Plugins, plugins, plugins – or how KDE Frameworks learned to Wayland

Several of KDE’s frameworks have windowing system specific code. This means that they need adjustments if they should be run on more than just X11. The frameworks were already adjusted to only call into X11 specific code if they are used on the X11 platform, but a proper Wayland port was still missing.

Over the last weeks I prepared several frameworks to support Wayland in a proper way. Especially I looked at KGlobalAccel, KIdleTime and KWindowSystem. For all three frameworks there is no “generic” Wayland solution available. That is there is no official interface available which could be used. So in order to add support we need to restrict the usage to KWin for the moment. This is especially the case for KGlobalAccel where the aim is to integrate directly into KWin as described in a previous blog post.

For KWindowSystem I wanted to reuse some Plasma-specific interfaces which we had been developing for the Plasma 5.4 release anyway. As those interfaces are part of the KWayland repository it was an obvious idea to reuse KWayland instead of duplicating the code. But using KWayland from a framework – especially a tier 1 framework is not trivial. KWayland is part of Workspace, thus depending on KWayland would create circular project dependencies. Turning KWayland into a framework would adjust the tier for pretty much all frameworks. Clearly neither a good idea.

Thinking about the problem one realizes there is another project with similar problems and they solved it: Qt. QtWayland provides plugins for Qt and by that qtbase itself does not need to depend on Wayland. So for our frameworks plugins can also be a good solution. We can provide plugins which depend on the respective frameworks and KWayland. As KWin would (for the time being) the only compositor to provide the interfaces anyway, it’s not a problem to depend on the KWayland libraries which are part of Workspace.

So as a first step the frameworks got restructured to have their platform dependent code provided by plugins which get loaded at runtime depending on the platform they are run in. In a second step the header files for the plugin interface needed to be installed. This is a requirement for the integration plugins to provide a plugin.

Now as a third step the development of the interfaces was required. This happened in a new repository called kwayland-integration which will see the initial release with Plasma 5.4. So far this repository provides two plugins: one for KIdleTime, one for KWindowSystem.

For KIdleTime I designed a specific Wayland protocol which allows us to get notified when a seat went idle for a specified interval. This is an important feature for many applications, like screen brightness, setting chat to away, etc. Given that I think it’s an interface which might be in general useful and I think it could be a candidate for inclusion in Wayland. This is something I will look into after Akademy when I have more time for it.

KWindowSystem is a little bit more Plasma/KWin specific, so I doubt that we can have anything which is in general useful for all Wayland compositors. KWindowSystem is also on X11 a little bit KWin/Plasma specific, so there is no general difference.

Nevertheless platforms should provide plugins for these frameworks if they want to support frameworks based applications properly. That’s especially a hint to all those distributions who decided to create their own windowing system.

For the long term I think the way to go is to make KWayland part of frameworks (targeting tier 1) and then KWayland-Integration also a framework (current dependencies would aim for tier 2, but also tier 4 could be a reasonable target). This would be especially important if the idle time interface becomes a proper Wayland interface and would be provided by more compositors than just KWin.

More information about the bigger picture of KWayland-Integration and Plasma on Wayland at Akademy next weekend 🙂 We have great Wayland things to show.