I've got kwin_wayland + plasmashell (wayland) running in a container (bugs included)

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Sebastian,

On Monday, March 14, 2016 05:36:28 PM Sebastian Grüner wrote:
> hey all,
> 
> I've been fiddling around wit lxc on a smartphone the other week, did
> some reading and thought I'd try out some ideas with kwin_wayland.
> This is one of your proposals for this years GSOC projects at KDE [1],
> and I know my approach is different from what is explained there.
> Nevertheless I'd like to share my initial hack with you, in case anyone
> wants to pursue this further.
> Long story short: I copied random bits and pieces of the web and got
> kwin_wayland and plasmashell (via startplasmacompositor) running in a
> containerized environment with native hardware acceleration, no llvmpipe
> needed :-). (I used systemd-nspawn, docker and lxc should work as well,
> haven't tried this though).
> 
> Here is what I've done:
> Get a rootfs of your favorite distro:
> - I use Opensuse Tumbleweed since I am familiar with this. (KDE
> Frameworks 5.20, Plasma 5.5.95)
> - I set up Debian unstable as well, which worked, but this uses old KDE
> packages (debootstrap)
> - I tried Ubuntu Xenial (debootstrap), weston works with native hw, but
> kwin_wayland won't start up.
[...]
> There is probably a lot of stuff that could be improved upon, but I got
> plasmashell in a container up and running!
> If the container hangs/crashes you can terminate it from a different tty
> with machinectl [3].
> 
> I hope you like this. :-)

I do!

What I'm wondering is how hard would it be to run such a container on a very 
bare Mer system? Mer has great support in hardware, but a downside is that 
we'd have to do almost all the packaging of our stack twice, that adds huge 
overhead, both in building, build infrastructure and in testing. Now if we 
could create images from a Mer hardware adaption with Neon or Debian builds, 
we could get great hardware support for mobile devices while having to do the 
packaging only once.

Have you thought about this? Am I ignoring major roadblocks?

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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