wayland server backend

[Antoine Martin]

We should be able to plug into wayland and provide remote access for it.

Reading ​this freerdp implementation, it doesn't look too hard.
The main difficulty may be in glueing the C api with our (mostly) python server code.

What makes this now more interesting than before is the availability of ​sub-surfaces - which would allow us to get YUV data for window's sub-regions (like an embedded video player in a browser), without effort.

[Antoine Martin]

Milestone renamed

[Antoine Martin]

More links:

• ​libweston-desktop: The goals of libweston-desktop are to make it easier to bring-up compositors and also to make it easier to support future versions of XDG_Shell.
• ​swc: A library for making a simple Wayland compositor
• ​wlc: Wayland compositor library
• ​tutorials: wayland-compositor: minimal wayland compositor
• ​https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayland_features#remote_display: remote display for wayland

[Antoine Martin]

Milestone renamed

[Antoine Martin]

Recent discussion on ​wayland-devel with links:

• ​Remote display with 3D acceleration using Wayland/Weston: Therefore no support for hardware accelerated OpenGL gets advertised to clients, and clients fall back to software GL.. The hardest part in adding the support to the RDP-backend is implementing the buffer content access efficiently
• ​Remote display with 3D acceleration using Wayland/Weston: but Waltham does no good if you are already going to use VNC protocol or RDP or any other existing protocol.
• ​waltham: Waltham IPC Library : Waltham is a network IPC library designed to resemble Wayland both protocol and protocol-API wise. - probably not useful for us.

[Antoine Martin]

Out of time again.

[Antoine Martin]

New wiki: ​Wayland Remoting. It looks nowhere near ready yet.

[Antoine Martin]

This would also solve #510

See:

• ​Writing a Wayland Compositor, Part 1: Hello wlroots
• ​Fedora : WaylandRemoteDesktop (still VNC-like!)
• ​Screen Sharing Support In WebRTC For Wayland Sessions
• ​Writing a basic compositor using libweston-desktop - user questions don't seem to be getting a lot of answers on the mailing list, and with the complete lack of documentation... (see ​The situation with Wayland need to change)
• ​Add support for screen sharing with PipeWire on Wayland
• ​Building Wayland desktop components with layer shell: A desktop that doesn't work is a desktop that is not going to get used, security doesn't matter if nobody is using it

[Antoine Martin]

Note: it is already possible to use a wayland server as an X11 vfb for xpra. ie: based on ticket:1656#comment:12 with weston:

weston --no-config --socket=wayland-30 &
export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-30
Xwayland :30 -noreset &
xpra start-desktop :30 --use-display --start=lxsession
xpra attach :30

[Antoine Martin]

As per ​Wayland misconceptions debunked: Things like sending pixel buffers to the compositor are already abstracted on Wayland and a network-backed implementation could be easily made.. I'm not sure it is really that easy: the handling of pixel buffers is just one small part of what we do.
The tone of this post is feisty! The problem is that no one seems to really care: all of the people who want network transparency drank the anti-Wayland kool-aid instead of showing up to put the work in.
Yes, more work for us. Yay. Rejoice!
Anyway, since they're willing to help, it's worth looking into: If you want to implement this, though, we’re here and ready to support you! Drop by the wlroots IRC channel and we’re prepared to help you implement this

[Antoine Martin]

For native client support, see #2243.

[Antoine Martin]

For keyboard mapping support, see #1049 and ticket:2368#comment:1

[Antoine Martin]

​The Wayland Protocol.

[Antoine Martin]

We're in the same boat as ​barrier, though there are now virtual device methods? wlroots based VNC server and the protocols it uses virtual_keyboard_unstable_v1 and wlr_virtual_pointer_unstable_v1
(but "unstable" and v1.. been burnt by wayland v1 before)

[Antoine Martin]

This is for a secondary virtual screen, but maybe the code to use is the same?
​wayvnc : Create virtual screen to use as second screen