concerns over wayland and need for wayland app display to X Server

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:52:55 -0500
David Jackson <djackson452 at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I am asking for the ability to display a wayland app to an X server. My
> original suggestion was perhaps can be done via a runtime loadable client
> side driver that would support the wayland client API, there would be
> drivers for rendering from a wayland client to a wayland session and to an
> wayland client to an X session and they can be selected at runtime, and the
> selected one loaded into the wayland application. The wayland client driver
> for X client connection to X server could be glue code between wayland APi
> and Xlib.

This does not fit at all in the scope of libwayland-client. But you
might write a ABI-compatible libwayland-client that talks directly to
X, and then LD_PRELOAD it. I do not dare to comment on the sanity of
this approach.

Supporting different display architectures and protocols really is the
toolkits' job.

> as far as the stacking, it went a little over my head. I guess you are
> talking about coordination of the application stacking on the X server and
> the wayland server, and how the stacking models generate expose events. I
> suppose that the wayland server requests pixmaps for newly exposed areas

There are no expose events nor server-inflicted damage to client
buffers in Wayland. At most, there could be an event for "server lost
the whole buffer", but for now there is not.

Perhaps the sanest way (ignoring support by toolkits) is to write a
middle-man server for converting between X and Wayland, if you cannot
live with the existing solutions. You should also look into how the E,
KDE and Gnome window managers are being ported, maybe they can act as
an X wm and a Wayland server at the same time, running on X?

Weston can run on X, but you cannot remote it by X protocol, because
a) Weston requires direct rendering, and b) Weston does not use glX.


Thanks,
pq