https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0OTE
Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 11 April 2013 at 01:42 PM EDT. 62 Comments
Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla's Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it's being done with glibc rather than Android's Bionic libc derivative.
Carsten Munk, the Chief Research Engineer at Jolla, has been working on a solution to enable the use of Wayland on top of Android hardware, particularly with its GPU drivers. However, as part of it, for the operating system to not depend upon Google's Bionic libc library.
Right now the patches aren't out in the wild but Munk is planning on putting them out under LGPLv2.1. He sees this work as potentially benefiting not only the Sailfish OS but also OpenWebOS, Qt, KDE, GNOME, Hawaii, Nemo, Mer, EFL, etc. The code to this point is at a stage of being able to handle a QML compositor on top of Wayland while rendering to Qualcomm's GPU Android drivers.
The motive for engaging this work is that most device manufacturers are only willing to work with Google's Android and not supply drivers for X11 or Wayland or other platforms. In Carsten's first blog post he documents at a low-level all of the different components and his experience in working with them. The second yet-to-be-posted blog entry will cover his actual implementation for achieving Wayland on Android GPU drivers. Until then, he's shared this video of Wayland on Android GPU drivers and using libhybis:
This is rather interesting work. Canonical's Mir Display Server can also run with Android graphics drivers. Canonical's reasonings for supporting Android drivers with Mir were much the same reason with device manufacturers largely only caring about Android. Carsten's work though does go to show the adaptability of Wayland. It's been looking like Jolla would use Wayland for Sailfish OS and with today's information, the situation is still looking positive in that direction.
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Phoronix: Jolla Brings Wayland Atop Android GPU Drivers
Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla's Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it's being done with glibc rather than Android's Bionic libc derivative...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM0OTE
Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla's Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it's being done with glibc rather than Android's Bionic libc derivative...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM0OTE
probably wrong but feels a bit that Mir was the wakeup call that Wayland needed. Now keep the momentum 
This means: the only legitimate reason to support Mir has disappeared overnight.
This also proves that real phone hackers will always overperform reconverted Linux packagers. These guys have a Linux phone that managed to sell 5 million units with no support, versus Ubuntu, that has nothing.
This also proves that real phone hackers will always overperform reconverted Linux packagers. These guys have a Linux phone that managed to sell 5 million units with no support, versus Ubuntu, that has nothing.
Originally posted by Alejandro NovaView Post
"Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself." - or how to pull a Canonical. ROFL.
Originally posted by varikonniemiView Post
<tinfoil> I bet the reasons aren't technical at all. They want control and a restrictive license, so they can sell proprietary licenses to manufacturers. Google sells services and Canonical sells proprietary license to GLPv3 code. </tinfoil>
Originally posted by XilanazView Post
probably wrong but feels a bit that Mir was the wakeup call that Wayland needed. Now keep the momentum
To put it another way: the only reason to use Mir never existed to begin with, and the Mir developers knew it from the moment they started using this library.
That article really made me laugh. Canonical is just pathetic.
That's it, it's decided, my next phone will run Sailfish
Getting unified Android/Linux/ChromeOS drivers would be ideal, whoever manages to bring us that. It should've been Google's project from day one of Android, but I guess it wasn't their priority, which is too bad because that has led to some of the biggest fragmentation issues of Android.
- I had already decided that a while ago. Hence it's very exciting to monitor the space for all the news.Originally posted by dee.View Post
- WTF. Canonical has been deliberately and constantly omitting and lying.Originally posted by log0View Post
- Does that surprise you...? I havent used this phrase yet because i didn't agree with it then, but quite honestly... Canonical is the Apple of the OSS world. Happy I havent loaded *Buntu in a longtime on any computers hahaOriginally posted by talvikView Post
- Actually it's LGPLv3, and many companies leverage their software against LGPL libraries.Originally posted by talvikView Post
One such example is Qt, I don't see many companies avoiding that in their products. - Two reasons:Originally posted by varikonniemiView Post
1) Control of the project
2) They don't know how Wayland works
One reason can be understandable, the other a bit less
In any case, I had followed Wayland from the mailing list from one year so far, and the things became to be more interesting every day. - There's big difference between LGPLv3 and LGPLv2.1 (used by Qt for example). Especially embedded industry avoids L/GPLv3 licenses because its anti-tivoization clause and such. MeeGo/Tizen and various other projects forbid L/GPLv3 in their core and projects like Yocto have no-L/GPLv3 build switches.Originally posted by intellivisionView Post
- driver != driver the problem are the driver that are not part of the kernel, eg the drivers that run in userspace. This isn't the problem with wayland as it requires no user space drivers like X11.Originally posted by KrystoView Post
- So I suppose that's why Tizen has decided to keep gnutls and gpg-error which are both licensed under LGPLv3+ (gnutls was recently re-licensed to v2.1+, but had up until the end of March was exclusively LGPLv3+)Originally posted by TehoView Post
Your argument really holds no water here. - Wayland is actually making some progress, perhaps the announcement of Mir made the Wayland guys move a bit faster. Hopefully we will have a fully functional Wayland desktop BEFORE the year 2025 now! I would like to see Wayland overtake X instead of Mir, but seriously it's all going to come down to performance & stability and not open source politics.
