Re: New user getting started questions

Alyssa Ross
2021-11-03T11:37:59Z

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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.

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…

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