Wayland vs X11

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Thursday, 31 October 2024 03:24:19 CET Nate Graham wrote:
> The reason I'm asking is because Plasma and KWin devs are pretty much
> all-in on Wayland now, and I'd like to know what still needs improvement
> to get us 100% distro coverage.

Replying with my FreeBSD hat on.

Modern FreeBSD uses the Linux graphics stack, basically, for DRM / KMS and 
what have you. I'm not a kernel graphics developer, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the 
details.

What keeps me *personally* from running Plasma6 and KWin in Wayland mode is 
that it doesn't actually send pixels to the screen.

Which is to say:
- Plasma6 in X11 mode is fine,
- Plasma6 in Wayland with software rendering is fine, but slow,
- Plasma6 in Wayland with the OpenGL backend runs, but the screen doesn't get 
any pixels at all. With `ps` I can see that all the Plasma6 processes are 
running. The screen still displays whatever was there last -- for instance, 
the text screen where I typed `startplasmawayland.sh` at the prompt.

I have been only semi-successful in debugging this. Working with Plasma 6.1.2 
I found one GL call that was spitting out errors in the log. The errors were 
being ignored. It was related to setting high-priority, IIRC. This was some 
weeks ago, and I didn't do anything on it since. Removing that feature from GL 
setup gets me to the next problem, where .. something is wrong. The kernel 
spits out warnings "explicit fence not handled" on the regular while Plasma6 
KWin is running (running and not displaying anything).

I realise that's a not-very-helpful edge case -- and I can see Plasma 
developers in the FreeBSD desktop channel trying to debug other issues, too, 
so I'm appreciative of the efforts -- all-in, as you say -- to make this 
happen. I'd be happy with it, too.

[ade]
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