- Did everyone miss this part from the blogpost?Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.
That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.
But, I will say that their behavior has improved - they are now participating in the project, discussing, upstreaming patches that are useful. And I forgive them because they've changed their ways and are participating sanely now.
- Did everyone miss this part of the blogpost:Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.
That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.
But, I will say that their behavior has improved - they are now participating in the project, discussing, upstreaming patches that are useful. And I forgive them because they've changed their ways and are participating sanely now. - Reminds me this:Originally posted by log0View PostWhat many people don?t understand about Linux development is that it?s truly a team effort:
Red Hat develops the kernel,
Novell develops the applications,
Debian does the packaging,
and Ubuntu takes the credit!
?Joke found on a bathroom stall at LinuxWorld Boston 2005 - Mir is an Ubuntu/Unity only project and not aimed to reliably support any of the other DEs/WMs, while Wayland is the exact opposite. There can be no doubt that Wayland will be the successor of X, simply because you can not trust Canonical that they will (intentionally?) make changes to the Mir/Unity duo that breaks other DEs.Originally posted by enfocompView Post
- Using Wayland with Android drivers is not new. Collabora ported Wayland to Android months ago: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.de/2012/09...o-404-and.htmlOriginally posted by Alejandro NovaView Post
This here is obviously a step further in that Wayland runs not only on an Android system but now on a glibc system with libhybris but Android drivers are used in both cases (and this Jolla works probably builds on the Collabora work).What's ?tinfoil? about that? It's exactly the same business model Trolltech used for Qt, Oracle uses for MySQL, etc.Originally posted by talvikView PostIf that was the case, Canonical was a driving force behind WebKit, developed Clang and contributed it to LLVM, maintained CUPS, managed X.org releases, invented libdispatch, developed Bonjour, ect. and did all that without any CLA crap.Originally posted by EricgView Post - More in the sense of... the take credit for others work. Not in a way "Oh we're distributing it" way but a "They coded it. We took it. Called it our own, claimed development of it because most people wont check the license file that marks us as liars."Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post
- Reduce pressure on creating free drivers or on open the hardware seems a bad idea.
- But only if the drivers were not closed. If closed drivers goes mainstream in linux, you can also use windows.Originally posted by KrystoView Post
- You should use your energie for hitting closed drivers instead of hitting canonical.Originally posted by EricgView Post
- Canonical has done nothing to get rid of closed drivers.Originally posted by dibalView Post
- I thought Carsten's own words were quite interesting:So basically everything Mir has achieved -- Androit driver integration, based on Carsten's libhybris intended to support Wayland on Sailfish. Mesa integration, based on Kristian's EGL/GBM work intended for Wayland. XMir, straight port from XWayland, not to mention the general architecture of Mir heavily influenced by Wayland.Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.
That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.
Now, I'm not calling them leechers or parasites or any other names. This is the nature of open source software. You are allowed, sometimes even encouraged to build upon the work of others. But give credit where it's due. Carsten did say they are being quite cooperative now, participating in discussions and submitting patches upstream. This is the way it should have been from the beginning.
- I think effect might actually be positive in that area. First of all this there's multiple problems with the closed source drivers on ARM space, one of the more important ones being that they usually work for only couple of kernel releases. That doesn't really fit the fast moving Linux developement model so open drivers is needed for that. But also I think it might be more interesting to develop these drivers when you already have a proper GNU/Linux stack running on top of it. Also the closed source drivers for AMD and NVIDIA haven't really stopped the open source driver developement for their cards. These Ubuntu Touch / Sailfish / Firefox OS projects are so insignificant currently that they hardly create any "pressure" anyway. They might actually do if they first got out of the door but that then again is very difficult without having good support for closed source drivers.Originally posted by dibalView PostThere might be some configurations of Tizen (or previously MeeGo) that allows/allowed L/GPLv3; GPLv3 code was removed from MeeGo TV and it was a no-go for IVI systems as well. Yocto has "non-GPLv3" option. One can only wonder why Apple wanted to avoid GPLv3 to the point of writing alternative for Samba (and GCC?). Projects like FreeBSD are also "fine" with L/GPLv2 but GPLv3 just goes too far. Tizen coreutils seems to be based on the pre-GPLv3 release of GNU coreutils too.Originally posted by intellivisionLast edited by Teho; 04-12-2013, 04:01 AM.
