XWayland Rootful HiDPI Support Under Review

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XWayland Rootful HiDPI Support Under Review

Following the recent talk of XWayland's rootful mode becoming more useful, Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has continued enhancing the XWayland rootful support. Last week he opened up the merge request for adding HiDPI support to this mode...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-HiDPI-Open

[s_j_newbury]

I've been trying this out with Steam under Sway. It does work somewhat. I'm not sure whether it really is a great solution to this particular issue though.

Xwayland -fullscreen -retro :11 -glamor gl -hidpi -once &
sleep 2
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 DISPLAY=:11 steam &
kwin_x11 --display :11​

I needed the WM because otherwise Steam opens unmanaged windows. I used kwin because I happen to have it installed. The dynamic resizing of the root window doesn't seem to be working for me under Sway, but "mode changes" via RandR are working.

[ThomasD]

With this change people can run e.g. XFCE4 with XWayland?
Sounds amazing.

[ehansin]

I just read Olivier's linked blog post and also part 1 of this series. Really good reads and informative!

[milo_hoffman]

This may become the safer way forward for those who want to run legacy window managers, given that the X11 server code is basically abandoned and a security ticking time bomb at this point.

[slalomsk8er]

This may become the safer way forward for those who want to run legacy window managers, given that the X11 server code is basically abandoned and a security ticking time bomb at this point.

I guess, it will also provide a path to do remote x for legacy admin interfaces like the one from CA Spectrum.

[ezst036]

This may become the safer way forward for those who want to run legacy window managers, given that the X11 server code is basically abandoned and a security ticking time bomb at this point.

Is X really abandoned though, if its just morphed its existence from bare-metal X to an abstracted-away XWayland? XWayland ultimately is X, right? It's basically a containerized version IIRC.

[ssokolow]

This may become the safer way forward for those who want to run legacy window managers, given that the X11 server code is basically abandoned and a security ticking time bomb at this point.

*nod*

I imagine, for people who don't like Wayland or need some feature not yet available in it, it'll become important to be able to run a stack like "Wayland-only apps inside cage with an X11 backend, running on top of rootful XWayland, fullscreened inside cage with a GBM backend" to retain upstream support while having what is effectively an X11 desktop.

[Hibbelharry]

Is X really abandoned though, if its just morphed its existence from bare-metal X to an abstracted-away XWayland? XWayland ultimately is X, right? It's basically a containerized version IIRC.

I tend to agree, but the very definition of X isn't clear at all, at least not in discussions here. Do we talk Xservers here or X.org X11 or generally the X11 protocol?

A Xserver directly running on hardware will be gone in the foreseeable future. Knowing that we can assume a lot of the current x.org x11 codebase is going into disrepair. Removing some of the very underused and superseeded parts of x.org X11 has already happend in the past when things like Xprint were removed. When will be the time to say this isn't X anymore?

I could raise a lot of questions like that one and be a bit philosophical. Or we'll just wait for birdie and his gang. I bet they'll have their own interpretation

[binarybanana]

Xwayland is mostly Xorg with input/output handled by Wayland. It's similar to Xnest, nesting Wayland compositors or running Weston in a regular window on Xorg.