XMir news!

[Kevin Gunn]

Hi,

my name is Kevin Gunn and I have the pleasure of leading the talented guys
on the Display Server team at Canonical who are delivering Mir. And we have
some news we’d like to share.

XMir has landed!

In recent days Mir and the relevant X.org patches required to support XMir
have landed in main. The final component needed for turning on XMir is the
unity-system-compositor (...or as we prefer to shorten it, u-s-c). We had
recently been performing a variety of integration tests across a spectrum
of hardware and we now feel confident about pushing u-s-c into universe.

The next steps for u-s-c to become default in Ubuntu 13.10 is achieving
feature completeness by Feature Freeze, intensive testing and ultimately
meeting the Acceptance Criteria as discussed below. Once he have passed
these stages u-s-c will be pushed into main and become default for Ubuntu
13.10.

If you’ve been following the Mir project, and even using XMir through our
PPA, you’ll want to make some adjustments to your system in order to track
with what is going into our distribution for 13.10. Please refer to the
instructions here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Installing

This also means, as we’re still under development, that Mir updates for our
remaining features & bug fixes will continue to appear in the archive as we
march towards FeatureFreeze for 13.10.

>From this moment until FeatureFreeze we will be focused on delivering 2
major features to support XMir, multimonitor & bypass composition support.
Mir will also continue to be developed for our support of Unity8 on Touch
which primarily consists of bug fixing for our window management &
Mir-on-Mir support for the Unity8 greeter and shell. We will also work with
our Community team at Canonical to coordinate a “call for testing” for XMir
to get some broader feedback. Details forthcoming.

Once we achieve FeatureFreeze, our focus will shift to fixing our critical
bugs for 13.10 in order to achieve FinalFreeze to pass our Acceptance
Criteria. Our philosophy behind the Acceptance Criteria is to gate Ubuntu
from any disruptions to the user experience due to the XMir change.
Essentially, the current Unity7 & application operation should continue
without any visual corruption or noticeable decrease in performance. This
Acceptance Criteria has been vetted through discussions with our QA &
Release Teams, more details can be found here
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/13.10AcceptanceCriteria<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/13.10AcceptanceCriteria#preview>.
Feel free to provide us with feedback.

You can reach the team at #ubuntu-mir on irc.freenode.net or on the
mir-devel mailing list. Please use “$ ubuntu-bug mir” for any bug report
you want to file.

Below you’ll find the status of XMir as of today. And we’ve still got some
key features to implement and critical bugs to fix, all happening as I type.

What’s enabled...

- Support for xserver-xorg-video-intel

- Support for xserver-xorg-video-ati

- Support for xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

- Intel sna enabled

- Unity 7 operation fully functional with no visible corruption

- Important application operation functioning with no visible corruption
(Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, etc)

- Good performance (without bypass), approximate 10% addition of overhead,
in most cases normal operation results in 60fps

- Fallback to stand alone X (for proprietary drivers)

- Multi-monitor mirror mode works, but screen resolution changes not well
handled

- VT switching working

- removed hardware cursor

And, not comprehensive, but some known limitations / features being worked
on....

- no proprietary driver support (dependent on 3rd parties)

- “input events seeming slow/last buffer render delay”

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1199450

- no multimonitor support

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1102760

- no bypass composition support at the system compositor level

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1109963

- no power management enabled

https://bugs.launchpad.net/xmir/+bug/1193222

- no VESA support

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1118903

- XMir always listening to keyboard, passwords may appear in other X
sessions

https://bugs.launchpad.net/xmir/+bug/1192843

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bug/1102757

- related to the XMir listening to keyboard, don’t try multi session,
doesn’t work

Looking forward to your support, feedback and happy use of XMir.

best regards,

Kevin
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