Wayland Network Transparency Patches Published

For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was "what about network transparency?!" Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network traparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP.

Derek began his patch series today by writing. "I saw a presentation once where someone said that even the simplest
implementation of wayland network transparency that just pushed the existing protocol over tcp/ip would still be better than X. Let's test that theory."

He found that application startup time is "shockingly fast due to Wayland's excellent protocol", but limiting this network transparency support right now is poor damage tracking and not yet implementing any compression when sending data over the wire. This "Wayland Over Wire" support allows for Wayland compositors to add one line of code to enable the remote compositor support, but there isn't yet support for EGL and DMA_BUF by clients as currently only wl_shm buffers.

This Wayland network transparency support weighs in at just about one thousand lines of code. More details can be found via this patch series and this Samsung OSG post. So right now this is a small but significant step towards network transparency and another item for hitting feature parity with X11/X.Org.