XWayland "Rootfull" Changes Merged For Running A Complete Desktop Environment

While XWayland is normally used just for running root-less single applications like games within an otherwise native Wayland desktop, new patches from Red Hat that have been merged into the X.Org Server enhance XWayland's existing "root-full" mode of operation for allowing entire desktop environments and window managers to nicely function within the context of XWayland.

Red Hat engineers Olivier Fourdan and Adam Jackson have been discussing XWayland "rootfull" enhancements in recent weeks and the fruit of that work has now been merged. Via the X.Org Server issue tracker has been the discussion for the past two months over improvements to the XWayland rootfull mode for legacy X11 environments.

Some of the patches merged today clearly spell out: "This is useful when running a complete desktop environment within Xwayland rootful."

Among the changes merged to X.Org Server Git for XWayland include a fullscreen mode for rootfull (spelled as "rootful" for some of the patches as well), fake device grab support, optional support for libdecor when running full-screen, not auto locking the pointer when in rootfull mode, and a variety of other patches to firm up the use-case of being able to run a complete desktop and window manager within an XWayland window.

All the changes are summed up in this MR designated as improving desktop integration for XWayland. It will be interesting to see how Red Hat makes use of this and potentially for moving some non-Wayland supported desktops to run within XWayland on say Fedora in order to eliminate more legacy hardware/DDX components.