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

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> 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

Hi folks, trawling through old mail to be sure I don't toss something
important, I came across this oldie-but-goodie from Jonathan to us
about issues looming for 14.10. Now that we've had our catch-up with
the Community Council [1] and caught our breath after the rush to get
14.04 out the door -- any new information or thoughts about these
issues?

Valorie

1. http://linuxgrandma.blogspot.com/2014/05/todays-catch-up-meeting-with-ubuntu.html
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