risks associated with Xorg / Wayland

[pocock]

There is regular noise about Linux distributions being on the cusp of abandoning Xorg, e.g. the recent Phoronix article about Xorg being abandonware, which generated many blogs and comments on various platforms.

Talos II and Blackbird users have commented that Wayland isn't working for us.  I personally use Xorg right now, I have this in my /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf

Code: [Select]

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
WaylandEnable=false


Has anybody investigated the Wayland issues on this architecture in any depth?

I don't see any distribution dropping Xorg in the next 12 months but as these machines have a long lifespan, if Xorg is dropped in 2 or 3 years from now then it will be an inconvenience for this platform.

[ClassicHasClass]

Wayland works "fine" (for various values of "fine") if you have a GPU. Or I should say, my objections to Wayland remain the same on my T2 as they do on x86_64.

My BMC-only Blackbird ran like glue with Wayland, and this was acknowledged (for various values of "acknowledged") by a Wayland developer I consulted with about it. This did seem to improve in Fedora 33, possibly due to other improvements such as in llvmpipe, but it can't be tricked into generating any larger displays so far: https://www.talospace.com/2020/11/fedora-33-mini-review-on-blackbird-and.html

I should also note I am no longer running gdm at all. I boot to a text prompt and start Xorg or Wayland manually. This also solved a lot of problems.

[pocock]

These are positive signs and I suspect there will be enough time to improve these things more before Xorg ever gets dropped by any distributions.

Personally, I found that the display wouldn't work for me with Wayland enabled in gdm.  I'm using an AMD GPU, the RX 580 and it has been very stable with Xorg.

For more widespread adoption of the platform, which will give it more critical mass, not everybody will want to go through a text prompt.  This type of hack is fine for some of us and helps prove what can and will work eventually though.

[ClassicHasClass]

Yes, I'm certainly prepared to admit that gdm is part of the problem. A lot of things worked better without it.

[Borley]

I have been running Wayland on my Blackbird since the day I got it. There are issues, but nothing that is unique to POWER. In order to record the screen, I have to log out into an Xorg session. While Synaptic and GUFW do not run under Wayland without some modifications for which I have written guides.

[pocock]

Actually, I'm hoping that some of the issues will disappear if people use the kernels produced with a regular 4k page size

Problems rooted in the 64k page size are not problems with the ppc64 platform.  Now people have both the information and the choice to use 4k like other architectures.  If a particular fault occurs with 64k and not with 4k, then it is a Wayland fault or something in the drivers.  Nonetheless, the vast majority of users will probably want to use the 4k page size rather than waiting for everybody else to support 64k.

Beyond that, I'm also hoping that Wayland developers will take feedback from users on every platform.

Based on my experience with the way systemd was imposed on the world, speaking as a developer, a sysadmin and a user, I feel that we were used as guinea pigs and I feel we may go through a similar experience with Wayland.  On Debian jessie, the first Debian release to use systemd by default, I encountered a range of issues.  Even today, on systems upgraded to the latest Debian, I still find issues that can be traced back to the introduction of systemd.

[Borley]

Addendum to my last post:

I have found Debian 11 so far to be unusable on RCS Blackbird with graphical environments. When loading up Sway WM, the screen renders but transparent objects were showing as opaque and the lines in my terminal emulator where displaying incorrectly.

'Alright, no skin off my back, I'll just use Gnome' I thought. After installing and starting gdm, the session immediately crashes out with a very generic error.

I next removed the GPU to see if I could tolerate using the ASPEED. It is stuck at a maximum of 1024x768 

I am currently weighing my options.

[pocock]

Did you change the settings to disable Wayland and use regular Xorg?

That is what I'm using (Debian 10) and it is working well

[Borley]

I shelved the device, temporarily, while I examine resolutions. I had been using Debian 10 under Gnome's Wayland implementation without issue previously.

With the new installation (Debian 11) I recall seeing "Potential missing firmware" relating to AMDGPU in apt actions, despite having firmware-amd-graphics installed and amdgpu added to initramfs (as I had done on Debian 10), so there may be something I am missing or some regression. I'll start poking around at it soon, I just had to scramble to get a fallback computer up and running.

[ClassicHasClass]

I have never been able to get Wayland to run the ASPEED at anything over 1024x768. That said, Xorg is fine with the WX7100 on Fedora 34 (now that the performance issue with graphene is sorted out).

[xilinder]

On my T2 the stock 4.19.0-17 kernel does run on the ASPEED VGA display 1920x1080 no problems.
(Older monitor max resolution.)

However, when installing the system from scratch I first install only LXDE and then, when up and running,
I will run TASKSEL and install MATE. No GDM, not on the system.

My custom kernels will only run on the WX7100, they are a whole different ball of bees wax, , , Bees included.

[ClassicHasClass]

That's what I mean: you can coerce X11 into running the ASPEED at full 1920x1080 but not Wayland, at least not with any means known to me.

[MauryG5]

Guys, in the end, from what I'm seeing as time goes by, Wayland represents the near future and Xorg the past now. I have seen and read several articles about it and now the road is that and it is also right because Xorg has outdone him and is an old graphics server. It had been rumored for years that it should be replaced and now the time has come. For now it is obvious that there are the inconveniences of the passage and that everything is not working well yet, but they are all working to make the transaction completely so it is only a matter of time and we will all be on Wayland in a fixed and stable way and I believe that as soon as we will begin to exploit as it should, we will have a significant improvement on everything in my opinion ...

[cchinicz]

Guys, in the end, from what I'm seeing as time goes by, Wayland represents the near future and Xorg the past now. I have seen and read several articles about it and now the road is that and it is also right because Xorg has outdone him and is an old graphics server. It had been rumored for years that it should be replaced and now the time has come. For now it is obvious that there are the inconveniences of the passage and that everything is not working well yet, but they are all working to make the transaction completely so it is only a matter of time and we will all be on Wayland in a fixed and stable way and I believe that as soon as we will begin to exploit as it should, we will have a significant improvement on everything in my opinion ...

I really hope you're right about Wayland. Every time I've tried it on a Blackbird with HDMI output from BMC I got a Black screen and had to push the shut down button in the front papel.

[MauryG5]

Eh perhaps the problem for those without a graphics card is this friend chinicz, from what I'm seeing at least for now, one of the salient features of Wayland is that it needs a dedicated graphics card to work well. I remember that when I installed Debian and I still didn't have the updated kernel and all the rest of the various graphics libraries, I had to quit to get it started in Xorg otherwise it was unusable due to Wayland using 3d management for example for icons. So I think in any case if you want to use Wayland properly, you need to have a nice dedicated graphics card installed!