- Indeed. Carsten gives credit in his blog for this...Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post...
This is the entry point used to implement Wayland on top of Android GPU drivers on glibc based systems. Some fantastic work in this area has already been done by Pekka Paalanen (pq) as part of his work for Collabora Ltd. (Telepathy, GStreamer, WebKit, X11 experts) which proved that this is possible. Parts of the solution I will publish is based on their work - their work was groundbreaking in this field and made all this possible.
... - Jolla looks good
Its good to see companies embracing Wayland.
I've been fond of Jolla since the beginning.
This just makes me more fond of them. - That's not fully true: the Mir developers claim that server side allocation of buffer allow them to better manage the (scarces in a phone) resources of the GPU (video memory).Originally posted by Alejandro NovaView Post
Wayland does normally client side allocation of buffer.
Thought at least one Wayland developer has turned the client side allocation into a "request a buffer to the server" so I'm not fully sure that this was indeed a legitimated reason.. - What part of "Decision made THEN, circumstances changing NOW" you do not understand?Originally posted by varikonniemiView Post
- FACT: Weston is on MIT. You can fork Weston and sell it as proprietary.Originally posted by talvikView Post
- Not going to happen.Originally posted by KrystoView Post
Not all features from mobile are needed on desktop (OpenVG?)
Not all features from desktop are wonted on mobile. In fact some are most unwelcome (power hungry ones).
Some well defined and limited feature set that would be supported across devices and gpus is probable though. - Actually Canonical is only major backer of any Linux distro who is fully supporting Intel FLOSS driver efforts.Originally posted by dee.View Post
Eg. Fedora castrate Intel drivers.
There are many angles you need to consider to give verdicts. - Its called product anouncment. If they worked on libhybris from the beginning in the open. Somebody would ask question WHY?Originally posted by HermitView Post
And most probably Canonical would receive salvos of bad PR from people who would assume that Canonical is working on mobile and abandon (or neglect) desktop.
FLOSS wont resolve such problems. Its politics and marketing. - What exactly do you mean? Sounds like complete bullshit. Red Hat also has many Mesa developers on their pay role. The are actually developing the driver infrastucture that Intel also uses.Originally posted by przemoliView PostYes, everyone can but only Canonical can sell Mir. It's unfair advantage and one of the many reasons why it will never be accepted by the community. Also the code in Weston/Wayland is resuable because MIT is very liberal license. For example projects like KWin and Mutter are licensed under GPLv2 hence they can't use code from Mir.Originally posted by przemoliView PostBecause it was already shown that Wayland could be used with Android drivers almost a year ago? Because Canonical didn't even contact the Wayland developers about the subject?Originally posted by przemoliView PostCanonical had announced that they have plans for mobile a long time ago.Originally posted by przemoliView PostHow is that any different from what has happened? If anything they have once again shown how they are incapable in working with the community. That if something is bad "PR".Originally posted by przemoliView Post
- Would you stupid people PLEASE quit spreading your "fragmentation" FUD? Fragmentation is a GOOD THING. Fragmentation is what ***MAKES ANDROID STRONG***. There is NO magic configuration that works perfectly for everybody. Fragmentation is the allowance for VARIATION, and VARIATION is necessary in order to be able to satisfy EVERYBODY.Originally posted by KrystoView Post
Also, you can't have "unified android drivers for everybody" because everybody has DIFFERENT HARDWARE. DIFFERENT HARDWARE = DIFFERENT DRIVERS. Again... FRAGMENTATION IS A GOOD THING. MAKES ANDROID STRONG.Last edited by droidhacker; 04-12-2013, 08:15 AM. - Here is the most important question:
Wayland on top of "Android" drivers? Or on top of QUALCOMM ADRENO ANDROID drivers?
