Plasma wayland on current

denydias · 06-20-2020, 01:57 AM

I've updated my box today. Now using KDE-5_20.06, elogind, wayland et all. Installation itself was fine as Alien Bob's advice is precise as always. I was fortunate enough to get -current packages from today changelog right in time for the job. This saved my some tinkering with the init scripts.

My box specs:

Code:

Intel Core i5-5300U
Intel HD Graphics 5500 (i915)

X worked out of the box with both startx and sddm plasma.desktop session. On the other hand, wayland required some effort. At first it displayed a blank screen only. To make it work on my box, I had to preserve KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) for the whole boot sequence.

First I had to change my lilo command from (only related parameters are listed):

Code:

drm.edid_firmware=eDP-1:edid/edid.bin i915.enable_fbc=1 i915.fastboot=1

to:

Code:

i915.fastboot=1

I also had to comment the vga option in lilo as it breaks KMS (was using vga=893 for 1920x1080x256). Then I generated and installed a new initrd letting my monitor edid file out of it.

After that I removed the old /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-video-intel.conf so wayland could just do its thing finding GPU driver.

With that changes in place, I was able to start Plasma successfully using both startkwayland and sddm with plasmawayland session.

But there are glitches. Although GPU acceleration works fine, colors are vivid and frame rates looks great, there are hiccups on some applications, mainly kontact which is important to my workflow. HiDPI support doesn't look quite there yet. Screen scale to 120% produces a quite blurred image. Input devices support is way behind X atm, for instance: touchpad options are very limited in wayland when compared to X.

The remaining downside is the ugly boot sequence now: after graphic lilo prompt displaying that nice Slackware logo, initrd loads with default VGA resolution and a huge console font and no penguins for the CPU threads count. When initrd probes the i915 module, KMS jumps in with a better resolution and a readable font size. Then sddm kicks in with the default 1080p resolution and there it goes with plasma.

At least these new settings let me switch from X to wayland anytime by just ending the current plasma session.

All in all, it's good to have both X and wayland working fine on my box to experiment. Nevertheless, for daily usage I'll stick with X for now.

Thanks to Eric, Pat and all the brave explorers on this thread.

gattocarlo · 06-20-2020, 09:38 AM

I upgraded everything: the process was smooth and everything is up and running. Great job, AlienBOB!

I run a home-made window manager, written in haskell and depending on xlib, so I will not be using wayland in the foreseeable future, but my daughters both relay on Plasma and I was wondering, from their end-user perspective, what is the difference between running xorg or wayland: they do some audio and video-editing but nothing more specific. Sorry for this question, which may be stupid, but for the stated reasons I have very little knowledge of wayland, and I don't know if the switch may be worthy for them. Thanks.

Best
andrea

giomat · 06-20-2020, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gattocarlo

from their end-user perspective, what is the difference between running xorg or wayland...

Ideally there should not be any difference for the end user, apart of perhaps a smoother framerate and no tearing problems. wayland is meant to be an evolution of xorg into something more modern, maintainable and secure.

Now for kde we are talking about their particular wayland implementation, and as i understand it still needs some work to provide the seamless experience when switching from xorg, especially if you happen to use nvidia graphics cards and their proprietary driver.

I personally tested gnome and sway wayland sessions, there's some broken copy/paste with some x11 programs and other little quirks, but they work quite fine. Some stuff like screen sharing is still work in progress and doesn't work in some programs, so if someone needs it for work it can be a pretty big stopper.

Lenard Spencer · 06-20-2020, 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lenard Spencer

I haven't dug into it yet, but there is a possibility that QJackCtl may rely on libappindicator to register in the systray, and libappindicator's deps (libindicator, libdbusmenu-gtk) will no longer build on -current (glib2 deprecation errors). I may be wrong....

Today I had time to dig into these three deps, and after finding the culprit (-Werror in all 3 packages) I created patches to change -Werror to -Wno-error (libindicator also had some typos in linking - cramming '-lglib-2.0 -lm' together as '-lglib2.0-lm', causing linking to fail). All patches I have created are here:
http://www.lenardspencer.net/linux/kde5
UPDATE: I made a minor change to the libindicator patch, patching configure.ac instead of configure, which means you will have to add 'autoreconf -fiv' to the build script.

pchristy · 06-21-2020, 03:08 AM

I've never tried wayland before, but since it now seems to be easily available, I thought I'd give it a try. All my machines use integrated Intel graphics, except one which has an AMD card.

Wayland doesn't play well with the touchpads on the laptops. It is no longer possible to "tap-to-select/open". Also there is some kind of funny when it comes to logging out, so for the moment I've gone back to X11.

Its getting there, but not quite ready for prime-time yet, is my view.

