Wayland Build

[coolblue2000]

I read about 6 weeks ago that a wayland beta was going to be release within a couple of weeks. Does anyone know if this has happened yet? We are about to install hundreds of Pis around the country as display devices and wayland would make our lives a lot easier.

[jamesh]

Dunno. I'll ask Eben.

[Heater]

coolblue2000,

We are about to install hundreds of Pis around the country...

Hope you have taken care of all the potential problems you could have with SD cards and file system image corruptions.
Having to run around the country to replace SD cards when they fail in a few months is going to be expensive.

[coolblue2000]

We have had zero issues with SD cards and I have personally run a PI as a database server for some time now with zero issues. However we do have a plan in place to send out imaged SD cards if such a situation occurs. Plus an application has been written to administer all the units via ssh to manage upgrades etc.

We have more issues with HDDs failing on normal PCs than we do SD cards.

Also Replacing a failed SD card in a PI is something pretty much anyone can do with help over the phone. Replacing a HDD in a PC is obviously far more complex. Plus the amount of Money saved by using Pis over PCs easily outweighs any potential issues. The PI hardware is also extremely resilient and far less likely to break than a standard PC.

[jamesh]

coolblue2000,

We are about to install hundreds of Pis around the country...

Hope you have taken care of all the potential problems you could have with SD cards and file system image corruptions.
Having to run around the country to replace SD cards when they fail in a few months is going to be expensive.

#

Give it a rest. People are not as stupid or as uninformed as you seem to think. Is it really necessary to bring up this subject EVERYTIME?

And just for the rest of the world who are not heater and have removed the bee from their bonnet, SD corruption is relatively rare, and best practice can reduce its chance of occurrence to almost zero.

[jamesh]

I read about 6 weeks ago that a wayland beta was going to be release within a couple of weeks. Does anyone know if this has happened yet? We are about to install hundreds of Pis around the country as display devices and wayland would make our lives a lot easier.

OK, there should be some release news on this in the next quarter, with some hope of going mainstream early in the new year. There's still a lot of bug fixing to do, but its looking pretty good.

You can, I think, get the current release from the Colabora website, but no idea whereabouts.

[coolblue2000]

@ jamesh

Thank you very much. I will take a look to see if I can find it. Looking forward to the new year release as it will fix one of the only major issues with the Raspberry Pi.

[coolblue2000]

Just found a way to possibly run a wayland build following the instructions in the link

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/raspberrypi.html


I have not tested it yet though so can't comment on whether it works or not.

[jamesh]

Just be warned it's plenty buggy at the moment! Expected to be much more robust by Xmas, but probably still not perfect *. That's for the new year.




* No such things as perfect software when you talk about this level of complexity.

[DavidS]

Just found a way to possibly run a wayland build following the instructions in the link

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/raspberrypi.html


I have not tested it yet though so can't comment on whether it works or not.

It does work (At least a week ago when I did some playing with it) and it is fairly stable, though does still have some significant issues to work out.

[karlkiste]

coolblue2000,

We are about to install hundreds of Pis around the country...

Hope you have taken care of all the potential problems you could have with SD cards and file system image corruptions.
Having to run around the country to replace SD cards when they fail in a few months is going to be expensive.

#

Give it a rest. People are not as stupid or as uninformed as you seem to think. Is it really necessary to bring up this subject EVERYTIME?

And just for the rest of the world who are not heater and have removed the bee from their bonnet, SD corruption is relatively rare, and best practice can reduce its chance of occurrence to almost zero.

If it's OK, I can share my experience: I had to dump a few hundred SD cards, for half of them did not work at all or failed within minutes. I've bought another brand then, and two or three out of 1000 failed within three months. That rate is not worse than with harddisks.

[coolblue2000]

It turns out that wayland is actually present in the latest standard Rasbian build! Yey!

So to run it simply issue the command sudo weston-launch (make sure you booted to console initially rather than the desktop)

Now playing around with it and it does indeed seem lightning quick!

