Weekly Edition
Return to the Development page
| |||||||||||||
The state of Wayland
For those following the development of the Wayland display system, a new,
concise summary of the
state of Wayland has been posted. "GTK+ 3.4.1 and Qt5 appear to
have complete Wayland support except for client side decorations (CSD).
EFL and Clutter appear to have complete support. So any application should
work with Wayland as long as it uses one of these four toolkits, and it
doesn't call any Xlib functions. Unfortunately a number of GTK+
applications do call Xlib, through gdk_x11_* functions, and they need to be
wrapped in build-time and run-time backend checks."
(Log in to post comments)
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 14:37 UTC (Mon) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]
NoMachine is in the process of close sourcing their NX server/client which heavy uses X11 sources.
http://www.nomachine.com/sources.php
Can something like NX/FreeNX/NeatX be done with Wayland?
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 14:54 UTC (Mon) by quartz (guest, #37351) [Link]
Not that I doubt it, but where did you see that they're closing the source? The front page still states it's "open", for some measure of open.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 15:44 UTC (Mon) by hans (subscriber, #148) [Link] Not that I doubt it, but where did you see that they're closing the source? The front page still states it's "open", for some measure of open.It was in the press release for version 4: This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 16:10 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Can something like NX/FreeNX/NeatX be done with Wayland?
What I would like to see is a virtual video driver for the Linux kernel in order to implement SPICE support on real hardware. (SPICE depends on virtualized hardware to provide it's connects)
Then I would also like to see a WAN profile for SPICE. Currently it seems to only be really good for LAN connections.
That way instead of just having your GUI work over the network you have _everything_ work over the network. Virtual consoles, framebuffers, and anything else. Any sort of video output post-initrd would be able to be sent over the network.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 16:23 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
But making this usable for unprivileged users would be... tricky.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 16:24 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Yes. You would have to treat it like a multihead workstation were you have a video card dedicated for each user.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 17:48 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Surely userspace can just send the command buffers over the network rather than to the DRM driver?
Don't see much point in using a kernel driver.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 17:51 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Nope. Command buffers are too huge for that.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 20:46 UTC (Mon) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]
Why is Spice hard to implement in Wayland? Isn't it just a protocol?
Or is Wayland the problem rather than Spice?
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 21:06 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Spice is not particularly hard to implement for Wayland. But nobody got around to doing this.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 10, 2012 7:26 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] > What I would like to see is a virtual video driver for the Linux kernel in order to implement SPICE support on real hardware.You mean like XSpice?
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 10, 2012 9:29 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh, is that what XSpice does? It's hard to tell: the page you link to never actually says what it is. Actually I'm still not sure. Is it an X video driver that sends the image over a spice connection to a remote client? (If so, that's not going to work for anything but X.)
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 11, 2012 18:35 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
Basically it seems to be a 'virtual GPU' (driver) for X.org:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg-announce/2010-...
But the same principle obviously can be applied to Wayland...?
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 13, 2012 13:50 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh, hang on, it's just another name for x86-video-qxl. Of course. *slaps self*
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 13, 2012 14:08 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That would be xf86-video-qxl and my fingers are dropping keys and LWN needs an edit option and a pony.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 19:26 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] You can get a lot of what NX does today with xpra.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 20:57 UTC (Mon) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]
That sure looks promising!
How is performance compared to FreeNX/NeatX?
try xpra Posted Apr 10, 2012 15:32 UTC (Tue) by amtota (guest, #4012) [Link]
Try the x264 support currently in trunk (no releases yet), according to the preliminary figures we have it is an order of magnitude more efficient than anything (open-source) out there.
It is lossy but more than good enough to use a terminal over it, and if you really must have a pixel perfect image then use png encoding.
try xpra Posted Apr 11, 2012 19:42 UTC (Wed) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]
That's very impressive!
How will Wayland affect xpre, when Fedora and Ubuntu adopts Wayland?
try xpra Posted Oct 10, 2012 8:20 UTC (Wed) by amtota (guest, #4012) [Link]
First, it looks like Wayland adoption is not going as fast as originally thought.
Second, although there are talks of remoting support in Wayland, it does not look like this is going to have anywhere near feature parity with xpra: no video/lossy compression, not support for re-connection, etc...
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 12, 2012 22:36 UTC (Thu) by przemoc (subscriber, #67594) [Link]
Thank you for mentioning xpra! I wasn't aware of this "screen for X" tool till today. Works fine.
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 12, 2012 22:44 UTC (Thu) by przemoc (subscriber, #67594) [Link]
By the used semantics, I should call it "tmux for X" after all...
