
Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server - hanuca
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Says-No-to-Ubuntu-s-New-Display-Server-381223.shtml
======
benologist
The site that plagues Google with shitty search results by scraping Github and
other websites and removing source links brings us a summary of yesterday's
news via a spam account.

For extra fuckwittery they even nofollow the source links they steal their
news from.

Stay classy, Softpedia!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244)

~~~
meritt
Why don't we simply blacklist Softpedia and other bullshit sites from HN
submissions.

------
sitharus
For those interested, this comment is caused by this commit revert:
[http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/com...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/commit/?id=0c697aee9b3767be7d1e04e4e4f9d304f23b188a)

So originally the XMir support was merged in, then reverted on instructions
from Higher Ups.

I can't really blame them, if they make driver changes Intel would have to
adapt the XMir code to cope with them.

~~~
csense
What is the reasoning for putting this code in the video driver?

The "Theory of Operation" comment in the merged-then-reverted code is
insightful. Apparently, the code is supposed to figure out which parts of
windows are damaged, and then tell the windowing system to do something about
it.

IMHO, windows are not a concept that should even exist in the video driver
[1]. They should be entirely under control of the windowing system. Which
means that figuring out which parts of windows are damaged is logic that
should totally reside in the windowing system, having no parts in the video
driver.

If this code must be in the driver because it needs to access private
data/functionality that's not visible outside the driver, then an API to
expose those driver internals to the windowing system would be a design that
better separates those layers.

Reverting this commit seems like a sound technical decision to me. Assuming
Intel's decision is politically motivated, and then getting outraged about it,
seems counterproductive.

[1] Even if this concept has already leaked into the driver for X or other
windowing systems, doesn't mean that questionable designs used in old code
should be allowed in new code.

~~~
mbell
Not really informed here but I would venture a guess that 'perfect separation
of concerns' causes a performance hit. In the backend web dev world you can
usually suck that up by making the load parallelizable across servers,
something you don't have the option of doing with code running locally. In
other words, 'separation of concerns' is great until you hit a performance
bottleneck, as you often do with any resource constrained system.

------
slurry
According to Phornoix, Chris Wilson of Intel wrote this in a Git commit:

 _We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have
chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream._

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY)

Phoronix's link to said commit does not work, so it is hard to infer context.
But I would assume that "the course of action they have chosen" refers to
working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If
that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel.

~~~
krschultz
""the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first
place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I
really blame Intel."

I absolutely blame Intel. Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make
their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely
political reasons. It's not like Ubuntu is asking Intel to do their work for
them.

So Canonical got railed for not contributing upstream, and they try to
contribute upstream they get everyone blaming them again? That's ridiculous.

~~~
ealexhudson
Most upstreams will generally accept responsibility for keeping code working -
just having it "merged" often means then handling bug reports, testing, etc.
If the Intel people don't want to maintain specialized Ubuntu-only
environments just to test the Mir codepaths, that's kind of their call.

It probably also didn't help that Canonical employees were using it as a
political football to boot other GPU vendors, e.g.
[https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112](https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112)

It was Canonical's decision to fork, if they have to bear the costs of the
fork then so be it.

~~~
krschultz
The old classic argument around why Linux doesn't have a rigid internal API
comes to mind
([http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html](http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html)).
Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would
allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software? If Canonical does
the work to make the driver universal, wouldn't the whole community benefit?

I'm not a big fan of letting politics get in the way of engineering, and this
smells of the fact that Intel is trying to battle ARM in a proxy war, with
FOSS as collateral damage.

~~~
tvon
> Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would
> allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software?

This still increases cost on the part of Intel.

------
viseztrance
Choice is good, but for too long has open source been fighting among itself. I
commend Intel for doing this. They're hardly alone after all, they're just
joining Kde, Gnome, Enlightenment and all the other open source projects that
embraced Wayland.

------
devx
Maybe this means Canonical will focus more on ARM hardware now, which is kind
of the point of Mir anyway - to be a lot more efficient on "lower-end" mobile
hardware like ARM chips. Can't say I wouldn't like that to happen.

~~~
keithpeter
Or Canonical's packagers will just carry on patching the Intel drivers?

~~~
mayhew
That works fine because Intel has open source drivers. Not so much if NVIDIA
and AMD decide to only support Wayland.

~~~
keithpeter
True enough. No support for NVIDIA cards at all in current Ubuntu betas. I
_think_ even nouveau was falling back to X compatibility but I might have that
wrong. It was sloooow

------
Havoc
Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm
not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-
productive? Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm
> not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-
> productive?

Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary.

