has a long way to go before it is capable of replacing X. As it is now if people would simply put their effort in
Re: (Score:2)
I think now is the time for other Linux Distros to commit to Wayland, leaving Canonical isolated.
Or, how about everyone else stays committed to Xorg and keeps all the neat features that apparently I don't need, or so the Wayland supporters keep telling me.
Re:A good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
How about waiting until it has proved it works and has advantages first. While a dumb framebuffer can theoretically perform better than something with a few layers of abstraction it hasn't done so yet, especially since some of those layers of abstraction in X are quite lean.
Re: (Score:2)
How about waiting until it has proved it works and has advantages first. While a dumb framebuffer can theoretically perform better than something with a few layers of abstraction it hasn't done so yet, especially since some of those layers of abstraction in X are quite lean.
If you think Wayland is "a dumb framebuffer", you should educate yourself.
Amusing comprehension failure (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wayland is of course a way to dump images on a dumb framebuffer
No, it's not. Please educate yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OK, it was incredibly hard to dig it out from an obscure document confusingly called the FAQ [freedesktop.org]:
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you expect me to take such a useless and pointless pile of words that goes around in circles seriously? Nothing about bottlenecks or anything tangible, just braindead self-referential bullshit instead of some sort of half-decent demo apps to prove a benefit over X or even SVGAlib.
Re: (Score:2)
You are right that for a long while, the API documentation sucked. They finally posted some, however. It looks good.
Wayland has been open compared to Canonicals process. They have had discussions on public mailing lists about it. There is a working code now as well. Yes it did take a while. I am not sure why, maybe they are perfectionists and were working out the details. They could have pushed out an early version and perfected things in later versions. But when you are dealing with an API, the API may nee
Re: (Score:2)
We're dropping SDL from XBMC (Score:3, Informative)
SDL will soon be dropped from XBMC. I'll quote Cory here to explain things:
"This is an interesting POC, however it’s not really in fitting with how we had planned to handle wayland. I recently rewrote our egl handling so that we can dynamically support various windowsystems on the fly, so that we can have a single binary capable of running X11/wayland/framebuffer. It was explicitly written with wayland in mind. See https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/2b49c791eb236ae4fe2be90ac7e7b8ccf0aad72f [github.com] for the pull, and https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/xbmc/windowing/egl/EGLNativeType.h [github.com] for the interface.
It’s very pluggable, and I suspect it’d be far less work than what you’ve done here. I was hoping to get to it ages ago, it just hasn’t been a priority yet.
We’ll be dropping SDL soon, since we prefer our own abstractions. See here: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/1175 [github.com]"