Per Wayland FAQ: Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering? <http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8>
No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to acheive.
This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.
It is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a wayland compositor, either a standalone remoting compositor or as a part of a full desktop compositor. This will let us forward native Wayland applications. The standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop. Building the fowarding into the desktop compositor, could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote wayland compositor, for example a friends desktop.
On 02/03/2011 09:35 AM, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
Nope. Wayland is not network transparent.
For network transparency you would still have to layer X on top of Wayland.
Right now there is no test implementation of Wayland with an X layer where we could test this out.
And I am not sure whether Wayland is a good idea to have as the 'default' display technology in Ubuntu.
I don't think most Ubuntu users are gamers, but rather folks that from time to time rely upon the fact that Linux has always natively had a network transparent display technology (X) that could be used to remotely display apps and desktops. That is why I think X should remain the default and people should be able to enable "Wayland" if they want it for fast gaming. And not the other way around.
Regards, Gerry
On 02/03/2011 11:40 AM, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
I saw that in Wayland discussions but I have yet to see any type of full-fledged demo.
Many of these discussions are pie-in-the-sky type wishful thinking by Wayland proponents.
And I think they will find this is somewhat more difficult than they have envisioned. It's one thing to implement the Wayland concept on the local machine and quite another to run it remotely.
Both the local and remote ends have to have the same idea of what is the display. Does that mean they both need the same GPU? Don't know.
We'll need to wait until someone has a true network-transparent demo of these new concepts before we can get excited about them. And since Wayland keeps stating to the "network-transparency" inquirers that it is not part of their requirement I don't think we'll see anything anytime soon.
Regards, Gerry
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brian mullan -
Gerry Reno -
John A. Sullivan III