[kubuntu-devel] Re: systemd, logind, upstart, wayland, weston chat at Munich BSP

[Jonathan Riddell]

> > 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

As I understand it Ubuntu are again delaying Mir and putting that into
a separate "unity 8" flavour so again no immediate problems.

> > 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.

Ubuntu is being moved to systemd so hopefully that will arrive before KDE software depends on it.

> > 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).

It probably isn't sane yet but we'll put the kdelibs4 stuff into maintinance mode and make a new image with KF5 stuff from a PPA.

> > 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.

I've not heard anything that says Wayland will be usable in the near
future so we've no plans this cycle.

> > 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..

David is now an upstream maintainer of SDDM so this is likely the
future for KDE.  That's a bit of a shame because it means we'll have a
different display manager than the rest of Ubuntu when I'd hoped that
would be a nice bit of convergence.  It'll mean much fiddling around
with ubiquity-dm which is a difficult to test bit.  Packaging SDDM is
on the todo and some people are looking into it.

Jonathan