Red Hat Developing New xwayland-run & wlheadless-run Utilities

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 29 November 2023 at 07:30 AM EST. 114 Comments

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

As part of Olivier Fourdan's work on making XWayland rootful mode useful and inspired by the xvfb-run script started by Debian to run a specified client/command in a virtual X.Org Server, he began developing xwayland-run. Using xwayland-run can be done to run XWayland rootful within a Wayland compositor headless as a replacement for existing Xvfb usage. This also serves as a convenient utility for running X11 clients within its own XWayland rootful instance.

He sums up these new utilities as:

* xwayland-run, to spawn an X11 client within its own dedicated Xwayland rootful instance,

* wlheadless-run to run a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors,

* xwfb-run, a combination of the two other tools above to be used as a direct replacement for xvfb-run specifically.

So far xwayland-run / wlheadless-run / xwfb-run support the Weston, Cage, GNOME Mutter, and GNOME-Kiosk compositors but is open to supporting additional compositors.

👁 XWayland rootful

Olivier Fourdan at Red Hat has recently been working on improving the XWayland rootful experience and in turn began hacking on this new xwayland-run Python utility.

This new xwayland-run family of utilities was announced this morning on the Wayland mailing list.