The Wakefield committers may hold off-line discussions from time-to-time. Summary minutes will be recorded here
Online Zoom Meeting 9am PDT 16th Sept 2021
Attending : Wakefield committers from Oracle, Redhat, JetBrains and Amazon as well as Wayland developers from Redhat who were invited by Mario.
The intent of this meeting was to have a productive dialog between the OpenJDK developers and Wayland community developers to come to a better shared understanding of the technical challenges and current state of Wayland and identify avenues of investigation.
Some opening remarks were about the Wakefield infrastructure, including this wiki, the Wakefield mailing list and the Wakefield repo.
Now they are up and running we expect to use the mailing list for most communications and document progress etc on this wiki page.
Branches should be created in the Wakefield repo for all work / experiments etc. Don't use the master branch.
In other words, we should use the project infrastructure for everything and publish contributions and ideas there.
The major topic of conversation was around the options for JDK for capturing screenshots and synthesising input events - both for running in X11 compatibility mode or as a native Wayland client
Screen capture is done today by calling a GTK API which is no longer exposed in GTK 4 because core wayland doesn't support it.
We need an alternative, (JDK has a pure X11 fall back based on xwd but we didn't touch on that - it has the same issue)
A few things were thrown out that might merit investigation
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portals-gtk.html
https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#using-portals
https://github.com/flatpak/libportal
The libportal abstraction / helper layer is probably what we'd want.
It is unclear (to me the note taker) if this is readily available on distros alongside wayland - we can't ship it ourselves and it ilikely needs more than a client-side library anyway
JDK for X11 today needs the functionality of the XTEST X11 extension protocol to support the input event side of things.
The wayland desktop answer for this is probably going to be https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei but it is still in development.
It is very unlikely that distros will be ready to ship all the pieces we need in the next 12 months. So the "short term" goal may actually need to wait for somewhat longer than that.
What is the API the clients used for rendering to the wayland client off-screen surface ? GTK defaults to OpenGL (EGL) and falls back to shared memory (ie some software rendering and a copy)
There is also an experimental Vulkan backend.
We use Xrender as the default Linux rendering pipeline today. Maybe we could use OpenGL for the X.org desktop too ? Yes, it is possible that we end up making improvements to the XGL pipeline as a consqeunece of adding EGL support for Wayland so that we could make OpenGL the default there (X.org) too. But it would be a side-benefit not the main goal.
What are people using for window decoration since the wayland model is that the client does the decoration ?I didn't catch all the options here seems there are a few
There was also a question about hidpi causing fuzziness of X11 apps especially for fractional scaling.
The wayland devs confirmed it is a known issue but difficult to solve without making X11 apps far too small to be legible.
The wayland devs input seems to be essential to us navigating a very complex and evolving landscape.
We agreed we need to go off and study some of these APIs and come back with follow up questions when ready.
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