systemd, logind, upstart, wayland, weston chat at Munich BSP

[Jonathan Riddell]

We chatted a bit about this topics at Munich BSP

without Mir or Plasma 2 to worry about in this cycle there's no immediate
issues but we need to keep an eye on them

cgroups (control groups) is a feature of Linux to limit, account and
isolate resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.) of process groups.
this is used in logind to get the system compositor without privilages
which is needed by kwin.  so kwin will probably need an init system with
cgroup support.  fortunately I see plans are under way for this in upstart
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/upstart-devel/2013-November/002942.html

the current version of logind in ubuntu is not enough for wayland because
it needs to get special access to hardware for compositing (which it does
through cgroups) so we will need an updated version of logind at some
point.  but that's hard because logind is now inseperable from systemd.

Debian has multiple systems and may even continue to have multiple
systems.  systemd has some problems because the upstream maintained is not
always popular in Debian and it has some bugs in the way it is integrated
(e.g. doesn't support LVM).  openRC would be the easiest change for Debian
as it uses similar init scripts to sysvinit.  systemd unit files are not
distro specific so should we have to use systemd in Kubuntu it might not be
so hard as the init script replacements just come from upstream.

afiestas has started working on looking at using systemd for KDE Plasma
startup, this should have a magic export to make a simple script to start
up if you don't use systemd but it won't be as fast.

In 14.10 we may well want to move to KF5 and Plasma 2 if it's at all same.
That won't have a hard dependency or even recommendation on Wayland but we
may well want to switch to Wayland too because post-LTS is the time for
breakage and it'll get all the breakage out the way at once (maybe).

We will want to ensure xwayland is packaged for running any x applications
(like anything Qt 4).

We we want to ensure Qt Wayland support is packaged.

We will want to check Wayland and Weston are up to date from upstream when
synced from Debian.

Currently Plasma 2 and KWin still need the Wayland parts ported but this'll
happen sometime soon.  At which point it would be worth getting it working
in Neon5 so we're more ready for 14.10.

For a full system to log into Plasma 2 with Wayland it needs a login
manager that supports it, currently only SDDM.  Quintasan has the trello
item to look into this.  Asking David (the lightdm-kde author) today he
said..
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: Fedora are trying out SDDM in a KDE4 world next
release. It is rather problematic (read, really really problematic)
              with complex setups.
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: I'm watching it, will be interesting to see what Red
Hat do.
13:39 < d_ed> Riddell: they have someone working on it, I did some KDE5/
Plasma 2 stuff on top of SDDM
13:40 < d_ed> but it's largely portable.
13:40 < d_ed> For Plasma2 I think we may end up going SDDM as default.

We should find more people who want to care about Wayland in Ubuntu, maybe
Mint and Ubuntu Gnome.

So no easy answers yet, lots happening in the future we should keep an eye
on.

Jonathan
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