September was a busy months in the KDE Wayland world. We have worked hard to bring Plasma closer to a workable system and could cross off some very important milestones.

Transient window positioning

One of the biggest oddities when trying out Plasma on Wayland in the 5.4 release is the fact that menus open at random positions. The reason for this is that KWin applied it’s placing strategy on it and ignored the hints provided by the window. We have now implemented support for the so-called transient windows in KWayland and use the provided placement hint in KWayland. So now all menus open at the correct position. A useable Wayland session is much closer now.

Plasma/KWin specific extensions

Marco did quite some work for the integration of Plasma. KWin provides some Plasma specific extensions like the sliding popups effect, blur and background contrast effect, etc. We have an abstraction through KWindowSystem so that applications do not have to use low level X11 calls directly. Now we extended this abstraction to also Wayland: if the application uses the API it will work on both X11 and Wayland. Granted it will only work with compositors providing the specific protocols, but that is no difference to X11. Also there the compositor needs to implement the custom protocol.

On the client side the protocol is implemented in KWayland and the integration for KWindowSystem is provided through
a plugin provided by the kwayland-integration repository. On KWin side the protocol is also provided in KWayland allowing a very easy to use API. Of course also KWin needed small adjustments in the effects to announce support for the protocol and read the information provided by the windows. Thanks to nice wrapping in KWayland the code is cleaner and simpler than in the X11 case.

Support for multiple X Servers

A change not directly relevant for KWin went into KWindowSystem and will be released with the upcoming 5.15 KDE Frameworks release. KWindowSystem provides an X11 API which looks like it supports multiple X Servers (e.g. one application talking to multiple servers), but that has never worked as it fetched required atoms only on first connection. We refactored the relevant code to no longer have this limitation.

Granted normally applications do not talk to multiple X servers, but there is a mode in KWin which uses just that: a nested kwin_wayland on X11. To explain: it needs to talk to the host X server for rendering two (one server) and it starts it’s own Xwayland server (second server). In case you have ever wondered why the nested kwin_wayland window released with Plasma 5.4 neither has a window icon nor a window title: that’s the reason. We couldn’t use Qt’s abstraction (wrong QPA plugin) and also not KWindowSystem as we needed to make sure the atoms get resolved for the Xwayland server. Now with this restriction removed the window has an icon and a title. Even more I added a “grab input mode” as one might know from virtual machines. While it’s easy to implement I didn’t want to implement it without having a way to tell the user what happened and what the current grab state is.

Preparing KWin for the cloud

The most exiting new feature in my opinion was born last Friday based on frustrations about testing KWin Wayland. Last week Marco and I spent quite some time investigating a few regressions (as it turned out due to adding transient window support). The way to test it was just uncomfortable. We had a test case but it meant starting KWin, waiting till it’s started, start the test application, perform some clicks and interpret whether it worked. Once we fixed that issue I started to look at a crash and the process was similar annoying. What I wanted was a way to automate the test condition, that is an autotest which we could even run in our CI system.

So on Friday I decided to dedicate my development time on a virtual framebuffer backend.This backend (to start use kwin_wayland --xwayland --virtual) doesn’t render to any device, but only “simulates” rendering by using a QImage which then isn’t used at all. Well not completely true: there is an environment variable to force the backend to store each rendered frame into a temporary directory.

Why is such a virtual backend so exiting? Well it means we can run KWin anywhere. We are not bound to any hardware restrictions like screen attached or screen resolution. With other words we can run it on servers – in the cloud. The first such instance runs on our CI servers in the form of an automated integration test. And in future there will be much more such tests.

But that is not only interesting for KWin to have it’s autotests, it’s also interesting for all other projects of the workspace as we have now a virtual Wayland server which is functional identical to the one we use. We also have a better virtual X server now as we have Xwayland instead of Xvfb (e.g. support for XRandR extension).

Once I had it implemented ideas came to me for improving our CI system: we could use it for something like OpenQA (or integrate the existing tool) and start a complete Plasma session and screenshot various points (if that sounds like an exiting project: please contact me, also if you want to do that as a Season of KDE project ).

Or integrate a remote rendering solution (e.g. VNC, rdesktop, spice, html5) and run a complete session through the web. That could be a very interesting feature for designers, translators, supporters and many other non-developers. Get the latest state of the code directly tested. We have things like Kubuntu CI which make it easy to test in a virtual machine, but wouldn’t it be even more awesome to just run the latest build of the CI system in the browser?

KWin Tests

With the help of this virtual backend we are now able to start a “complete” KWin in the autotests. This allows us to very precisely test whether a specif feature works as expected. Unit tests are great, but sometimes one wants to test the complete integration and that’s now possible.

The first problem addressed with this new possibility was a bug noticed while writing this blog post. I used Kate on Wayland and the tooltips got keyboard focus. So now we have an autotest which ensures this case works.