XDC 2021 | Addressing Wayland robustness | David Edmundson, KDE
Channel: X.Org Foundation
Date: 2021-09-22

X.org Developers Conference 2021 - September 15-17, 2021 - https://xdc2021.x.org/
Slides and materials: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/1/contributions/20/



One of the biggest user-facing issues facing Wayland adoption is robustness. A crash in the compositor can take down the entire session and lead to data loss. With Wayland being a constantly changing landscape and with more workload being put on the compositor process this doesn't seem to be going away.


This talk showcases work across multiple libraries and toolkits to tackle this at the root with a method of "compositor handoffs" allowing clients to safely securely and seamlessly reconnect to a relaunched Wayland compositor. This not only tackles the issue of robustness but also opens up a whole avenue of new opportunities that were previously impossible; such as freezing and resuming applications.


We talk through the POC implementations made across multiple toolkits, and what changes are needed throughout Wayland and Mesa to support this.