nvidia and the wayland display server

[Nephyrin]

So Canonical just announced they will be moving to the wayland display server in the future:
http://digitizor.com/2010/11/05/ubun...x-for-wayland/

The idea of wayland seems great - a simple display server built on OpenGL for modern compositing desktops. Of course, it will work with all the open-source drivers without much issue. But, will it ever get support in the nvidia drivers?

I'm imagining a horrible future wherein I have to choose between hacking an X display into a wayland-distro to use my old proprietary drivers for games, or using the well supported open-source drivers that simply don't have advanced 3d capabilities.

Please tell me you have some magic in store for us nvidia

[JaXXoN]

Although I like the ideas behind Wayland, I'm wondering where one can
access the API documentation: on the official web-site, there's just a very
simplified architecture diagram and using a search engine didn't revealed
anything usefull for me. I understand that rendering is done using OpenGL
ES, but how to talk to the compositor (window placement and input handling)?
Where's the Wayland "hello world"? Doesn't seem to much out there ...

To be successful, I think Wayland should be much better documented.
The way it is right now, I can't imagine it will land in other distros, any
time soon.

Your mileage may vary.

regards

Bernhard

[Gusar]

Ah yes, Mark Shuttleworth and creating hype... But that's all there is to it, hype. And people, unfortunately, fall for it.

Wayland sounds good, but it's still at the beginning of it's development, so allow me to be skeptical that it'll really appear in Ubuntu, even when the target is 11.10, so almost a year from now.

Yeah, I'm harsh, I just have a great aversion to artificial hype.

[mlord]

I see no evidence of "hype" there -- Ubuntu has a proven track record of following up on technology announcements like that one, even if it was just a blog posting and not anything more formal.

Even Mark (the other Mark!) said it will likely be two years before we see it in a useful state. That's not hype, it's realism!

Cheers

[mooninite]

*cough* This technology was brought to you by Red Hat. *cough*

[mlord]

Sure, a Redhat employee worked on it in his spare time (initially). So?

I'm not a Redhat employee, nor a Canonical employee. Yet all products from both companies include code from me. So?

Cheers

[artem]

This switch is only for mobile devices.

There's nothing to worry or to care about.

[Gusar]

Originally Posted by mlord

I see no evidence of "hype" there

There is not one but *two* topics on this opened here today, not to mentions reports on plenty of sites, reports that generate quite a bit of comments. For me, that says "hype".

Originally Posted by mlord

Sure, a Redhat employee worked on it in his spare time (initially). So?

Some don't like seeing someone being praised for something they didn't create. Ubuntu is getting all the attention here, despite Wayland being a Red Hat creation. You might not see this as a big deal, but I fully understand some people do.

[ghost_zero5]

Actually on his website Mark wrote the following comment:

It’s highly unlikely that the default Ubuntu install in a year will be on Wayland. It’s possible that there will be versions of Ubuntu that use it, or proof-of-concept images, by then. More importantly, we won’t make it the default until it really is widely supported and supportable, by folks using a wide variety of hardware providers. And as for network connectivity, there’s sufficient time between now and then for these problems to get solved.

So he doesn't intend to use it for the MAIN distro so soon but they start to work on it and therefore there will be a proof-of-concept.

However, I think that for a good home-PC experience it makes sense to move to something that doesn't use the Client/Server technology for GUI in the future (though when exactly is a different question). Is it because of "Unity"? They want to start using Unity for the normal Desktop-Environment in the future though (although they won't use it for everything from "day one").

@artem:
From where do you get they idea that it is only for mobile devices because this is wrong.

[flammon]

I hope someone from nVidia can answer the original question. Will nVidia provide Wayland driver support?

[AaronP]

We have no plans to support Wayland.

[Lemmiwinks]

Originally Posted by AaronP

We have no plans to support Wayland.

That would mean the end of proper 3D acceleration for thousands of future Ubuntu users on Nvidia hardware. Well I guess Nvidia will change its mind when Canonical really put their plans into action.