Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy

Waypipe is off to the races as the newest network transparency effort in the Wayland space. Waypipe provides a network transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs/games over a network similar to X11's capabilities and forwarding X over an SSH connection...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Waypipe-Successful-GSoC-2019

[uid313]

How does the network transparency compare between X11, Plan 9 from Bell Labs (uses rio) and Wayland with Waypipe?

[kpedersen]

How does the network transparency compare between X11, Plan 9 from Bell Labs (uses rio) and Wayland with Waypipe?

I don't know about the performance but reading up on it, it looks like it has a bit more context than just sending across a compressed or lossy raster. It sends across "protocol data" but I am not quite sure what that includes, it doesn't seem to be well defined.

I don't quite know how it compares to the following. I am hoping it is more than just raster.

Plan 9 / DrawTerm - Appears as a device block, send shapes, pixels
X11 - Send shapes, pixels, upload groups of pixels to be reused (pixmaps)
RDP - Context of what a button is so can "send buttons" (not portable for this reason), also send pixels, shapes.
VNC - Send compressed / lossy raster
NoMachine/X11 - Basically X11 with many optimisations
Waypipe - ?

From reading it seems it involves shared memory buffers (which is not great for remote work). Does it send GL commands like indirect drawing? It surely would have to to provide an "image" in a format suitable for all the many compositors. It is also my understanding that all individual compositors have to implement this; it isnt like in X11 where a window manager will just benefit "for free" information from the X server.

It would be nice to not have to sit an X11 server ontop of Wayland for the network graphics. Anyone know more about this project?

[emersion]

>Does it send GL commands like indirect drawing?

No, it sends pixels on the wire in an optimized manner.

Note that most X11 clients don't use X11 to draw nowadays. Hence Waypipe should perform better than X11 forwarding.

>It is also my understanding that all individual compositors have to implement this; it isnt like in X11 where a window manager will just benefit "for free" information from the X server.

It acts as a proxy, no need for compositors to do anything special. Just run it under any compositor!

[treba]

The blog post is quite impressive. Running SuperTuxKart:

Using the new --hwvideo flag to enable VAAPI encoding and decoding with a generation 8 Intel iGPU, the framerate goes up to 80 FPS, and bandwidth drops to 4 MB/second.

Gaming over ssh is quite a benchmark for remote protocols. Nice work!

[pal666]

Does it send GL commands like indirect drawing?

wayland knows nothing about gl so why wayland proxy should know anything about gl? client does gl or whatever without wayland and just gives wayland complete frame

It is also my understanding that all individual compositors have to implement this

server having to implement proxy should be a sign of flaw in understanding
on the other hand, x11-like builtin networking does indeed require each server to implement it, so that wouldn't be a disadvantage vs x11

[kpedersen]

No, it sends pixels on the wire in an optimized manner.

What a shame. Brute forcing a raster across, no matter how optimised it will be will never be great across a network; especially for large resolutions.

It will also cause issue for VMs because the rendering will have to be done in software (or weak passthrough drivers).

It will be interesting to measure this solution against X11 with a decent GUI toolkit. I imagine even Windows NT 4.0's old RDP implementation will blow them both out of the water.

Hopefully a smart and modern solution will come in the future

[pal666]

What a shame. Brute forcing a raster across, no matter how optimised it will be will never be great across a network; especially for large resolutions.

lol, i've found someone not aware of youtube in 2019

Hopefully a smart and modern solution will come in the future

this solution is already smarter than your imagination

[bemerk]

How is Citrix doing it in comparison?

[uid313]

So can this thing do AV1?