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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious how Servo (and Electrolysis which I know is un-related) are planning to handle the GPU. Most GL drivers if not all of them are not multi-thread happy.

Are they implementing an internal command buffer like Chrome or is there some other solution that allows multiple threads and/or multiple processes to all output content to the same window?

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Separate per-thread GL contexts, with texture sharing via EGLImageKHR on EGL, pixmaps on X11, and IOSurface on Mac.

WebGL and content display lists are proxied to a separate process for security (in the multiprocess branch).

I feel like an idiot after reading that, and I'm studying EE hoping for a career in firmware/low-level programming. Good luck to me :)

You shouldn't. They're specifically titled data structures and functions inherent to various specific (some to a given platform) compositors, display servers and graphics libraries. You memorize them as you go, but it's the ideas that are more important.

Wayland might be taking over from X11 on a widely used Linux desktop as early as 6 months from now (Fedora 23):

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/01/19/gnome-wayland-por...

Obviously X11 will not just disappear, but is targeting Servo at X11 at this early stage in it's development like writing a Python library targeting Python 2?

Well, when I wrote this stuff for the first time a couple of years ago, NVIDIA's official position was "we have no plans to support Wayland". Even now I suspect X will be around for years.

I will be the first to cheer X's demise, as we've had so many problems with multithreading and X, but we have no choice right now.

Here's an overview from last year showing nvidia's wayland support under way:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mtgxmde

X11 won't be going away any time soon.

Also, the EGL backend should work just fine in Wayland.

And it's working? All my experience with multiple threads on different contexts is crash, crash, bug bug bug. I'm surprised it's stable at all on any platform.

I think we will need to wait for Vulkan before we get a true multithreading GL.

Vulkan will not be GL anything.

What do you mean?

It's 100% an entirely different API.

It's not "OpenGL" or "GL" or "GLnext", it's "Vulkan".

Vulkan's codename before reveal was "GLnext".

http://www.develop-online.net/news/glnext-revealed-as-vulkan...

My uninformed guess is that they will rely on the new multithread friendly systems such as DX12 and the next generation of Open GL.

May be Vulkan will help with that.

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