Mark Shuttleworth announced on his blog today that Unity will be embracing the X Window System replacement Wayland, the OpenGL based display management system. In his own Words
The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.
So, What is Wayland?
Wayland is a lightweight display server for the GNU/Linux desktop. Started by Kristian Høgsberg, one of Intel OSTC members.
In Kristian’s own words
every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we’ll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker
According to Wikipedia, Wayland uses existing technologies in the Linux kernel such as the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), kernel mode-setting (KMS) and the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) batchbuffer in order to provide a minimal display server. Wayland compositor has been moved to OpenGL ES instead of native OpenGL.
Why switch?
In an attempt to justify this switch Mark says
We don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s *possible* to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on native GL, we’re choosing to prioritize the quality of experience over those original values, like network transparency.
We considered the Android compositing environment. It’s great for Android, but we felt it would be more difficult to bring the whole free software stack along with us if we pursued that direction.
We considered and spoke with several proprietary options, on the basis that they might be persuaded to open source their work for a new push, and we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solveable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.
In general, this will all be fine — actually *great* — for folks who have good open source drivers for their graphics hardware. Wayland depends on things they are all moving to support: kernel modesetting, gem buffers and so on. The requirement of EGL is new but consistent with industry standards from Khronos — both GLES and GL will be supported. We’d like to hear from vendors for whom this would be problematic, but hope it provides yet another (and perhaps definitive) motive to move to open source drivers for all Linux work.
Will there be Hiccups?
On the topic of backwards compatiblity Mark says
We’re confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all it’s GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either.
Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that, but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!
Personally I think it is a good move because as the free desktop matures, very old components like X need to be replaced with modern technologies like Wayland.