I just need to do some more testing to see if it will be suitable for our (fairly simple) display requirements. (It is possible any bugs will not affect us in this respect as we are not doing anything other than running a browser). At least by the time Wayland is released we will be fully ready to take advantage of it.

I love the Raspberry Pi, I know it is meant for education but it is just so flexible.

[amorphic]

Have you been able to get a web browser up and running on weston in the latest Raspbian build?

Would really like some halfway-decent browser performance to deploy some Pi-powered dashboards at work...

[Heater]

As far as I know Wayland does nothing for speeding up apps like web browsers. It only speeds up the moving and resizing of windows. Seems once you have your browser window open, sized and in place everything proceeds the same as normal.

Could someone clarify this for me?

[dom]

As far as I know Wayland does nothing for speeding up apps like web browsers. It only speeds up the moving and resizing of windows. Seems once you have your browser window open, sized and in place everything proceeds the same as normal.

Could someone clarify this for me?

Yes, that's pretty accurate.

[jamesh]

Although its worth noting that the CPU cycles that were previously used for windows movement/blitting etc will now be available for rendering, so it's a bit of a double whammy improvement.

[hatman]

In addition to speeding-up the moving/resizing of windows, is Wayland likely to have an effect on the scrolling in a web browser? In my experience I find the rendering of most webpages is ok, but scrolling them up and down is painful (so I've taken to using the page up/down keys)

Thanks!

[jsebean]

In addition to speeding-up the moving/resizing of windows, is Wayland likely to have an effect on the scrolling in a web browser? In my experience I find the rendering of most webpages is ok, but scrolling them up and down is painful (so I've taken to using the page up/down keys)

Thanks!

+1 I'd like to know the answer to this one as well. I would try it myself but last I tired I couldn't launch Xorg apps for some reason, I didn't try very hard to figure out. I've never used wayland ever so it's new to me. Would be nice for someone to chime in on this question.

[jamesh]

Scrolling up performance depends on how its done. If a lot of the bltting of the scroll can be moved to HW then there will be an improvement, if it's rendered for each frame of the scroll, then not so much. But I would expect some improvement simply due to the amount of freed up CPU''s cycles from HW acceleration of the rest of the display composition.

[ghellquist]

Only a quick thought about servicing machines around the country: why not put a spare SD card inside the box with the Pi? Configured with software and ready to go. Easy to swap for a normal person. Would save a day or two waiting for a new card to arrive.
Or, why not as the hardware cost is so low, even put a fully configured spare Pi there?
Next step up might be to include a watchdog timer and a hardware switch. Running two Pi-s at the same time, one being primary and the other waiting to take over.

[oozic]

Hi,

watching this thread

Is there a way to use GPU acceleration for a browser with the RPi?

I'm building a sort of dashboard with the RPi, html5+css+js.
It's not that "heavy" to render, I just want to use some css3 transition effect.

Do you think wayland can improve this or there are other solutions?

I try wayland about 1 month ago but I was unable to install any browser or app, is there a guide to install a browser like chromium?

Many thanks

[Jessie]

Hi,

watching this thread

Is there a way to use GPU acceleration for a browser with the RPi?

I'm building a sort of dashboard with the RPi, html5+css+js.
It's not that "heavy" to render, I just want to use some css3 transition effect.

Do you think wayland can improve this or there are other solutions?

I try wayland about 1 month ago but I was unable to install any browser or app, is there a guide to install a browser like chromium?

Many thanks

The big issue (from the way I understand it) is that no one has written a browser with open gl and the gpu in mind. For instance some send a draw call for every single pixel rendered. Whereas, the gpu works better with larger chunks of data.

[oozic]

This basically makes impossible to use the raspberry-pi to run a browser to display "modern" website, right?

[DougieLawson]

The new Collabra beta browser is supposed to address those issues.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5535

[oozic]

amazing I missed that news!

thanks!