“It runs rift quality experiences”, that’s Zuckerberg’s words. And they’re twice wrong.

Rift device runs tethered to a PC, which is a x86 architecture based machine. The Quest will be running on a Snapdragon 8xx processor, which is a mobile processor, SoC architecture. There’s no way to compare the mobile architecture’s processing capabilities with the x86 one and its way more powerful CPUs / GPUs – roughly speaking, one focuses on power consumption while the other on performance.

So, no “rift quality” into Quest.

The other thing is that the OS, drivers and graphics libraries are different on each architecture, so say your latest shader feature will be different on each architecture and, in principle the same binary application won’t be able to run on both. In other words, this means that you will need to tell the 3D artist and the programmer to work the application out again… and they will get really mad at you! :)

Therefore, Oculus Quest won’t “run rift” existing apps and games either. They will need to be re-built.

https://01.org/chromium/blogs/tiagovignatti/2014/chromium-ozone-gbm-explained

https://01.org/ozone-wayland/blogs/tiagovignatti/2014/chromium-browser-wayland

communities

There are three main projects involved in here: Chromium, Wayland and Ozone-Wayland. In Chromium, there is a very big and geek community that mainly produces Chrome browser and Chrome-OS. Very near to that one there’s Blink engine’s community, which interacts (and overlaps) a lot with the Chromium’s; I can’t tell exactly in numbers but there’s huge number of people, vendors and commercial involved in Chromium and, more important to us, there’s a lot of quality code being cooked in there for leveraging Web technologies in general.

In the other side, we have Wayland, the project that hosts the development of a Linux graphics system. Its goal is to give to applications the best graphics performance that can be extracted from the hardware. The community in there mainly produces the Wayland client/server libraries and Weston, the window server to hosts applications.

Now, somewhere in between Wayland’s and Chromium’s, the Ozone-Wayland community will start to grow. Ozone, the Chromium’s meta-platform for supporting different windowing systems, has given the possibility of building the whole Wayland support outside the Chromium and Wayland code-bases — basically each project then has its own code base. It may take a second of reflexion, but it’s an wonderful way of organizing the development because a community doesn’t need to step on the other. And that’s the main point because, grossly speaking, Web developers don’t want know core graphics and hardware details, while the window system’s don’t want to know about Web technologies. Using this kind of organization, Ozone-Wayland therefore hosts the tough task of bridging Wayland graphics for Chromium, and on doing so also diminishes the burden of the two other big communities having to interact directly with each other.

products cheat-sheet.

It’s good to remember what each of these three projects are building. A quick guide follows:

– Chromium: Blink Web engine, Content Shell (used for runtime’s, browsers, etc), Chrome browser, Ash UI, Chrome-OS, among others.

– Wayland: libwayland-server, libwayland-client, Weston window compositor, Desktop Shell (a “toy” shell UI, for testing purposes).

– Ozone-Wayland: libozone-wayland, that relying on libwayland-client and linking with all Chromium based products. So Ozone-Wayland basically leverage any of those products that the Chromium project develops.

web page and how-to.

A few people came asking me how to setup Ozone-Wayland and etc. I’m not sure you guys noticed, but we’re hosting there in Github something that we call our “Web page”, detailing a bit more how Chromium code-base plays together with the Wayland specific bits. In particular, there’s a how-to for people that wants to give a try and check out the development. There’s a small wiki as well.

Github infrastructure.

We’re coordinating the development via Github’s tracking issue system and trying to avoid mailing list so far — Welcome to the 21st century… let’s see how long we can stay in there and avoid going back to the 20th again :)

So you can “star” and “watch” Ozone-Wayland, as a subscription mechanism to get notifications of all sort of updates. Do it now!

IRC.

we hang out in freenode.net, #ozone-wayland channel; everyday and in the timezone you wish :)

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Ozone is a set of C++ classes in Chromium for abstracting different window systems on Linux. It provides abstraction for the construction of accelerated surfaces underlying Aura UI framework, input devices assignment and event handling.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/ozone

Today we are launching publicly Ozone-Wayland, which is the implementation of Chromium’s Ozone for supporting Wayland graphics system. Different projects based on Chromium/Blink like the Chrome browser, ChromeOS, among others can be enabled now using Wayland.

https://github.com/otcshare/ozone-wayland

In particular, we have Chrome Browser and Content Shell enabled and running on Wayland. All the projects are under active development (therefore unstable) but we are hoping to cope with fixes together with the open source community.

We’ll be posting updates in the following weeks detailing the solution and our ideas. Enjoy!

