Running The Latest GNOME Wayland Shell On Fedora 20

With the Fedora 20 beta coming up I decided to see where the latest Fedora 20 packages are now at for their support of Wayland and the GNOME Shell Wayland session. In particular, looking at whether the session is still buggy and how the XWayland performance is for Linux gaming.

After the initial GNOME Wayland support landed in Fedora 20 I ran the first benchmarks from Fedora 20 Wayland, where the X.Org Server is still used by default but the Wayland-based session is offered as a "tech preview" for developers and enthusiasts.

With the Fedora 20 packages as of 28 October, there still isn't any Wayland option offered from the GDM log-in screen, but it's still easy to try out Wayland using the experimental packages.

In my original Fedora 20 Wayland testing, the performance overhead of running Linux OpenGL games through XWayland for the GNOME Shell with Mutter-based compositor was mixed. In that testing, segmentation faults were also a sadly common occurrence during testing.

When running the very latest Fedora 20 tests, there were still some segmentation faults tracing back to the Mutter library that were only present when using the Wayland-based session, but the session seemed to crash less than in the original testing.

On the following pages are the updated Fedora 20 tests when running the GNOME Shell under Wayland and then in the current stock configuration of using an X.Org Server. Wayland won't become the default on Fedora until at least versions 21 or 22. Testing this time around was from an Intel Core i3 4130 with Haswell HD Graphics 4400. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite.