Re: New user getting started questions

Thomas Leonard
2021-11-03T19:17:25Z

On Wed, 3 Nov 2021 at 11:37, Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
>
> Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Sat, 13 Mar 2021 at 07:21, Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]
> >> For the short-term, it would be fairly easy to make a slight change to
> >> the wayland-virtwl-proxy so that a version of it could run on the
> >> host. Unlike the guest one, which has to copy frames and deal with
> >> virtwl, this would just pass FDs through. And instead of connecting to
> >> /dev/wl0, it would just connect to the host compositor socket. It
> >> would then block access to screenshots (since it doesn't proxy that),
> >> and would add the VM's name to each window's title.
> >>
> >> Eventually I'd like to turn it into a full compositor, but I'm going
> >> to be busy for the next 6 months at least.
> >
> > The 6 months passed and I had a bit more free time to work on this,
> > and now the proxy runs on the host too!
> >
> > I didn't have time to write a compositor though, because I ended up
> > spending my whole holiday getting Xwayland support added (see
> > https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/10/30/xwayland/ if you want the
> > details - it's surprisingly complicated!).
>
> That's awesome — thanks for keeping us updated!
>
> Have you seen the new mechanism for Wayland over virtio-gpu context
> types that Google are moving towards? It's supported in mainline Linux
> now, and in Sommelier. I'd expect virtio-wl to go away at some point in
> favour of that.

Ah, is that released already? I saw you mentioned it in your handy
graphics write-up, but I thought it wasn't due until Linux 5.16:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VirtIO-Linux-5.16-Ctx-Type

I don't know any details about it, but unless it's massively more
complicated than virtwl it shouldn't be any trouble to switch to it.
Will be nice not having to port virtwl to each new kernel!

> Also, I've been following some Qubes work recently, and it sounds like
> they might be interested in doing X11 over Wayland in a way that
> wouldn't need special compositor support (and the corresponding
> potential for security bugs). It sounds like it would be a lot of work
> though, so we'll see…

Isn't that what Sommelier and wayland-proxy-virtwl are both doing
already though? There's no need for any X11 support in the host
compositor with them.
--
talex5 (GitHub/Twitter) http://roscidus.com/blog/
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