(I’ve made a cheat sheet here also — Creative Commons Legal Code Attribution 2.0. for both figures)

On customization, the shell plugin comes first: changes in there will impact directly which UI paradigm will be used. Specifically, one implementing the plugin protocol will be defining whether the UI is meant for phones, IVI, desktops, etc.

Probably the most important characteristic of the shell plugin is to give “roles” for surfaces, i.e. define where and how they will be mapped on the screen. For example, if a client wants its surface mapped as a top-level window, or say to resize the dimensions of it, then it’s up to the shell to expose these different surfaces roles, all according the UI paradigm the shell itself is providing.

Worth to note that the shell plugin doesn’t need to rely on any drawing library or graphics toolkit because it doesn’t tackle directly drawing aspects. Also, conceptually it’s mandatory to give roles for surfaces and therefore a shell plugin is a must (or at least a simple implementation of surface::configure).

An special shell client through an special “private” protocol can be used for setting up basic UI elements that require special treatment. For example in the desktop UI, widget elements such as panel, dock, lockscreen and cursors will need special treatments for their positioning, grabbing semantics and so forth.

On customization, different shell clients, exposing different UI elements can be implemented using *the* *same* shell plugin. Some architectures will rather be using one overlay simple client that will take care of spawning and controlling other UI basics applications also.

The special client will probably want to rely on graphics toolkits.

Wayland clients use the Wayland core protocol and the protocol that shell plugin has defined. The corollary is that one client will always know the UI paradigm (due shell plugin) and will *not* work across different paradigms. Though, that doesn’t mean applications will need to know their paradigm necessarily but only the middleware software is connecting to Wayland (like the graphics toolkits).

A footnote about Canonical’s Mir

Canonical announced their new display manager yesterday. There’s a section “Why Not Wayland / Weston?” where they claim:

“we consider the shell integration parts of the protocol as privileged and we’d rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the client facing protocol.”

and something similar was written here also:

” Wayland .. exposes privileged sections like the shell integration that we planned to handle differently, both for security reasons and as we wanted to decouple the way the shell works on top of the display server from the application-facing protocol”

so they would rather have:

“An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.”

First of all, there’s nothing privileged about the shell protocol Wayland is exposing. wl_shell and wl_shell_surface (the “shell protocols”) are part of the Wayland core protocol, yes, but as I’ve explained on this post, it’s all customizable for whatever UI needs. Nevertheless, their usage is completely optional and anyone can build a different shell and stack with the rest of Wayland, just like tablet-shell protocol for instance does. Still, this will be Wayland and use the shiny libwayland for IPC.

Therefore I don’t think Canonical should justify their new project because Wayland “does not fulfill .. requirements completely”. There are no technical reasons Ubuntu cannot use Wayland in principle. What they wrote there is a very very mean excuse instead.

1. But who’s going to program Wayland or X?

Short answer is: very likely you won’t :) A more elaborated answer requires the understanding of what is the graphics system “shell” and its components, or in other words what is the system layer that fits on top of a core graphics system.

While the graphics system comprises of an hardware abstraction, the shell could be thought as an abstraction for such graphics system in a way that application developers would feel more comfortable on writing their applications there – it would be the application software glue therefore, offering convenience for an ordinary developer. Examples of shell components are widget library “toolkits”, game engines, window and decoration managers, Web runtime, video processing libraries and so forth. Developers of these kind of components are the only ones that need to understand the graphics system API, in principle.

2. And what is the X API?

libxcb is the implementation of X11 protocol. libxcb needs 19 functions to deal with IPC related stuff. The core protocol implementation and libxcb protocol helpers export 195 functions all together. All extensions, developed over the 25 years of X existence, sum up 26 in total with 1064 functions for clients. Therefore the X11 client API has approximately a total of 1278 entry points.

Raw data and how I collected it is here.

When we talk about a graphics system, we like to think about the drawing APIs only. It’s a big mistake. The API is more broad, encompassing for instance input methods, input devices, output devices, a bunch of graphics related configuration aspects, testing and so on. In fact, X has basically two drawing APIs (the core protocol and Xrender) and some systems building very modern interfaces are not even using them anymore, bypassing via OpenGLES and friends.

I’ve reported about one year ago that some new systems don’t use the core X protocol and just use a few extensions instead. One would claim that this is alright cause the API would be smaller, but my opinion is if things carry on expanding outwards like they have been, we’re going get to a point where the graphics systems becomes unmaintainable. Moreover, it takes too long for the shell developer learn that just a small set of the API is needed. The X protocol flexibility feature in which developers can add many new extension as desired and the lack of a proper API deprecation mechanism is definitely a problem to consider here.

