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0 pointsjude-5y ago0 comments

Are there widely-used X servers that don't support DRI3? Genuine question -- it's been out since 2013. I realize that DRI3 doesn't work over the network (I also never complained about losing X11's network transparency).

> You could do that but such an X server would not really be any practically different from Wayland.

Not quite -- the X server would still provide all the device-independent IPC, input, and screen multiplexing facilities and APIs. Dealing with input isolation could be addressed with an extension.

So I think this answers my question -- Wayland isn't anything special. It sounds like I'd get a lot of mileage out of taking wlroots and adding back in all the device-independent X11 protocols as a Wayland extension. This would basically be the "X server with only DRI3" I described.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

cycloptic5y ago· 2 in thread

AFAIK DRI3 is also Linux-only and is not supported on any X server outside of Linux.

In Wayland those tasks have been split out into libraries. The details of the protocol IPC is handled by libwayland, the input is handled by libinput. Screen multiplexing is specific to the compositor and not really something you can farm out to a library, which is the same as composited X where the compositor process takes over the entire screen and handles all the rendering.

It would be interesting if someone combined an X server with a Wayland server like you described, but I don't think it would be useful. A lot of your legacy applications would still be broken, for example no old clients or window managers are rendering using DRI3. If you want to design an extension for client isolation, the problem there isn't that X doesn't have that but that the existing methods don't really work well. My suggestion there would be to talk to any desktop environments to find out what their requirements are, if they haven't already committed to switching to Wayland already. (i.e. GNOME and KDE already have their solution for this in Wayland) It may be that an additional X extension is unnecessary for what the other desktops require.

jude-OP5y ago

> AFAIK DRI3 is also Linux-only and is not supported on any X server outside of Linux.

So? I never said I cared about the portability of low-level rendering software. It's not like anyone cares that Xenocara and the aperture driver only work on OpenBSD, for example.

> Screen multiplexing is specific to the compositor and not really something you can farm out to a library, which is the same as composited X where the compositor process takes over the entire screen and handles all the rendering.

Hold up. Isn't screen multiplexing and compositing exactly what libwayland gives a program the power to do? You'd build and run a compositor (like Sway, or like Kwin), and it fulfills compositing, screen multiplexing, and so on, as well as IPC, window management, hotkeys, screenshots, etc.

At least with X, these were separate programs you could mix and match.

> It would be interesting if someone combined an X server with a Wayland server like you described, but I don't think it would be useful.

I'd find it useful. I don't care if no one else does, since I'm writing this for myself.

> A lot of your legacy applications would still be broken, for example no old clients or window managers are rendering using DRI3.

I'd add the necessary compatibility code for the programs I need to run. I'd add them in a way that, if others wanted to fork my code, they could easily restore their own legacy code paths.

> If you want to design an extension for client isolation, the problem there isn't that X doesn't have that but that the existing methods don't really work well.

Sounds like a problem with the particular extension, not X11.

> My suggestion there would be to talk to any desktop environments to find out what their requirements are,

Don't care. I'm not doing this for them. I don't use any of them, and they're all dead to me at this point. I'm doing this to keep my minimalist X11 window manager and X11 clients, and to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.

cycloptic5y ago

You asked if other X servers are used, there are other X servers that are widely used outside Linux (Xquartz, Xwin, etc) which would break if the clients required DRI3.

Libwayland is a small library carrying the implementation of the wire protocol, and a few other bits like a simple event loop for servers and a library that can load X cursors. The point with that is that you're bringing your own compositing and multiplexing anyway. From there it's optional if implementations want to put in additional features for IPC, window management, hotkeys, screenshots, etc, and they can choose if they want to put that in the server or put it in a separate program. So you can still mix and match on some level anyway, it's not quite the same though.

I had exactly the same idea as you a few years ago to build something like that and I thought it would be useful too, and I thought about it for a while and realized that it doesn't really give you any of the benefits of Wayland or the benefits of X11. The point with wayland is already that it strips the unnecessary bits out and maintains a legacy code path with XWayland, and the point with X is that it's always going to keep the legacy code running anyway, so you don't gain much by combining them. If you have a minimalist window manager that's only a few thousand lines of code, and you want to get the benefits of Wayland, it's much easier to just port that using wlroots or something than it would be to rewrite the whole X server. That's just my experience.

>Sounds like a problem with the particular extension, not X11.

Since this is an issue with Xorg lacking the right extensions it's basically the same thing.

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