OpenBSD Developers Explore Wayland Protocol in Hakaton
During the recent Hakaton event in Tallinn, the g2k23 developers of OpenBSD conducted an experiment to launch a graphic environment in OpenBSD using the Wayland protocol. Previously, the Own edition of the X11-steak was used to create a graphic environment in OpenBSD, based on the xenocara libraries of X.org 7.7, X Server 1.21.6, and mesa 22.3.4. However, the participants at the Hakaton explored the use of different systems in OpenBSD and attempted to create an environment using the composite manager sway, built with the Wayland protocol, and compatible with the mosaic window manager i3 and the panel i3bar. (source: OpenBSD Hackathons)
The event demonstrated that it is indeed possible to organize the Wayland environment in OpenBSD, although it still requires improvement before it can be considered a full-time system. Alongside SWAY, the OpenBSD library wlroots was used, which provides essential functions for organizing the work of a composite manager based on Wayland. (source: wlroots)
To enable the Wayland environment, the team utilized the port Mesa for OpenBSD. They also incorporated the ported LibSeat libraries and the background process Seatd to control the session and facilitate access to shared input and output devices. For input organization, they used the Libudev-OpenBSD, LibEVDEV-OpenBSD, and LibinPut-OpenBSD ports. Additionally, the X-application port xwayland was used to run X-applications from SWAY. (source: port Mesa, ports LibSeat, port xwayland)
Throughout the experiment, the Havoc emulator and Swayimg images viewer were launched as Wayland applications. Although paths were prepared to run a set of demonstrations of the GTK3-DEMO, more complex GTK applications would require additional modifications. However, XWAYLAND successfully ran GTK applications such as