3. So what is the Wayland API then?

Wayland API has approximately a total of 135 entry points, in its 0.99 version. libwayland solely exports 19 functions, where most are related with IPC, dispatching of events and etc which are the main responsibility of the library. The 14 interfaces consists of 102 functions and usually a client application will require some platform specific routines as well, such as the EGL abstraction and some for the DRM driver model; these add 14 more functions currently.

Raw data here.

We have something we call “private protocols”, that describes more high-level interactions and a few special clients. Examples are the XWayland infrastructure, desktop shell workspace and its panel bar, input methods where special care for device grab is needed and etc. One might consider adding those APIs as well but anyhow, Wayland has a small API after all.

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Although X and Wayland’s intention are both to sit between the applications and the kernel graphics layers, a direct comparison of those two systems is not fair on most of the cases; while X encompasses Wayland in numerous of features, Wayland has a few other advantages. In special, in this post I wanted to call the attention for the big advantage the shell programmer has when creating components that aid modern interfaces, where only a small set of functions are actually needed using Wayland.

X API is approximately 15 times bigger than the Wayland one. Here, I’ve only counted the amount of exported functions for clients. I understand that there could be different and more precise ways to tell how big is a graphics system API (e.g counting events received by clients, or Wayland amount of interface listeners, or the window properties of X).

The architecture behind and the mechanisms are a little tricky though, let’s take a look.

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Once Weston is started, it launches the xwayland module which creates an X socket, adds it to the main Weston loop and waits for X clients to be connected into. When the first client gets connected, it triggers Weston to fork and exec one X server. Weston continues its normal execution but unregister itself that socket.

The X server, with the Wayland backend on it (xwayland), keeps listening Weston via a special Wayland protocol interface. Weston binds such interface and announces back the socket that X clients will be connecting to (xserver_send_listen_socket event) and the first X client that was just connected (xserver_send_client event). The idea is to give now to X the responsibility of clients trying to be connected, naturally. Worth to mention that this lazy initialization method was intentionally designed in order to avoid extra lags at Weston start up and memory overhead when X11 applications are not being used. So the X server is started on demand, only when actually needed.

At this point now, Weston also starts its own X Window Manager. In short, the main task of it is to proxy X applications built based on those old WM standards, such as EWMH and the jurassic ICCCM, and plumb them into the shiny Wayland desktop shell interface. In other words, the idea is to map different type of X windows on Wayland surfaces (xserver_set_window_id request), and specially give some meaningful user-interface policies on X Windows to the desktop shell, for instance making a surface to get maximized, or say to resize/move it around.

Other tasks the Weston X window manager performs are embed a pretty decoration frame around windows and also make sure the client-to-client communication such as copy and paste (selection) and eventually drag and drop work nicely. Remark that the X protocol doesn’t define policy but the WMs, and this is a challenge for Wayland, that does define. So the Weston X WM has to come up with the right amount of salt to fit perfectly the policies that were already straighten up by Wayland’s desktop shell… hmm way too philosophical.

All X windows created from now on will be redirected to offscreen pixmap and stored on a DRM buffer (via the xwayland video driver); that’s how compositing works on Wayland. The idea is that a X client will behave very likely as a regular Wayland client. Therefore, there’s no protocol calls or any major task involved on xwayland and all happens seamlessly, with the protocol “conversion” penalty close to nil.

The architecture for input handling looks good already as well. At X init time, it’s created fake devices, the keyboard and the pointer, and the concept goes the other way around of window creation: it gives the input devices capabilities from Weston to Xorg. We’re still shaping the cursor settings, the complex logic of client and surface grabbing, among other features, but the basics are most definitely in place already.

So the video is there for demoing what we’ve got until now. You can see in practice all these rather cool building blocks I mentioned. It’s rather cool.. specially for developers; one has to have the know-how on X11 and Wayland protocols, Xorg and Weston internals, X Window Manager standards, etc. Lot of fun!!!

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While there’s still lot of churn in the protocol, and yet our goal is soon to wrap up all we’ve been doing to a steady and settle-on-the-stone one description, there’s a lot on the implementation side that needs love. And that mainly concern Weston compositor, which is becoming the de facto compositor on several systems targeting Wayland.

