Month: April 2017

The changes at Canonical have had an effect both on the priorities for the Mir project and on the resources available for future development. We have been meeting to make new plans. In short:

Mir is alive, there are Canonical IoT projects that use it. Work will continue on Mir to support these and on cleaning and upstreaming the distro patches Ubuntu carries to support Mir.

Canonical are no longer working on a desktop environment or phone shell. However we will maintain the existing support Mir has for compositing and window management. (We’re happy to receive PRs in support of similar efforts.)

Mir provides a framework for integration between three parts of the graphics stack.

These parts are:

1. The drivers that control the hardware
2. The desktop environment or shell
3. Applications with a GUI

Mir currently works with mesa-kms graphics, mesa-x11 graphics or android HWC graphics (work has been done on vulkan graphics and is well beyond proof-of-concept but hasn’t been released).

Switching the driver support doesn’t impact the shell or applications. (Servers will run unchanged on mesa, on X11 and android.) Mir provides “abstractions” so that, for example, user input or display configuration changes look the same to servers and client applications regardless of the drivers being used.

Mir supports writing a display server by providing sensible defaults for (e.g.) positioning tooltips without imposing a desktop style. It has always carried example programs demonstrating how to do “fullscreen” (kiosk style), traditional “floating windows” and “tiling” window management to ensure we don’t “bake in” too many policies.

Because the work has been funded by Canonical features that were important to Ubuntu Phone and Unity8 desktop have progressed faster and are more complete than others.

When Mir was started we needed a mechanism for client-server communications (and Wayland wasn’t in the state it is today). We did something that worked well enough (libmirclient) and, because it’s just a small, intentionally isolated part of the whole, we could change later. We never imagined what a “big deal” that decision would become.

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[added]

Seeing the initial reactions I can tell I made a farce of explaining this. I’ll try again:

For the author of a shell what Mir provides is subtly but significantly different from a set of libraries you can use to build on: It provides a default shell that can be customized.

Disclaimer: With the changes in progress at Canonical I am not currently in a position to make any commitment about the future of Mir.

It is no secret that I think there’s value to the Mir project and I’d like it to be a valued contribution to the free software landscape.

I’ve written elsewhere about my efforts to make it easy to use Mir for making desktop, phone and “Internet of Things” shells, I won’t repeat that here beyond saying “have a look”.

It is important to me that Mir is GPL. That makes it a contribution to a “commons” that I care about.

The dream of convergence dies hard. Canonical may have abandoned it, but I hope it survives. A lot of the issues have been tackled and knowledge gained.

I read that UBPorts will be using Mir “for the time being”. They sensibly don’t want to maintain Mir and are planning a migration to an (unidentified) Wayland compositor.

However, we can also see from G+ Mark Shuttleworth is planning to keep “investing in Mir” for the Internet of Things.

This opens up an interesting possibility: there’s no obvious technical reason that Mir could not support clients using libwayland directly. It would take some research to confirm this but I can’t foresee anything technical blocking such an approach.

There could be some benefits to Canonical from this: the current design of Mir client-server interation makes sense in a traditional Debian (or RPM) repository based world, but less so for Snap (or Flatpak).

In a traditional environment where the libraries are a shared resource updates simply need to maintain ABI compatibility to work with existing clients. That makes it possible to keep Mir server and client and server libraries “in step” while making incompatible changes to the communications protocol.

However with Snaps the client and server “snap”s package the libraries they use with the applications.That presents issues for keeping them in step. These issues are soluble but create an additional burden for Mir, server and client developers. Using a protocol based solution would ease this burden.

For the wider community native support for Wayland clients in Mir would make the task of toolkit maintainers and others simpler.

If Canonical could be persuaded to add this feature to Mir and/or maintain it in the project would anyone care?

Is anyone else willing to help with such a feature?