Sway, Wayland, and Xwayland

[Dale Brazelton]

Hello

Thanks to you both for the feedback. I will act on the suggestions and report back tonight. Also I joined the X11 mailing list as suggested. Is that the proper place to discuss drm-kmod, amdgpu, and Wayland related issues?

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________________________________
From: Johannes Lundberg <johalun at FreeBSD.org>
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2019 9:24:17 PM
To: Dale Brazelton
Cc: x11 at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Sway, Wayland, and Xwayland


On 6/10/19 7:03 PM, Jan Beich wrote:
> (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)"?
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Hi

I've recently been playing around with this a bit.

xfce applications like xfce4-terminal seem to use wayland backend by
default and work out of the box in Sway.

firefox needs environment variable GDK_BACKEND=1 to be set (or
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 if that's now the recommend way). With this it runs
fine in Sway.

Other simple X apps like xclock, or even glxgears that need Xwayland run
but are not displayed. The window seem to be  simply hidden. IIRC there
was a fix to this but I can't remember what that was. I tried
enable/disable DRI3 but to no success...

I'm not sure though how well your graphics card is supported by
12-stable. You might have better luck with drm v5.0 drivers. I'm
currently working on putting together some live usb images for testing
that has drivers and Xfce/Sway desktop environments installed. Download
from https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https:%2F%2Fpeople.freebsd.org%2F~johalun%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C6ae6dc09fff74a28408b08d6ee13eaf4%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636958166643369338&sdata=WAXc9uu0MblMXXvvPWMfwtgTcUVFmbmIKM5ZF0bm4NQ%3D&reserved=0 and burn to a 16GB memstick if
you want to test out an early version. Drm v5.0 drivers are only for
13-current at the moment but will be available later for 12-stable and 12.1.

Cheers