LPC: Life after X [LWN.net]

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 5, 2010 21:35 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

I think certain of the remote protocol implementations have the ability to forward a single window, for example seamless RDP.

It would be good if someone knowledgeable about the state-of-the-art available in competing remote protocols could shake their cystalball and peer in the not-to-distance-future of 2 to 4 years from now (the timescale for Wayland dominance) and try to paint a picture of what should be possible. SPICE and RDP being the obvious candidates that leap to mind for me. I think some of us curmudgeony people instinctively think VNC is meant to fill this role because its been the workhorse for many of us for a long time (too long maybe if the old dogs and new tricks adage is true.) But maybe that's the wrong technology to slot in as a puzzle piece here.

-jef

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 21, 2010 13:00 UTC (Sun) by 9000 (guest, #71396) [Link]

There's a project aimed to achieve exactly this: http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Xzibit

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 5, 2010 21:41 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (10 responses)

Well virt-install is interesting example. I was going to mention that virt-manager and related tools has it's own protocol for remotely administrating machines and supports lots of nice features for setting up administration roles and integration into more enterprisy-environments and that X networking is probably about the least useful, least efficient, and least secure way to remote access libvirt controlled VMs. Hell it even supports accessing Libvirtd over SSH if you want to do that.

But then I realized that you were talking about Oracle's tools, Not Linux/KVM stuff.

:D

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 5, 2010 21:56 UTC (Fri) by ttrafford (guest, #15383) [Link] (9 responses)

You were right the first thought, I did actually mean the libvirt tools and apparently I just didn't know about the remote management stuff. That wouldn't actually help me much though since I don't have virt-manager or virt-install on my Mac which is my client-side connection.

As for security, I personally do everything over ssh and let it handle tunneling X.

It's just that "single-application, automatically-handled/forwarded-by-ssh" situation that I hope is continued after the dust settles.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 8, 2010 9:38 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (8 responses)

> It's just that "single-application, automatically-handled/forwarded-by-ssh" situation that I hope is continued after the dust settles.

Given that the X server is still going to be around in a slightly less privileged position on the stack, those applications will still be able to work as they do today if nothing better is found.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 8, 2010 9:45 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

> ...those applications will still be able to work as they do today if nothing better is found.

One dodgy thought - what about a remote application embedding a small web server and doing http on stdin and stdout rather than over a socket, so that a local web browser could start the application over ssh?

I dare say of course that if that idea isn't completely useless someone will already have done it.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 6:04 UTC (Fri) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (1 responses)

> what about [...] embedding a small web server

http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Clutch-L...

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 9:04 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

>> what about [...] embedding a small web server

> http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Clutch-L...

That is still going over a socket though, or so it looks to me, not stdin and stdout forwarded by ssh.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 6:02 UTC (Fri) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (4 responses)

> Given that the X server is still going to be around...

That won't help you much if the application is no longer able to act as an X client.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 8:56 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Given that the X server is still going to be around...

>That won't help you much if the application is no longer able to act as an X client.

Why shouldn't it be able to? If the X server is around people can write new X clients if it makes sense (although they will probably find other ways to do network forwarding when they start to think about it). If it uses Gtk+ for X it can even blend in seamlessly with the non-X clients.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 10:36 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

if all the new applications are written to run on X then wayland has no native apps and does no good.

if all the new applications are written to run on wayland, then they cannot be clients for X and the fact that there is still an X server you can run on top of wayland does no good (except for obsolete apps that pre-date wayland)

do you see why people who need network transparency may be opposed to the common development going in a direction that doesn't support it?

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 19:14 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

Your reply implies that it's impossible to layer network transparency on top of Wayland. I doubt that's true.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 12, 2010 19:39 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you are right, I am assuming that good network transparency (as opposed to what VNC etc provide) it is going to require some consideration in the design of the windowing system, and since the people working on the windowing system are taking the attitude 'nobody needs network transparency', such consideration is unlikely.

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 7, 2010 11:23 UTC (Sun) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

You only ever run xeyes to confirm x forwarding is working, without x forwarding you wouldn't.

Configure virt-manager properly and run a local virt-install instance...

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 10, 2010 11:11 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Personally I run xlogo for that. :)

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 11, 2010 12:31 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

Indeed, VNC has nothing to do with X. I can't seemlessly copy/paste text, moving a windows is horribly slow in VNC, and it's not compatible with the X applications that already run on other systems. It's not the way to replace X. In my opinion, the proper way to do that is to have the network not between X layers but next to them. In short, applications should be able to more or less directly communicate with hardware, and an X network server should be available as any other application (think Xceed and equivalent under other OSes). Dynamic libraries should provide the alternate API needed for local applications to use the X network protocol to render on remote displays.

I can say I'm using X remotely on a daily basis, including between various systems. It would be a big functional loss if networking would simply be removed. That would be one reason to switch to a more open system :-/