Also note, that Mir is now basically gone, Canonical decided now to stop that rift and stick to Wayland.
It's a bit outdated and honestly needs replacing at this point. Xplain[0] replaces parts of it, and some of my newer blog posts[1][2] replace other parts. I can also answer any questions people have about the stack.
[0] http://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/
I assume that the interfaces discussed here are Linux specific, and the BSDs have something different.
Does POSIX have anything to say about graphics interfaces?
What is the lowest-level portable way to draw graphics? X11?
It's funny, because I always thought of X as being more of a windowing abstraction, rather than graphics in general. Perhaps I am making a distinction that does not really exist.
Obviously I am not a graphics guy :)
If you want portable you're going to want something like SDL probably.
Looking through the source of libhybris it looks like very little of it has anything to do with bionic itself.
libhybris is more things like converting Surfaceflinger calls into Wayland ones. Looks like there's some media, camera, and input stuff, too, which is all outside the realm of bionic/glibc.
Can you please prove me wrong?
The very fact that you cannot prove me wrong, tells it all.
Given that I also work with Android, are you so naive to think I need to search for whatever you want me to find?!?
Sure there is Mesa on the emulator, which is deprecated by the way.
Oh and in those Intel devices that are no longer being sold.
No it doesn't.
"Android Studio: The Mesa software renderer is deprecated. Use Swiftshader for software rendering"
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39568455/android-studio-...
Intel has dropped out of Android market.
[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/dev/drm/d...
[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/dev/pci/drm/d...
[3] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/...
Not at all. Writing 100% compliant POSIX code means sticking to the PDP-11 model of what an application is supposed to be, meaning either a terminal text application or a daemon.
Anything graphical related is a separate standard.
Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, but it is not the only one - KDE's KWin is another.
Xorg is the current most common implementation of the X11 protocol, however - again - it is not the only one (although almost all Linux desktop systems today use it) and there are other implementations.
So how do X11 and Wayland relate to each other? Well, they are both protocols for providing a windowing system. They each do things differently, with pros and cons to each approach. They are different enough so that one can be implemented on top of the other, so compatibility should not be a problem, although obviously features are lost or crippled when doing so.
There is this misconception that Wayland obsoletes X11, but they are very different systems designed by different people and worked by (mostly) different developers that only superficially provide the same features (showing windows on screen) that - at least personally - i do not see that happenning any time soon, if ever. Personally the way i see it is similar to asking if Atom (or VSCode, if that is your poison) obsoletes Emacs (or Vim).
Yes, Firefox and Chrome are open source, but they're atypical of open source projects in that (a) the amount of implementation effort required to make the kind of changes under discussion here are much larger than for typical open-source projects and (b) institutional users and knowledgeable (or simply well-advised) individual users of Firefox and Chrome won't use your fork unless you have a credible story about how you can protect them from 0days. I know of no fork of either Firefox or Chrome that has ever had a credible story, but I've spent only a couple of hours looking.
Google has their own replacement for X11 which they use in some Chromebooks, which reduces the probability that they'll throw in behind Wayland.
Not every OS install needs a mainstream browser (in-vehicle entertainment systems do not seem to: they're heavy users of Wayland) but if your OS install does, and you're waiting for Wayland (more precisely, software that uses the Wayland protocol) to replace xorg or X11, you might be waiting a long time.
"mainstream": provides a decent experience on most popular web sites including e-commerce sites.
I'm also waiting for Firefox to start supporting Wayland without X11, but it's progressing really slowly.
Besides browsers another very major work is required for Wine. It's not even moving anywhere now, since developers aren't sure how to address it. They are too dependent on X11 for windows placements and etc.
So XWayland will need to be adequate, to address these cases, including gaming, until the time major projects will complete all that work.
Not the last I heard (579 days ago):
Except SurfaceFlinger predates Wayland by years. Kinda hard to use something that doesn't exist. ;)
At the time the complaint was that Android didn't use X11 but I think it's safe to say that was a good decision at the time. As for merging them at this point they both have too much inertia combined with some fundamental design differences that'd be hard to reconcile.
In contrast, Nokia didn't want to make such rift, and until it went bust, used common graphics stack (with SailfishOS becoming Meego descendant, using Wayland).
Wayland was started the same year that Android shipped and Wayland didn't have it's first release until 4 years later. That's obviously way too late for Android to have used it or collaborated on it.
> but the fact that they didn't want to work on big problem that benefits Linux as a whole (replacing X11), but made something that benefits only them, and that created a huge and damaging rift. That they can be blamed for.
At the time nobody wanted a replacement to X11. That was a big complaint against Wayland, too.
Getting into mailing list wars and trying to make everyone happy ensures you end up like Nokia - too late to matter and with no more money. That's not helpful to anyone.
Also please explain how Google created a "huge and damaging rift"? What damage resulted from this at all?
Hardware becoming Android only. See https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/
A major part of that problem is that rift that created incompatibility and prevented reusing of the existing progress. That was the whole reason for making libhybris, to unblock that issue.
But that's also wholly unrelated to the specific context here which was Wayland vs. SurfaceFlinger.
Wayland was your "huge damaging rift" here if anything. Divorcing itself from both xorg and surface flinger, for no particular reason at the time in the case of the later.
Not arguing about the rest of your post, but the above is incorrect.
Nokia didn't go bust because they tried to cooperate with the rest of the world. You can be cooperative and still say no to people.
If I'm not mistaken Android was developed in submerged mode for a long time, for business reasons.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=549781
There's already a Wayland version of Firefox available: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/
Relevant bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134
[1]: https://project-insanity.org/blog/2017/02/14/try-out-firefox...
That is what Wayland's developers want, but that doesn't mean it will happen :-P
EGL if you use OpenGL, and WSI if Vulkan, if I understand correctly.