Mir is an open source and free display server technology that has been designed from the ground up to provide efficient support for graphics co-processors on GNU/Linux systems. It is developed by Canonical for the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu.
Client and server implementations
Mir is distributed as both client (libmirclient) and server (libmirserver). It has been designed as a drop-in replacement for the X Window System (X.Org) on Ubuntu and its derivatives. It is also compatible with the Android graphics drivers.
The Mir and XMir products will be distributed by default on upcoming releases of the Ubuntu Linux operating system developed by Canonical. It is also the default display server used on the current stable release of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for powering smartphones and tablets.
What’s included
Mir comprises of several components that are essential for any modern display server, such as a compositor, input manager, output manager, application manager, as well as inter-app data exchange functionality.
The software is somehow identical in functionality with and heavily inspired by the widely used X.Org display server, which is currently implemented in 99.9% of all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as the brand-new Wayland display server.
It has been engineered to support many of the existing hardware compositors, designed towards EGL/GL(ES), and take advantage of existing drivers that implement the Android driver model.
Under the hood and supported operating systems
The program is platform-independent and written entirely in the C++ programming language, designed to run on GNU/Linux systems, BSD distributions, as well as other UNIX-like platforms.
It has been successfully tested with both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures, and the latest version can be tested on the current release of the Ubuntu Linux operating systems or by grabbing the latest source code from its official repository.
