Mir (software)

Mir is a computer display server for the Linux operating system currently in development by Canonical Ltd. It is planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu.

Mir was announced by Canonical on 4 March 2013. Mir has been developed to enable the development of Unity 8, the next generation of the Unity user interface.

Mir, like , 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 Android’s input stack (formerly) and Google’s . 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).

As of May 2014^[update] the only announced desktop environment with native support for Mir is Canonical's Unity 8. No other Linux distribution has announced plans to adopt Mir as default display server.