Wayland 1.7.0 [LWN.net]

Bryce Harrington has announced the release of Wayland 1.7.0. "The Wayland protocol may be considered "done" but that doesn't mean there's not work to be done. This release focused on major improvements to Wayland's documentation, minor improvements to the testsuite, and some scattered bugfixes to the code itself."

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Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 17, 2015 19:26 UTC (Tue) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (31 responses)

What's the recommended way to get remote access to GUI programs using Wayland? Last I saw, it appeared that you could use Weston (the sample implementation of Wayland) and the Weston Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Or is there a better way? The ability to do remote network access to GUI apps is still the killer feature of X, and it's even more important now with remote servers / cloud-based systems.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 17, 2015 20:22 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

RDP with Weston could work, especially if you want to remote the whole desktop, VNC might work too but I wouldn't discount using X11 for remote display either, pretty much any application/toolkit which can output via Wayland comes from the X Window System world and can output via X11 too.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 9:00 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (18 responses)

As raven667 said: for remote access use X currently and I think that before deprecating X, KDE and Gnome Wayland compositors will get the equivalent of Weston's RDP backend.

So remote access should still be available for 'normal desktops' but there are Wayland compositors without 'built-in' remote access (Jolla phone for example), yes.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 19:58 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (17 responses)

Just to be clear: before deprecating X there needs to be a way to send per-application windows remotely, NOT just entire desktops. It's not clear to me when people say "RDP backend" if they mean only a replacement for remoting an entire desktop. That can be useful but that's not the primary way most people use X remotely, in my experience.

For example, I use "ssh -X myworksystem xapplication" constantly... that, or something similar, needs to work in Wayland before it can completely replace X.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 20:43 UTC (Wed) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (6 responses)

You can continue to use X11 for that. There is no problem with forwarding an X11 application to a Xwayland server.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 21:12 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (5 responses)

I understand but the post I was responding to was talking about what was needed before "deprecating X" which I took to mean no longer providing xwayland or similar. I'm just saying that before X can stop being supported, this capability needs to be provided in base wayland.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 7:05 UTC (Thu) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (4 responses)

Ah to me "deprecating X" means "running Xwayland" and "applications still support X11 optionally". Complete removal I would call "obsoleting X" and I do not expect this to happen in the next decades. I would love to get rid of it, but I'm too realistic on it. There will of course be environments which do not support X11 clients, but that's not different to the current state either - please try running your X11 application on Android ;-)

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 25, 2015 8:04 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

The fear from some people is that applications will stop being written to run with X, at which point, remoting the display for those applications will no longer work.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 25, 2015 9:57 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (2 responses)

> The fear from some people is that applications will stop being written to run with X, at which point, remoting the display for those applications will no longer work.

Well it would no longer work only for those who use a Wayland compositor which doesn't provide remoting, currently there's only Weston (AFAIK) which provide remoting, but it's still very early days..

Plus even if your DE's Wayland compositor doesn't provide remoting, I think that it's possible to have another Wayland compositor which you would use only for applications that you want to display on remote screens, no?

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 25, 2015 20:03 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

wasn't the response to 'what about remoting?' in this thread 'just use X, it still works'?

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 25, 2015 20:50 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> wasn't the response to 'what about remoting?' in this thread 'just use X, it still works'?

I think that is still correct, the previous comment was a hypothetical about what would happen if someone made a Wayland-only application, which is something that currently is not significant or doesn't exist at all, then there would be a major itch to scratch on making a Wayland compositor for remoting individual applications, the existing work on adding RDP output support to Weston shows the way on how this could be done, if you did the support outside the toolkits.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 22:44 UTC (Wed) by Tarnyko (subscriber, #90061) [Link]

You can already do that the dirty way : there is a Weston shell named "fullscreen-shell" which start Wayland applications in fullscreen mode. Just start a separate Weston-RDP instance with fullscreen-shell, run your app in it, connect to it remotely, and you're done.

Now if you want something more X11-styled, you'd have to hack the RDP compositor to send individual windows (basically emulating the seamless rdp functionality). It's perfectly feasible. Have little time and demand for that personally.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 0:51 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (8 responses)

I want one even further down the line: taking a window on *that* Wayland compositor and "moving" it to *this* Wayland compositor. Think of it like tmux for pixel-based applications.

Can move windows with Winswitch.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 1:43 UTC (Thu) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link] (1 responses)

That appears to be the what Xpra/Winswitch does. I understand Xpra is adding support for Wayland.

Can move windows with Winswitch.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 12:06 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Last I checked xpra, it forced you to decide at launch time whether to use it or not, so you'd need to run it as X to really get the full benefits. Wayland *seems* more stackable so I could run Weston or something on top of xpra to get this (or vice versa; something similar to tmux and urxvt here I guess). The real problem is usually threading an OpenGL context through all of it to get actual hardware.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 16:53 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (5 responses)

You still need client awareness for this. What happens when they have different capabilities? Really I think the solution to this is pervasive/fast/reliable state save and restore throughout clients - something which mobile has been doing for the last several years.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 17:00 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

I thought Wayland clients didn't know where they were mapped within the entire screen, so pushing the pixels over a network for an already started app shouldn't be impossible without client knowledge (at least as far as I understand). More intelligent awareness can come later; I just don't like apps being jailed to the monitor at work if the snow keeps me at home for a day.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 17:12 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (3 responses)

If you're moving to another machine, you're not going to retain your on-screen position (not least because they might well be different layouts/resolutions). If it's about restoring state within the same session or session type, then that can be handled by an opaque session-state cookie which the application and compositor negotiate between them to save and restore, which represents the state the compositor is retaining for that client.

