Mir (software)

Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell. Mir was announced by Canonical on 4 March 2013 as part of the development of Unity 8, intended as the next generation for the Unity user interface. Four years later Unity 8 was dropped although Mir's development continued for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Mir is built on EGL and uses some of the infrastructure originally developed for Wayland such as Mesa's EGL implementation and Jolla's libhybris. The compatibility layer for X, XMir, is based on XWayland. Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Google's Protocol Buffers, and previously included Android's input stack, which has since been replaced by Wayland's libinput, prior to the end of 2015. An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack". According to Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, Some of the benefits that Mir will eventually offer include lower overhead in the display pipeline, more seamless transitions between display modes during the boot process, richer input handling that will make it easier to support things like touchscreen gestures, more seamless support for systems with switchable graphics hardware (like laptops that can dynamically shift between using embedded and discrete graphics), and better application interchange (which will help improve things like the clipboard and drag-and-drop). it has basic Wayland support. the only announced desktop environment with native support for Mir was Canonical's Unity 8. No other Linux distribution announced plans to adopt Mir as default display server.