Planet Debian upstream

And it's a release without Xwayland.

And... wait, what? Let's unwind this a bit, and ideally you should come away with a better understanding of Xorg vs Xwayland, and possibly even Wayland itself.

Heads up: if you are familiar with X, the below is simplified to the point it hurts. Sorry about that, but as an X developer you're probably good at coping with pain.

Let's go back to the 1980s, when fashion was weird and there were still reasons to be optimistic about the future. Because this is a thought exercise, we go back with full hindsight 20/20 vision and, ideally, the winning Lotto numbers in case we have some time for some self-indulgence.

If we were to implement an X server from scratch, we'd come away with a set of components. libxprotocol that handles the actual protocol wire format parsing and provides a C api to access that (quite like libxcb, actually). That one will just be the protocol-to-code conversion layer.

We'd have a libxserver component which handles all the state management required for an X server to actually behave like an X server (nothing in the X protocol require an X server to display anything). That library has a few entry points for abstract input events (pointer and keyboard, because this is the 80s after all) and a few exit points for rendered output.

libxserver uses libxprotocol but that's an implementation detail, we can ignore the protocol for the rest of the post.

Let's create a github organisation and host those two libraries. We now have: http://github.com/x/libxserver and http://github.com/x/libxprotocol [1].

Now, to actually implement a working functional X server, our new project would link against libxserver hook into this library's API points. For input, you'd use libinput and pass those events through, for output you'd use the modesetting driver that knows how to scream at the hardware until something finally shows up. This is somewhere between outrageously simplified and unacceptably wrong but it'll do for this post.

Your X server has to handle a lot of the hardware-specifics but other than that it's a wrapper around libxserver which does the work of ... well, being an X server.

Our stack looks like this:


+------------------------+
|  xserver   [libxserver]|--------[ X client ]
|                        |
|[libinput] [modesetting]|
+------------------------+
|       kernel           |
+------------------------+

Hooray, we have re-implemented Xorg. Or rather, XFree86 because we're 20 years from all the pent-up frustratrion that caused the Xorg fork. Let's host this project on http://github.com/x/xorg

Now, let's say instead of physical display devices, we want to render into an framebuffer, and we have no input devices.


+------------------------+
|  xserver   [libxserver]|--------[ X client ]
|                        |
|            [write()]   |
+------------------------+
|       some buffer      |
+------------------------+

This is basically Xvfb or, if you are writing out PostScript, Xprint. Let's host those on github too, we're accumulating quite a set of projects here.

Now, let's say those buffers are allocated elsewhere and we're just rendering to them. And those buffer are passed to us via an IPC protocol, like... Wayland!


+------------------------+
|  xserver   [libxserver]|--------[ X client ]
|                        |
|input events    [render]|
+------------------------+
      |            |
+------------------------+
|   Wayland compositor   |
+------------------------+

And voila, we have Xwayland. If you swap out the protocol you can have Xquartz (X on Macos) or Xwin (X on Windows) or Xnext/Xephyr (X on X) or Xvnc (X over VNC). The principle is always the same.

Fun fact: the Wayland compositor doesn't need to run on the hardware, you can play display server babushka until you run out of turtles.

In our glorious revisioned past all these are distinct projects, re-using libxserver and some external libraries where needed. Depending on the projects things may be very simple or get very complex, it depends on how we render things.

But in the end, we have several independent projects all providing us with an X server process - the specific X bits are done in libxserver though. We can release Xwayland without having to release Xorg or Xvfb.

libxserver won't need a lot of releases, the behaviour is largely specified by the protocol requirements and once you're done implementing it, it'll be quite a slow-moving project.

Ok, now, fast forward to 2021, lose some hindsight, hope, and attitude and - oh, we have exactly the above structure. Except that it's not spread across multiple independent repos on github, it's all sitting in the same git directory: our Xorg, Xwayland, Xvfb, etc. are all sitting in hw/$name, and libxserver is basically the rest of the repo.

A traditional X server release was a tag in that git directory. An XWayland-only release is basically an rm -rf hw/*-but-not-xwayland followed by a tag, an Xorg-only release is basically an rm -rf hw/*-but-not-xfree86 [2].

In theory, we could've moved all these out into separate projects a while ago but the benefits are small and no-one has the time for that anyway.

So there you have it - you can have Xorg-only or XWayland-only releases without the world coming to an end.

Now, for the "Xorg is dead" claims - it's very likely that the current release will be the last Xorg release. [3] There is little interest in an X server that runs on hardware, or rather: there's little interest in the effort required to push out releases. Povilas did a great job in getting this one out but again, it's likely this is the last release. [4]

Xwayland - very different, it'll hang around for a long time because it's "just" a protocol translation layer. And of course the interest is there, so we have volunteers to do the releases.

So basically: expecting Xwayland releases, be surprised (but not confused) by Xorg releases.

[1] Github of course doesn't exist yet because we're in the 80s. Time-travelling is complicated.
[2] Historical directory name, just accept it.
[3] Just like the previous release...
[4] At least until the next volunteer steps ups. Turns out the problem "no-one wants to work on this" is easily fixed by "me! me! I want to work on this". A concept that is apparently quite hard to understand in the peanut gallery.

Posted Wed Sep 22 03:16:00 2021 Tags: xserver-xorg-input-all

jwz (Jamie Zawinski)

A year without live music has been a disaster. So has corporate power in streaming, recording, and ticketing. Antitrust may be the only solution.

Three major record labels produce two-thirds of all music consumed in America. They are the most powerful buyer of music and talent, and they use that power to prioritize a handful of mega-stars and pop hits. They pitch music into massive radio conglomerates and streaming platforms that control how music is consumed, and they collect an ever-growing share of industry revenue.
Concerts, a crucial space where independent venues and artists have largely sidestepped corporate gatekeepers, are increasingly threatened by Covid shutdowns and the prospect that Live Nation and other Wall Street-backed giants will either buy them out or put them out of business. [...]
The broad middle class of independent artists, record labels, venues, and other small businesses must now rely on -- and increasingly pay -- monopolists for access to bands and fans. For some, the pandemic made a difficult situation impossible. [...]
Van Arman offered a simple litmus test for whether music is "independent," a shapeshifting term applied to everything from punk bands playing basement gigs to the cash-flush "indie" subsidiaries of major labels. "You are independent if you are pro-competitive," he said. [...] If you're independent, you're "not looking to reduce competition by acquiring rivals" or for other unfair advantages that tilt the industry toward corporate dominance.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Posted Wed Sep 22 01:25:52 2021 Tags: xdaliclock

Richard Stallman

(satire) *Relieved Ecologists Announce Rising Sea Levels Were Due To Clump Of Hair Clogging Drain At Bottom of Ocean.*