If it's just about pushing pixels though: the client is the one doing the rendering, so it already _knows_ what pixels are on the screen. So nothing required there.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 20, 2015 20:27 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

As I understand it, the Wayland window belongs to the local display. So the remote app shouldn't give a monkeys about "on screen position", it just cares about the relative co-ordinates inside the window.

aiui, this functionality has been explicitly designed to be possible with Wayland - there is no implementation because none of the devs consider it personally desirable, so they haven't done it. When someone steps up to the plate, it won't be that hard.

Cheers,
Wol

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 23, 2015 4:36 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

FWIW, I'm pretty sure daniels is a Wayland developer :) . Anyways, for now I'd be satisfied with just pixels; more complicated stuff can come later.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 26, 2015 18:34 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

> aiui, this functionality has been explicitly designed to be possible with Wayland - there is no implementation because none of the devs consider it personally desirable, so they haven't done it.

There's been an implementation floating around for the last 18 months or so, but no-one has taken it up and finished it. This implements a hybrid/proxy model, where the client always sees a local compositor, which proxies all requests through to the remote compositor. It's had some pretty impressive results thanks to some nice compression / change detection: http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/rolling-hash/

http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/weston/log/?h=remote

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 12:38 UTC (Wed) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (8 responses)

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html

AIUI, Xwayland gives you everything you know and love with any other Xserver, including remote traffic from clients via the normal X protocol, as it just looks like an Xserver to clients, and just happens to use wayland/weston as the local display back-end.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 13:49 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

But, I hope, without the fundamentally uncorrectable security holes of the X protocol?

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 14:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Unless each X client gets it's own X server then I suppose it's not going to help much.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 18:21 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Each client getting its own X server would be a great way to sandbox them but even with all the X clients sharing a server that still provides separation between local Wayland processes, the compositor and X clients, so X clients can't mess with the rest of the desktop.

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 15:55 UTC (Wed) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

At least the Xserver will have a far smaller surface area and will no longer be running as root. But malicious clients being able to do bad things to other clients on the same server is a fundamental historical feature.

XWayland

Posted Feb 18, 2015 15:20 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (3 responses)

XWayland is a plausible intermediate step. However, many users (especially many who handle servers or remote systems) will demand that every toolkit and GUI program must continue to support X (in addition to the Wayland interface) until there's a good widely-accepted way to do remote GUI access with just the Wayland interface.

XWayland

Posted Feb 18, 2015 22:20 UTC (Wed) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

Not to be rude, but if this is not backed up by development effort (either by paying someone like Red Hat or doing it yourself) any "demands" that people make will most likely be ignored.

I can "demand" that Linux should support my 5K retina iMac, but that has not worked out very well so far....

XWayland

Posted Feb 19, 2015 15:10 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

If you want to look how it should be done I'd ignore X completely.

The situation for remote applications in Microsoft Windows is vastly superior to that offered by X Windows and has been for a long time now.

Unfortunately even RDP is a bit of a low point nowadays.

The Org I work at nowadays has teams of people that use Linux-based thin clients that run Windows-based VDI that is hosted, very literally, on a different continent. For people that get a full desktop the 'start menu' has a mixture of local and remote applications and what applications they get exposed/access to is controlled by Active Directory group membership. The vast majority of users will never know which ones are remote and which ones are local as it integrates so naturally into the desktop. You have to know what to look for to spot remote apps.

Compared to that even something as simple as running a remote X11 browser over 802.11g wireless is so unpleasant that I avoid it as much as possible.

XWayland

Posted Feb 19, 2015 18:57 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]

That's great for setups where both the client and server are pre-configured to interoperate.

But what if you want to run an application from a new machine? From my Linux or OS X desktop I can simply do `ssh -Y some.server.com app-foo` and the application magically appears and runs on my desktop, without any configuration whatsoever. Is it just as simple?

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 17:09 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link] (1 responses)

As an example common use case:
I am working on a remote machine over ssh. It is running scientific (rhel clone) 5 or 6. A simulation has just finished and I want to look at the pdf file it output. Currently I just run 'evince filename' and get it instantly on my screen.

In a years time, when my laptop is running a wayland based desktop, and the remote machine is still running some crusty old version, will this still work? The odds of getting the sysadmin to install anything special on the remote machines is effectively zero. I don't really care what protocol is used to shift the pixels over the network, i just want it to work in a similar way.

I am guessing that having xwayland on laptop solves this? but will it need any extra configuration? will it require anything new at the remote end?

Wayland 1.7.0 - remote access?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 17:50 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I am guessing that having xwayland on laptop solves this? but will it need any extra configuration? will it require anything new at the remote end?

I don't think there is any special integration to make this work, XWayland is an X server just like any other so it integrates transparently with SSH in the same way, I don't think anything new will need to be done.

Maynard?

Posted Feb 18, 2015 5:42 UTC (Wed) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] (1 responses)

Speaking of which, does anybody know if the related project Maynard is still alive?

https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard/issues/30

Maynard?

Posted Feb 19, 2015 16:57 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

No commits since december
https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard/commits/master

Looks like wayland and maynard have dropped to low priority at raspberrypi foundation.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/changes-to-the-raspbian-user-i...

Its a shame because the performance of maynard was really good.