In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical
authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but
eventually _someone_ is going to come up with a decision of how things are
going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of
inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually,
things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and
disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a
situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put
the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort
helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself."

And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement
is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a
patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :)

> Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.

Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months.
At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people
and do something useful.

------
jebblue
It seems there's similarities between Wayland and Mir:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_\(software\))

"Mir, like Wayland, is built on EGL[6] and utilizes some of the infrastructure
originally developed for Wayland[7] such as Mesa’s EGL implementation[6] and
Jolla’s libhybris."

So why didn't Canonical just use Wayland, I thought that was their plan
forward a couple of years ago?

Whatever they do I hope they don't screw up Ubuntu 12.04's excellent ability
to play Steam based games.

EDIT: Read the controversy of the Wiki article, interesting insights.

------
tinco
What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source
software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason.

Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will
eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful
workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to
date drivers.

~~~
damien
I don't see how it's political to let Canonical keep the burden of maintaining
code that only they care about...

~~~
azakai
Is that what is happening here? Intel's explanation of "The Management"
handing down orders doesn't imply technical reasons were the motivation. It's
unclear.

If there are technical reasons - like the one you mentioned - let's hear them,
they might be valid.

~~~
asveikau
Does anyone else see the "-The Management" comment as having more than a tinge
of sarcasm? I think people are taking it a little too seriously.

~~~
nknighthb
[http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/com...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/commit/?id=0c697aee9b3767be7d1e04e4e4f9d304f23b188a)

Note "Ordered-by:" line, clearly intended to communicate Chris Wilson was
ordered to do this, rather than doing it of his own accord.

~~~
asveikau
You still see no attempt at humor or lightheartedness in this? May I remind
you that his email ends in .co.uk, so many people may need to apply a "British
humour filter". Most of his commits have "Signed-off-by:" with a name; he
replaced "signed-off" with "ordered" and the name with a vague reference to
"The Management".

The further context I was thinking of was this:

[http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/com...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/commit/?id=58a7611ccfda88c7cbcc62b25b787d6b0fa64081)

~~~
nknighthb
I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context beyond
the commits. No, I see no humor or lightheartedness. Signed-off-by is not just
something Chris made up, it's a pseudo-standardized line for git commit
messages.

Further context I'm aware of is that Chris explicitly accepted and applied the
patch after working with the developers to get it right, along with other
signs of cooperation.

Yet more context I'm aware of is much of the political bullshit surrounding
Mir, Wayland, Canonical, Red Hat, Intel and really the entire FOSS community
at this point.

This isn't a joke. This is Intel's management intervening.

~~~
asveikau
> I'm obviously aware of both commits, and of much, much further context
> beyond the commits.

Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit. (If your
comment tells the whole story I am unconvinced. OK, so the guy merged a patch,
then it turns out he did not in fact have the blessing of his employer, so he
reverted it with a slightly snarky commit message. Any more context I should
be aware of beyond that? It does not sound like a huge conspiracy to me.)

Edit: also, what does "The Management" mean? This guy's immediate supervisor?
Intel CEO? I feel like some people are taking an oddly paranoid reading of the
situation. I don't know anything about Intel specifically but I have worked at
a large company, I am willing to bet that the higher you get in Intel's
management the less they care about Ubuntu.

~~~
nknighthb
No, I'm not about to spend days or weeks trying to impart knowledge of the
history, values, and practices of the entire FOSS community on you.

You're free to continue acting smug about things you don't understand and
building strawmen left and right (I note this is at least the second time in
the last week you've done this), but you should stop expecting others to do
the heavy lifting for you.

~~~
asveikau
You made it sound like you had inside knowledge of Intel's decision making
process that is relevant here. If that's the case I think you should disclose
it instead of getting mad at me or assuming it is universal knowledge.

Our thread from last week is totally unrelated to any of this. I would rather
not engage in discussion that is based on personal animosity. Let's stay on
topic.

~~~
nknighthb
No, I didn't make it sound like that. You are, once again, inventing a
strawman, and drawing wild conclusions based on insufficient knowledge. Last
week's thread is not unrelated. It shows the same pattern of inane, bad-faith
behavior.

~~~
asveikau
So saying that publicly signing something "The Management" while working in a
company the size of Intel is comically vague, and saying people should lighten
up a bit without additional info and perspective, that is acting in bad faith?
I am not trying to offend anyone with this commentary, it is my own opinion.

~~~
nknighthb
> _So saying that publicly signing something "The Management" while working in
> a company the size of Intel is comically vague_

You didn't say that.

