Waypipe: GSOC project complete

[Manuel Stoeckl]

The Google Summer of Code project to develop Waypipe (a proxy for
Wayland applications, that can be used similarly to `ssh -X`), is
now complete. I will continue to fix bug reports, clean up the code,
extend protocol support, and try to implement feature requests, but my
time will be more limited.

The blog posts associated with the GSOC project are available at [0];
the most recent one gives an overview of how Waypipe works.

Since the initial announcement on the mailing list ([1]), there have
been only a few feature changes, most notably the introduction of
hardware video encoding/decoding with VAAPI (when available) and the
ability to change at runtime the Unix socket linking a Waypipe
client/server pair. (With some additional setup work, this can help
keep GUI applications alive when e.g. an ssh tunnel breaks, pausing
their connections to the Wayland compositor until a new transport is
provided. See the man page :-)) There have also been many internal
changes, including better use of multithreading, a more specialized
protocol parser, and SIMD routines for change detection.

[0] https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html
[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-June/040687.html

You can find the project at

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

[This URL may still change in coming months, as I'd like to move waypipe
to the /wayland group on the Freedesktop.org GitLab instance, or into
something unambiguous like a /wayland/tools/ subgroup, with the very
useful side effect of making it easier for people to contribute or (if
already trusted to commit to Wayland or Weston) merge changes.]


mstoeckl