14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical, the company founded by Mark Shuttleworth to promote the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system everywhere around the world, has recently published the "year in review" for their Mir display server technology.
As most of you are aware, Canonical develops its own display server for Ubuntu, called Mir, which, in some ways, is similar to the X.Org Server and Wayland technologies.
While Ubuntu on the desktop still uses X.Org Server's components, Mir is currently heavily tested for the Unity 8 user interface that Canonical plans on implementing by default for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, for desktops.
However, until now, Mir has only been successfully deployed on mobile devices, powering the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used in various official and unofficial Ubuntu Phone and Tablets.
According to Alan Griffiths, Software Engineer at Canonical, 2016 was a great year for Mir, and in 2017 the company plans on releasing the 1.0 milestone of the display server, which should implement the long-anticipated Vulkan support.
"2017 will see a cleanup of our "toolkit" API and better support for "platform" plugin modules," said Griffiths. "We will then be working on upstreaming our Mesa patch. That will allow us to release our (currently experimental) Vulkan support."
Canonical is working on reducing latency for Mir
Canonical worked very hard in 2016 to improve its Mir display server by enabling a client-side toolkit, application, or library to work on Mir, as well as to upstream Mir support into GTK+ 3, Qt, SDL2, and Kodi.
They also managed to create Mir Abstraction Layer and released MirAL 1.0, but for 2017 the company plans on enabling Mir on new platforms, upstream their Mesa patch, and enable Mir on a new graphics API, such as Vulkan.
Canonical is now working on reducing latency for Mir, and hopes that 2017 will be the year when Mir becomes mature enough to be used on desktops, powering the next-generation Unity 8 display server.
At the moment, the company did not reveal the exact date when Mir 1.0 will see the light of day, so we can only guess that it could launch sometime around the release of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), in mid-April, when they'll prepare for Ubuntu 17.10.