> _saying people should lighten up_

You didn't say that, either. Which is good, because "lighten up" is not, has
never been, and will never be a reasonable thing to say to anyone, anytime,
anywhere.

Your original comment wasn't unreasonable. Where you started going off the
rails was initially with "May I remind you", which is patronizing.

Then "Maybe you should share that first, rather than leaving it implicit.",
chiding me for failing to magically know that you lacked knowledge that is
relatively common within the set of people who care about the subject at hand.

Then you characterized my statements as describing a "huge conspiracy". Being
unaware of any "huge conspiracy", only a lot of wide-open politics, this is,
to me, at once puzzling and insulting. "oddly paranoid" makes it even worse.

Then you accuse me of pretending to have inside knowledge of Intel, when I did
no such thing, and did not intend to, and say I should "disclose" this thing I
don't have, as if I'm trying to hide something.

And now you seek to rewrite history.

~~~
asveikau
I am pretty sure I did say these things. But nevermind. More importantly I
don't think I'm guilty of nearly the malice you ascribed to me, and a part of
me is wondering where you are based on the off chance we can share a beverage
of your choice and you can see I'm not a monster. Is it the thread from last
week that has you angry at me?

~~~
nknighthb
I didn't even know who you were until your third comment, which sounded eerily
familiar. And there are certainly no circumstances under which I would
voluntarily associate with someone who displays your pattern of lashing out
whenever they don't understand something.

~~~
asveikau
Well, I tried. I would humbly suggest that one person's "lashing out" could be
another's simple misunderstanding.

In the meantime I think there is a phrase you used to describe me, something
along the lines of "willful misinterpretation"; I believe you may have done
the same for me.

------
ausjke
I don't know what to say here. I'm still running Ubuntu but the phone-tablet-
desktop eat it all strategy got me seriously concerned. Come on, Microsoft
can't do that with its deep pocket, neither does Google, you just don't eat
more than you can chew, not to mention you have no market share in any of them
yet. Focusing on ubuntu server LTS, charging service fees, focusing on cloud
platforms, while maintaining a free desktop to keep a wide user base, seems
more reasonable to me.

------
hippich
Political talks aside, it looks all good. Intel will develop code for Wayland
(which potentially will be used in all but Ubuntu distros) and Ubuntu will be
working on adding patches for XMir on their own since XMir will be used only
in Ubuntu. Eventually either XMir will be proven better and more distros adopt
it and then it will be more reasonable for Intel spend time on integrating
drivers with XMir.

No real news here.

------
chris_wot
There is one vendor using Mir. One. I don't blame Intel for not backing it.

~~~
general_failure
And there are zero using Wayland. Zero.

~~~
shuzchen
Wayland packages have been in Fedora since 18 (it's at 19 now and 20 is to
drop in under 3 months time). You can already start testing your apps to see
how they work in Wayland, and it's on the roadmap to being integrated as the
default. Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and
plans to switch.

~~~
dingaling
> Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to
> switch.

Indeed, but the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X.
Wayland provides graphics multiplexing; that's it.

Possibly mangled analogy: it's like saying we're switching from a LAMP stack
to Postgres; it doesn't make sense as a statement.

~~~
forgottenpass
>the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X.

Does switching to a wayland compositor by default and using xwayland for the
applications that still can't talk to it not sufficiently address that? At
least as practically as is possible when replacing a popular piece of
interoperable software with a large user install base?

------
prodigal_erik
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec) doesn't
even consider remoting, and to date Wayland has just punted on it. Is there
any way they can both lose? The brief era of only caring about the machine
under my desk is coming to an end, and any display system that isn't designed
around accommodating latency is going to become a terrible mistake.

------
hanuca
True or false?

~~~
teho
True:

[http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/com...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-
intel/commit/?id=58a7611ccfda88c7cbcc62b25b787d6b0fa64081&utm_source=anzwix)

Intel is the most active company in Wayland developement too.

------
pcx66
This is a totally bullshit way of managing a FOSS project. You should never
remove working code from a FOSS project if someone is already maintaining it
and that someone represents a major chunk of your users. I hate that Ubuntu
guys are moving away from X/Wayland (so suddenly and in a close-is way), but
treating them like this indirectly is wrong. We got to play fair with the FOSS
eco-system.

~~~
josephlord
Not sure it deserves the down votes you got but I think you are very wrong. If
you are running a project you can remove what you want, if someone wants
something different enough they can fork it. If you do it early before many
people are using it you will get far less complaints than when there are
millions of users.

Adding code, and features places further requirements and limitations on
further changes and any feature added and widely used will become nearly
impossible to remove later.