NX for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 20:25 UTC (Mon) by sciurus (subscriber, #58832) [Link]
"Jesse has been playing around a bit with some remote Wayland support using libvncserver. He's apparently had some success with this and expects to push some code upstream soon." - from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MT...
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 9, 2012 17:53 UTC (Mon) by nickbp (subscriber, #63605) [Link] I have a utility app which currently makes heavy use of xlib for retrieving/setting window properties and coordinates. What API for this would be better supported by Wayland?
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 9, 2012 18:24 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
since it's for something dealing with managing windows I am guessing that it would have to interact with wayland directly.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 9, 2012 21:38 UTC (Mon) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
Wayland wont tell you where your window is.
Fact is, this is already broken---what if you window is in the spinning cube of Compiz?
so this functionality simply doesn't exist in wayland. We need to make Wayland not have all the security problems that X11 has that led ssh to not forward X by default.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 9, 2012 22:16 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Sure. And what if your computer has no keyboard? Should we remove keyboard handling from the kernel/Wayland/X? It will make a lot of things simpler!
Much simpler Posted Apr 10, 2012 11:28 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Less than two weeks and already people are thinking so small. Keyboards aren't the problem. We need to get to the root of the trouble and remove that :)
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 10, 2012 12:29 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It seems to me that in order for you to program window managers in wayland that it would need to know were your windows are at.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 10, 2012 14:53 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
The compositor knows where the windows are (since it has to draw them on the screen), and in Wayland, the compositor _is_ the window manager.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 10, 2012 16:49 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
from "http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_11"
> How can I replace Wayland's Window Manager?
> The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process. You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors. It is not a specific single compositor or window manager. If you want a different window manager, you can write a new one.
> This may sound like a lot of work, but one of the key points about Wayland is that the boilerplate code to a Wayland compositor is comparable or less than the X boilerplate involved in becoming an X window manager and compositor. Bringing up EGL and GLES2 on the Linux KMS framebuffer and reading input from evdev can be done in less that a thousand lines of code. The Wayland server side library provides the protocol implementation and makes it easy to put the pieces together.
So it seems that it would be perfectly possible to do what the original program did, but it would have to take a entirely different approach.
It seems unlikely that people are going to accept reduced ability to manage windows. So that either means making it possible to script wayland itself or replace the default wayland functionality with something that is scriptable.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 10, 2012 23:54 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
I expect Gnome and KDE will be the first to offer alternative compositors, as they are key to the desktop experience. And I'm sure KDE's is going to be scriptable somehow.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 11, 2012 3:24 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
even if they do, they can still fix that nasty security problem that X11 has
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 11, 2012 5:21 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
From reading the source code of Weston (the 'official' compositor), it doesn't appear that there's a mechanism for custom hooks.
But it's certainly possible to extend it, the code is simple enough: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/tree/
Adding a mechanism for custom hooks would be an interesting project.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 10, 2012 16:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Looks like your application should be a part of the compositor. I'm not sure the current compositor has required hooks for it, but it should be possible to add them.
Gromit for Wayland? Posted Apr 9, 2012 22:49 UTC (Mon) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] Does anybody know, whether it will be possible to implement Gromit on Wayland?
Gromit for Wayland? Posted Apr 10, 2012 12:13 UTC (Tue) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
That is an interesting question to ask on Wayland mailing list, the potential issue I foresee is input redirection: to paint on the screen you need a fullscreen transparent window but you don't want to have the mouse input unless you're in 'painting' mode..
Gromit for Wayland? Posted Apr 11, 2012 9:02 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Being curious I asked this question on Wayland's developper mailing list and Pekka Paalanen (many thanks to him) answered quickly:
- to bind actions to the 'pause' key, this would be a DE specific configuration.
- for the fullscreen transparent Window letting mouse events pass through it: this is possible in Wayland as Wayland clients can define their input region, so when not drawing the input region would be empty, when drawing it would cover the fullscreen.
So Gromit should be possible on Wayland, the only issue is that it would require a DE specific configuration for the keyboard.
The state of Wayland Posted Apr 11, 2012 20:44 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]
I asked at FOSDEM about IME's and generally keyborard-input and Wayland. I seem to remember that input was outside of Wayland's scope.
That doesn't really help us, -- we need something to replace what X does now for input anyway. Especially IME's that work everywhere.
Recently we have even gotten IME's that are nice for us western people; like the N9 Swype keyboard, or any screen-keyboard at all.
Anyone know if this has come any further?
|
|||||||||||||