LWN: Comments on "The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2"

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

daenzer — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:13:04 +0000

The latter. Waypipe works mostly the same as SSH X11 forwarding from the user PoV. Both can be active for the same SSH connection, and the user can choose Wayland or X per-application via environment variables.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

daenzer — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:09:03 +0000

No need to use Xorg for that, it works exactly the same (via Xwayland) in a Wayland session.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

raven667 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 05:32:22 +0000

> waypipe

that may be cool too, but I don't think that X11 support in existing apps and libraries is going away anytime soon, even if the display is managed by a Wayland compositor, Xwayland is going to exist for a _loooong_ time to maintain compatibility with existing apps. More than enough time to make a new standard default for new deployed systems and new apps out of the various ways you could forward existing apps over ssh with wayland if we wanted to deprecate X11 for new apps as it has been done for compositors/windowmanagers.

Just the other day I forwarded an app over SSH/X11 onto Windows10/WSLg with Xwayland transparently and it worked the way it always has.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

GhePeU — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 23:43:29 +0000

I've seen it mentioned before but I haven't had the time to actually try it, what's the user experience with waypipe? I read the documentation and the examples but I'm still not sure.

Do you need a new, dedicated SSH/waypipe session for each application or can you just connect to a remote machine, launch and close all the applications you want, even more than one at a time, and keep using the SSH session interactively for CLI tools?

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

tdz — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 08:49:58 +0000

That's much appreciated. Thank you.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

pizza — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 15:01:57 +0000

> Take a look at waypipe.

FWIW I use waypipe at least every few days; it "feels" more bandwidth sensitive than classic X forwarding, but considerably less sensitive to connection latencies.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

intelfx — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 06:11:18 +0000

Take a look at waypipe.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

NightMonkey — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:28:32 +0000

I totally get why Wayland is necessary, and applaud the work. There is a lot of obvious benefits that this series of articles helps detail.

I still use Xorg on my personal systems because I still find it both cool and useful to occasionally forward X apps remotely via OpenSSH to my primary laptop. I will miss that feature when it is gone.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

tux3 — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 11:37:03 +0000

Not an expert, but my understanding is the following:

Pipewire is a thing that applications talk to to shuffle audio and video buffers around, optionally doing some extra processing. It has nothing to do with the compositor, but it's good at exposing reasonable audio/video APIs to apps.

The wayland compositor is the only one with direct access the screen data. Actual implementations of the compositor are free to add their own stuff on top of the (small) base of wayland APIs, and they provide a permission system.

Apps ask permissions through XDG Desktop Portals, which is a DBus API with an implementation for each desktop environment that might for instance show a pop up to the user with "X app wants to record your screen, Yay/Nay?"

The implementation of the XDG portal for accessing the screen uses Pipewire for the logistics of passing buffers around, so that's why it sits in there in the middle between the compositor and the app asking for access. Pipewire asks the compositor, which pushes its data inside Pipewire, and the app gets the data from Pipewire through the portal.

Pipewire and portals is just the de-facto standard in the implementation-specific world of Wayland compositors. Wayland as she is spoke.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

vadim — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 09:59:02 +0000

The one thing I'm still a bit confused about is why PipeWire has anything to do with screen sharing.

Could somebody explain? PipeWire is an entirely separate project from a compositor, so what does it do to get the screen data?

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

bluca — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:34:46 +0000

Very well written and informative articles, really enjoyed reading both parts