If its the general case where it will work on *any* Android GPU drivers, then it means something. If it is the specific case where it works specifically and only on qualcomm adreno drivers, then it is meaningless horse shit. Not only because it is only good for that hardware, but also because ****FREEDRENO****. - I never understood that. The anti-tivoisation clause makes sense. Plus, GPLv3 improved the overall clarity of the license (and added other additions, like acknowledging that the internet exists, and thus saying that it's sufficient to put your code online and then put a link to it somewhere, instead of needing to give everyone a written offer for sending a disc with the source). So if people don't want to use it, then they clearly want to exploit the code and tivoise it. And thus such people are not to be trusted to begin with.Originally posted by TehoView Post
- On the other hand, that was an Insult to Rocks. You'd liken Canonical to Apple, but that would even be unfair to AppleOriginally posted by EricgView Post
Did you read the blog post linked from the article? It's also talking about the PowerVR SGX drivers.Originally posted by droidhackerView Post - Apple does not do that as far as I can tell. During Macworld 2003 Apple publicly announced that Safari is based on KHTML: http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safa...-to-the-world/Originally posted by EricgView Post
To this day the KHTML heritage is featured on the main page of https://www.webkit.org/ (Fun fact, btw: Google does not http://www.chromium.org/blink )
As far as I can tell Apple also upstreamed bugfixes from BSD and GNU components of OSX. Apple does not insist on hosting forks on their own SCM service (Launchpad in Canonical's case). - Should every linux company work at the kernel? There are plenty of things left to do in userspace.Originally posted by dee.View Post
- Every company that sells services for a whole distribution should definitively also work on the kernel. If Canonical only did Unity and sold that for other distributions, you'd be right, but Canonical distributes Ubuntu as a whole.Originally posted by dibalView Post
- Could you please point to the section in the licence that says that? Or anywhere else that this has been established?Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post
- Learn to read to what I even replied.Originally posted by jayrulezView Post
- Are you trying to tell us one of the most evil companies is better than Canonical? Stop kidding.Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post
- Companies cannot be evil. They can be profitable or not.Originally posted by PawlersonView Post
- But what about Google? Everybody loves Google!
- Or EA. Everybody hates EA.Originally posted by SergeView Post
- Bullshit. Ethics don't stop applying to you just because you decide to act as a "corporation". If you do unethical things, you're evil. If your company does unethical things, your company is evil. It's not rocket science.Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post
Profitability has nothing to do with it. You can make profit without doing evil things. - +1 Doing evil != profitable.Originally posted by dee.View Post
- For me, it is completely ok to work on other aspects from the open source software stack. The linux kernel is just a (maybe replaceable) part of the open source software stack.Originally posted by AwesomenessView Post
- The question is not whether outsiders believe ethics should apply to corporations or not, the question is whether the corporations themselves are aware of the ethical implications of their decisions, which I think they are not. Corporations don't actually make decisions - which means they don't have free will, and that has a whole other host of ethical implications, but that would be off-topic to this conversation - but as I was saying, corporations don't make decisions, their employees make the decisions. We can judge the ethics of these employees, because they are people, but we can't judge the ethics of corporations. Corporations simply have no conscience.
- Does Monsantofund founds projects in countrys that not accept patents on life ? Or is is a door opener to accept the Monsanto patent policy ?Originally posted by SergeView Post
God I love people who believes in greenwashing.
- My point is that corporations are amoral. I'm not 100% sure where you were going with your previous post, but it seems to me that you were trying to say that even the positive, charitable works undertaken by Monsanto are done with an agenda, in which case you're only further proving my point.
- It's not the same as LGPLv3 with copyright assignment, though. With MIT, you can develop a diverse ecosystem with a hell of a lot of contributors more or less on a level playing field. With LGPLv3 plus copyright assignment, you put yourself head and shoulders above everyone else, and pretty much guarantee that no other company will ever contribute to your project, since the entire point is to allow you to sell proprietary-friendly relicensing for profit. With no-one else contributing or even trying to develop deep expertise with your project, you have no competition for services revenue, so you can go to hardware vendors and tell them that you'll do the port of their drivers to your project for a set fee. With no competition, they'll be more or less forced to say yes if they want to ship a product running your stack.Originally posted by przemoliView Post
Probably not the worst decision from a business point of view, though, especially if you're looking for a short-to-medium-term revenue boost.Last edited by daniels; 04-13-2013, 06:12 PM. - too much fragmentation doesn't allow the smaller players to have a fighting chance. If the hardware drivers in android worked identically in all other linux based ARM OSs then we could see some more interesting products that would provide actual competition and would thus spur on further development.Originally posted by droidhackerView Post
It would be quite interesting to see a near even split between andoid, firefox OS, ubuntu mobile, jolla, ios, blackberry and windows mobile 8 as then each would have to constantly try and out do the competition at every step of the way thus leading to a much more healthy market.
Likewise, it's also a problem of fragmentation that every time an OSS dev gets butthurt over something trivial he goes and forks the project, often taking a few other devs with him, diverting resources to his side project that will likely go nowhere but serve only to slow development of the project he forked from. This is a major problem in OSS since it's making the smallest player even smaller and slower.