--
Pete

3rensho · 06-21-2020, 03:24 AM

I did the upgrade and thanks to Eric's meticulous directions it went smoothly. Yesterday I decided to give the Wayland bit a go so logged out and at the prompt entered startkwayland. It started fine and looked OK. In a Konsole session the font was noticeably larger. I opened Thunderbird and Chromium. For a while everything was fine and looked good. After about 4-5 minutes my fans started revving up. Checking glances showed three Chromium processes using 100% of three cores. Shortly thereafter Akonadi went crazy and maxed out most of the remaining cores. I shut the session down and went back to Plasma. No problems there at all.

z80 · 06-21-2020, 03:56 AM

Heads up for users of the Nvidia 390.132 driver:
I had to switch back to the nouveau driver since the Nvidia refused to work (errors in dmesg related to DRM/KMS) and broken display after the sddm login.

After changing that it works like a charm.

chrisretusn · 06-21-2020, 04:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by z80

Heads up for users of the Nvidia 390.132 driver:
I had to switch back to the nouveau driver since the Nvidia refused to work (errors in dmesg related to DRM/KMS) and broken display after the sddm login.

After changing that it works like a charm.

I'm running in to that also (same version, it's a legacy driver), using startx instead of startkwayland right now. All works.

chrisretusn · 06-22-2020, 04:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrisretusn

I'm running in to that also (same version, it's a legacy driver), using startx instead of startkwayland right now. All works.

I tried this both from runlevel 3 and 4, it's ugly. Really glad startx still works. FYI, I left the "fixes" in place for the NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.132.run) with no ill effect.

Attached is a couple of screenshot of the ugly desktop.

The screen full of messages I captured after logging out.

Code:

qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Subscriber "Archive Mail Kernel ETM - 30470368" disconnected
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Subscriber "MailFilterItemMonitor - 31167616" disconnected
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Subscriber "AgentBaseChangeRecorder - 16587408" disconnected
org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: Subscriber "MailFilter Kernel ETM - 31167056" disconnected
Failed to create wl_display (No such file or directory)
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: wayland-org.kde.kwin.qpa, eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

This is what was captured with startkwayland | tee startkwayland.log

Code:

OpenGL vendor string:                   NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string:                 GeForce GT 730/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string:                  3.1.0 NVIDIA 390.132
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
Driver:                                 NVIDIA
Driver version:                         390.132
GPU class:                              Unknown
OpenGL version:                         3.1
GLSL version:                           1.40
Linux kernel version:                   5.4.47
Requires strict binding:                no
GLSL shaders:                           yes
Texture NPOT support:                   yes
Virtual Machine:                        no
X-Server started on display :0

I followed the instructions as listed in the README.

z80 · 06-22-2020, 06:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrisretusn

FYI, I left the "fixes" in place for the NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.132.run) with no ill effect.

If you leave the KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1 setting in place when using the Nouveau driver the kwin process will run amok over time. In a wayland session even kwin_x11 gets started instead of kwin_wayland (well, at least on my machine).

chrisretusn · 06-22-2020, 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by z80

If you leave the KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1 setting in place when using the Nouveau driver the kwin process will run amok over time. In a wayland session even kwin_x11 gets started instead of kwin_wayland (well, at least on my machine).

Okay thanks, good to know.

I am using the NVIDIA driver with no plans to use nouveau driver since Steam prefers NVIDIA.

montagdude · 06-23-2020, 07:35 AM

I just updated, and everything is working fine so far, including the Wayland session, except for the fact that some third-party applications like FlightGear apparently don't support Wayland. Thanks, Eric. (I knew you couldn't stay away for long.

)

Edit: actually, it may have been the video driver that caused issues with FlightGear. I use Intel for general usage and Radeon opensource for FlightGear.

Lenard Spencer · 06-23-2020, 01:30 PM

One thing I have found is with System Settings, in a wayland session, when I try to change font sizes (which means it has to redraw the screen), the screen goes black and locks up hard, with no way out except a hard reset. In an X session it works fine.

Lenard Spencer · 06-23-2020, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by z80

If you leave the KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1 setting in place when using the Nouveau driver the kwin process will run amok over time. In a wayland session even kwin_x11 gets started instead of kwin_wayland (well, at least on my machine).

I could add the kwin.{,c}sh files to nvidia-driver SBo as an option if I need to.

rvdboom · 06-24-2020, 01:30 AM

I had a go last week-end on the Plasma Wayland session. Most things looked to work fine but appart for Activities not being supported right now, I had an issue with dual screens. The Wayland session inverted the displays compared to the X11 session, putting taskbars and plasma widgets on what is supposed to be my secondary screen. Even when booting with only one screen lit, I missed the taskbar. So I reverted to X11 for now and that's a shame as the Wayland session looked good apart from that.
I've searched around a bit and it seems a fairly recurrently reported problem for the last year but still I could not find a proper fix. If anyone has an idea, I'll owe him a beer or a fruit juice.