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

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 27 February 2012 20:06, David Jackson <djackson452 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:03 PM, David Jackson <djackson452 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> So, I will be able to display wayland session, or did you mean individual
>> wayland apps, onto an X server, over an X protocol connection, to a standard
>> X server? If it is an entire wayland session tht can be displayed over X
>> protocol to a standard X server, that would be sufficient, as long as the
>> wayland session can be displayed only to the X server and does not have to
>> be displayed to real hardware at the same time.
>
>
> As an example, if I wanted to display an wayland session to an  Xvnc server
> for instance, or an Xfree86 server running on another computer. its
> possible, right?
>
> Thanks for your help.

Yes, that's completely correct.  You can also have an X session hosted
inside your Wayland session hosted inside your X session which accepts
remote connections, or any combination you can come up with.

Another thing I should add to the list is that the graphics rendering
is completely unchanged from X11.  The DRI (mid-late 1990s) and DRI2
(mid-late 2000s) extensions are the model for Wayland's rendering; if
you have an X app today, it will make GL calls which will go through
the kernel (which performs basic security/sanity checks) and be
processed directly by the graphics card.  Once rendering is completed,
the client simply asks the X server to display the completed buffer,
without ever having performed any actual rendering through GLX.  In
fact, the server doesn't know the difference between a buffer which
the client has rendered to with hardware-accelerated GL, or which the
client has rendered to in software.

So, in that sense, it's exactly the same as X11 has been since about 1997.

Cheers,
Daniel