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

[Martin Graesslin]

On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 3:21:58 PM CET Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 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?

sorry I don't think that gives us much. The question is whether KWin can 
access the device hardware. If it can it means we have a DRM enabled driver. 
If yes KWin will work just fine without the need for a container. If it doesn't 
(which is where Mer comes in the game) it doesn't help us as we need the 
Android stack inside the container (KWin would need to use hwcomposer). That's 
a completely different problem and probably not solved by passing the dri 
device into the container.

Cheers
Martin
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