In past months I was accumulating a TODO list for Weston and libraries that I think wouldn’t require any exceptional knowledge on core graphics or Wayland internals. These are good items for people that want start hack or just do some contribution on Wayland:

1. log facility (easy)

Back in July, I had already warmed up a discussion how we could log on Wayland. So now we spit everything to stdout but we want to do it similarly as Xorg, i.e. redirecting to its own file. It turned out that we might want only on Weston compositor and implement our own way of logging for sake of simplicity. Ideally it has to be very simple, without verbosity levels probably, etc. This task should be quite easy to finish.

2. launcher for Weston (medium)

Weston is meant to run as a normal user. Now we have to set manually input devices, DRM and tty with root permissions, so Weston can happily be started. Ideally we should have a setuid helper script doing all this tricky, and in fact I started something here. For a real system though, we need to enhance a bit this program with the policykit, specially for dealing with hotplugs. Probably zero understanding on Wayland internals is needed but an overall knowledge of OS is required.

3. libxkbcommon X merge (medium)

Actually that’s not much Wayland work, but it most definitely would help its development. xkbcommon is the library that exposes the keyboard mapping logic to clients, converting keycodes in keysyms. Weston clients are using for evdev convertion. The library is an adaptation of a bunch of X11 modules to fit in a non-X11 world and as such, it still requires xproto, kbproto and libX11. One task would be to untie such dependencies with X and the other to proper merge libxkbcommon with Xorg. I’d classify as medium-size task due the involvement with the community and the hairy understanding of XKB in general, although Daniel, Kristian and other guys already made a nice progress there.

4. xwayland on X (hard)

xwayland is the implementation on Xorg to make it run as a Wayland client. That works well on Intel chipsets and might work as well with other drivers through the shm X driver. In principle, basic X11 applications work with some WM control lacking, input grab as well and things like Xrandr don’t. One would also forward port xwayland and driver to upstream, once the work is shaped up. I bet WM developers would have an ecstasy and delight themselves hacking around.

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Hopefully you get excited with some of the items. I definitely can give a hand with any, so just poke me on #wayland at freenode.

So, today I’ve set up the last bits of Qt environment on my Intel Pine-Trail pretty easy (yeah, I compile on my tablet :-O). You don’t need to clone the whole data base for starting hacking on it. Let’s see.

first, you have to clone qtbase:

# mkdir qt; cd qt
# git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qtbase.git

Before start the compilation steps, I like to set up my testbed in a different directory than what the ordinary system uses, so I include this on my .bashrc:

export QTVER=qt5
export QTDIR=/opt/qt/$QTVER
export PATH=$QTDIR/bin/:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$QTDIR/lib/pkgconfig/:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$QTDIR/lib/plugins/

and don’t forget to re-run your bashrc! Now, when developing a Wayland application it’s quite useful to check if your app is behaving nicely, so for doing so I like to compare it with Qt’s XCB backend. Then you’ll need the following — I’m under Ubuntu 11.10:

# apt-get install libxcb1 libxcb1-dev libx11-xcb1 libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-keysyms1 libxcb-keysyms1-dev libxcb-image0 libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-shm0 libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-sync0 libxcb-sync0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev

you should be ready now to go for the configuration:

# ./configure -confirm-license -opensource -no-qt3support -no-multimedia -no-webkit -no-phonon -no-v8 -debug -qpa -xcb -wayland -egl -opengl es2 -nomake examples -prefix ${QTDIR}

and now, the compilation — which took approximately 1hr and half in my system:

# make

install it:

# make install

At this point you got all Qt libraries, and needed tools to compile qtwayland platform. So go back one directory and clone that:

# cd ../
# git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qtwayland.git

You need Wayland protocol libraries now in your system, and that’s the very late ones, which means the stock packages from your distro won’t work. Get and
build them using the following:

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/building.html

You might want to develop Wayland on the top of X, so before compile you’ll need this:

# apt-get install libxcomposite-dev

Jørgen Lind, updated me with: “the default buffersharing to use is wayland_egl. To be able to use the xcomposite stuff you need to export the environment variable QT_WAYLAND_GL_CONFIG to be either xcomposite_egl or xcomposite_glx”. So in order do to Wayland on X you will need to tweak it as well.

and then:

# cd qtwayland/
# qmake
# make && make install

To run now a Qt app, I first set the XDG directory that compositor and clients use to talk under Wayland. You better to watch out, cause some distros already have this set somewhere. Anyway, I put this on my .bashrc:

# export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$HOME/.xdg
# mkdir $HOME/.xdg

and re-ran .bashrc. Finally the Qt app running and voilà:

# cd ../qtbase/examples/opengl/hellowindow
# qmake
# make
# wayland-compositor &
# ./hellowindow -platform wayland

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Kudos to Thiago Macieira for reviewing the content!