Sway, Wayland, and Xwayland

[Jan Beich]

(CC'ing appropriate public list. I don't help privately.)

Dale Brazelton <dalebrazelton at outlook.com> writes:

> Hello! I saw you were the Sway maintainer so I thought I'd direct this
> question to you. I'm a fairly new FreeBSD user. I run 12 stable on an
> AMD X470 board with an AMD Vega 64 graphics card. I use drm-kmod with
> amdgpu driver for graphics support. All the packages I use are built
> from ports using poudriere. I've managed to get Sway working but am
> unable to get any X11 apps to work thru xwayland. For instance if I
> start sway and then start firefox from my terminal app (alacritty)
> nothing happens. Firefox appears to start, and indeed if I use ps - a
> it shows up in the app list but it is not visible. I've done the usual
> "googling" but all I've found are vague references to xwayland not
> working properly. Do you know if this is an issue with sway or a
> deeper problem with amdgpu? I noticed amdgpu is based off an older
> Linux kernel and the ports version of xwayland is behind upstream so I
> wondered if that could be the problem. I would like to help resolve
> this issue for myself and all FreeBSD users but I'm not sure where to
> start. I can read and write basic C code but I'm not a professional
> programmer. I would also be glad to do some testing if
> necessary. Thanks in advance for any assistance you could give.

Maybe an issue with www/firefox. Try www/firefox-esr instead or another
X11 application. Firefox supports Wayland natively which can be enabled
by defining GDK_BACKEND=wayland or MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 (since 66.0, preferred)
via environ(7) variable.

Did you change any port options in x11-wm/sway or one of its dependencies?
Did you define LIBGL_DRI3_ENABLE=1 in environ(7) to avoid llvmpipe fallback?
Does $DISPLAY in alacritty session and Xwayland 1st argument in ps(1) match?
Can you show "sway -d" output? IIRC, Sway starts Xwayland on first use.
Can you try "firefox --new-instance --profile $(mktemp -dt ffprofile)"?