3 Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to
4 its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol. The
5 compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel
6 modesetting and evdev input devices, an X applications, or a wayland
7 client itself. The clients can be traditional appliactions, X servers
8 (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.
10 The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and
11 buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards
12 them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders
13 into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The
14 protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and
15 other interactions that must go throught the compositor. However, the
16 protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that
17 makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering
18 themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL.
20 The wayland repository includes a compositor and a few clients, but
21 both the compositor and clients are essentially test cases.
26 The instructions below assume some familiarity with git and building
27 and running experimental software. And be prepared that this project
28 isn't at all useful right now, it's still very much a prototype. When
29 the instructions suggest to clone a git repo, you can of course just
30 add a remote and fetch instead, if you have a clone of that repo
31 around already. I usually install all software I'm working on into
32 $HOME/install, so that's what I'll use in the instructions below, but
33 you can use your favorite directory of course or install over your
34 system copy (pass --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc, generally).
39 At this point, kernel modesetting is upstream for Intel, AMD and
40 nVidia chipsets. Most distributions ship with kernel modesetting
41 enabled by default and will work with Wayland out of the box. The
42 modesetting driver must also support the page flip ioctl, which only
43 the intel driver does at this point.
48 Wayland uses the mesa EGL stack, and all extensions required to run
49 EGL on KMS are now upstream on the master branch. The 7.9 release of
50 mesa will have all these extensions, but for now you'll need to build
53 $ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
55 $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/install --enable-egl --enable-gles2
56 $ make && make install
58 If you're using an intel chipset, it's best to also pass
59 --disable-gallium to ./configure, since otherwise libEGL will try to
60 load the gallium sw rasterizer before loading the Intel DRI driver.
65 Wayland needs libxkbcommon for translating evdev keycodes to keysyms.
66 There's a couple of repos around, and we're trying to consolidate the
67 development, but for wayland you'll need the repo from my get
68 repository. For this you'll need development packages for xproto,
71 $ git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/libxkbcommon.git
73 $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/install
74 $ make && make install
79 The Waland clients render using cairo-gl, which is an experimental
80 cairo backend. It has been available since cairo 1.10. Unless your
81 distribution ships cairo with the gl backend enabled, you'll need to
82 compile your own version of cairo:
84 $ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/cairo
86 $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/install --enable-gl
87 $ make && make install
92 With mesa and libxkbcommon in place, we can checkout and build
93 Wayland. Aside from mesa, Wayland needs development packages for
94 gdk-pixbuf-2.0, libudev, libdrm, xcb-dri2, xcb-fixes (for X
95 compositor) cairo-gl, glib-2.0, gdk-2.0 (for poppler) and
98 $ git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/wayland
99 $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/install
100 $ make && make install
102 Installing into a non-/usr prefix is fine, but the 70-wayland.rules
103 udev rule file has to be installed in /etc/udev/rules.d. Once
104 installed, either reboot or run
106 $ sudo udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=drm --subsystem-match=input
108 to make udev label the devices wayland will use.
110 If DISPLAY is set, the wayland compositor will run under X in a window
111 and take input from X. Otherwise it will run on the KMS framebuffer
112 and take input from evdev devices. Pick a background image that you
113 like and copy it to the Wayland source directory as background.jpg or
114 use the -b command line option:
116 $ ./wayland-system-compositor -b my-image.jpg
118 To run clients, switch to a different VT and run the client from
119 there. Or run it under X and start up the clients from a terminal
120 window. There are a few demo clients available, but they are all
121 pretty simple and mostly for testing specific features in the wayland
122 protocol: 'terminal' is a simple terminal emulator, not very compliant
123 at all, but works well enough for bash
125 'flower' moves a flower around the screen, testing the frame protocol
126 'gears' glxgears, but for wayland, currently broken
127 'image' loads the image files passed on the command line and shows them
129 'view' does the same for pdf files, but needs file URIs
130 (file:///path/to/pdf)