Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, we’re going to be leading off with the latest news about Wayland and Xorg support on FreeBSD, then a look at OpenBSD ARM64

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Headlines

Wayland is now in the FreeBSD Ports tree

• This commit brings Wayland, the new windowing system, into the FreeBSD ports tree
• “This port was first created by Koop Mast (kwm@) then updated and improved by Johannes Lundberg”
• “Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it.”
• Wayland is designed for desktop and laptop use, rather than X, which was designed for use over the network, where clients were not powerful enough to run the applications locally.
• “Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.”
• “Please report bugs to the FreeBSD bugtracker!”
• It is good to see this project progressing, as it seems in a few generations, high performance graphics drivers may only be actively developed for Wayland. ***

Call For Testing: xorg 1.18.4 and newer intel/ati DDX

• Baptiste Daroussin, and the FreeBSD X11 team, have issued a call for testing for the upgrade to Xorg 1.18.4
• Along with it comes newer ATI/AMD and Intel drivers
• “Note that you will need to rebuild all the xf86-* packages to work with thatnewer xorg (hence the bump of the revision)”
• “Do not expect newer gpu supported as this is not the kernel part”, it only provides the newer Xorg driver, not the kernel mode setting driver (this is a separate project)
• “If you experience any issue with intel or radeon driver please try to use the new modesetting driver provided by xorg directly (note that fedora and debian recommend the use of the new driver instead of the ati/intel one)” ***

Error handling in C

• “Unlike other languages which have one preferred means of signalling an error, C is a multi error paradigm language. Error handling styles in C can be organized into one of several distinct styles, such as popular or correct. Some examples of each.”
  • “One very popular option is the classic unix style. -1 is returned to indicate an error.”
  • “Another option seen in the standard C library is NULL for errors.”
  • “The latter has the advantage that NULL is a false value, which makes it easier to write logical conditions. File descriptor 0 is valid (stdin) but false, while -1 is invalid but true.”
  • “And of course, there’s the worst of both worlds approach requiring a special sentinel that you’ll probably forget to use”
  • “Other unix functions, those that don’t need to return a file descriptor, stick to just 0 and -1”
  • “Of course, none of these functions reveal anything about the nature of the error. For that, you need to consult t