Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

Is NetBSD going to play with Wayland? 'Cause X.org seems to be in a bit 
shaky and captured by Linux-droids.

More questions if anyone feels like answering:

* It's obvious we already have KMS. However, is that all we need to
  support Wayland?

* What do the other BSD's do at this point? Is there any cohesion there?

* I don't think GTK + Broadway or RDP/VNC is a viable alternative to
  XDMCP. The Wayland guys really think that's good enough? XDMCP can do
  things those can't, like display a single application etc... I've never
  seen a non-hackish way to do that with VNC or RDP and Broadway is
  GTK3-only. If XDMCP goes... well damn. I like it and use it. I guess I'm
  screwed because the Wayland guys seem to see XDMCP and drawing
  operations as "the dumb way" to do things (from reading their
  interviews). I'd have a lot easier time accepting that if we had a
  viable XDMCP alternative. That doesn't seem to me to be the case. Since
  nobody cares what I will "accept" I guess I'll be doomed to old
  framebuffer hardware like we were before the last KMS update that came
  with 7.x.... Then again, I mostly don't care. I'm old and I like old
  hardware. However, I'd hate to see a systemd-like-event happen to X11.

* Anyone remember AtomBIOS? Wasn't stuff like that supposed to solve most
  of the we'll-never-share-squat-with-anyone problem for the vendors? They
  could all just make their special-monkey-magic hyperfast graphics calls
  from BIOS calls (which would suck for non x86 but at least provide some
  middle ground for development). I guess it never took off?

* Is KMS "just a hack" we support or is it a future X11 direction TNF
  embraces? Doesn't Linux do things in kernel-land that we either can't or
  won't do in NetBSD? I'm thinking of all the stuff provided by
  ./sys/miscfs/procfs/procfs_linux.c and sys/compat/linux*. Doesn't that
  mean we are forever going to be worried more about making sure we
  properly ape Linux rather than making anything novel ?

* How do weird X11 framebuffer code for off-the-wall platforms get built?
  I'm thinking of things like Amiga's with RetinaZ3 boards. How is it that
  these wizards-in-caves can be coaxed out for that, but for x86 we have
  to beg for a seat at the table with Linux and Microsoft? I'm just
  ignorant of these dynamics. I'm assuming it's because those older
  framebuffers are more simplistic or better documented.

For reference:

Xorg seems to be losing momentum (or not)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-Git-2016
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Foundation-Missteps

(I know, I know, two of those are Larabel links - but his facts are 
correct in this case.)

Some of my biases for Linux device drivers on BSD come from this:
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/freebsd/linux_bsd_kld.html

My only real technical knowledge of AtomBIOS comes from this post:
http://tinyurl.com/j2q87y8

Amigas have cool X11 drivers. So does SH3, MacPPC/68k, and others:
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.4.2/amiga/INSTALL.X11

-Swift