6 ms·

Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the on

Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.

kaendfinger 7y ago
Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
- sprash 7y ago
  No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
  - wmf 7y ago
    It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. Because that's more efficient. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections. Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.
    - sprash 7y ago
      Any proof for this? I don't believe you. Every SVG is smaller than the rendered PNG counterpart. And SVG is a really inefficient way to serialize drawing commands. Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Very little modern software uses the X drawing functions. GTK uses Cairo, but so does X (that's where it came from, the library behind the X drawing API). But apps will use the GTK implementation of Cairo (client side) because it works on other platforms as well (windows and OSX). In most cases it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      Cairo wasn't the library behind the X11 drawing API, it was originally the Xr rendering extension, that was an alternative to the original X11 drawing API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) >The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho. You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in the case of X11, which doesn't have an extension language to drive the drawing functions -- but it did make sense for NeWS which also used PostScript as an extension language as well as a drawing API). So Cairo rose above X11 and became its own independent library, so it could be useful to clients and toolkits on any window system or hardware. https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-rendering-for-vector-graphics/ https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-render... https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.or... https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/ https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004... Here's some email discussion with Jim Gettys about where Cairo came from: From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 9, 2007, 11:04 PM The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha. It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time). So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. From: Don Hopkins <dhopkins@donhopkins.com> Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 10:50 PM Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people). Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way. And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript." The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X. >So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 17, 2007, 11:41 PM > Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him. https://cairographics.org/bibliography/ https://cairographics.org/bibliography/
  - dan-robertson 7y ago
    I would be careful about describing cairo’s Primitives as modern. Cairo-style rendering apis and implementations are struggling to keep up with modern user interfaces and modern resolutions. It isn’t super clear which way 2d rendering apis will go in future. It seems silly to me to bake such an assumption into a protocol
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      What realistic alternative designs are there?
- _delirium 7y ago
  This is pretty interesting! I'm worried it's going to be a long path to getting things up and working again like they do with X today though. For example, my typical remote-X use-case is connecting to a Linux server from my macOS laptop. I haven't been following Wayland and/or waypipe enough to know how feasible that kind of setup would be with them. Are they potentially cross-platform enough that one end could run on macOS?
ambrop7 7y ago
It appears that one person is working on it and the project is in a prototype phase: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe
izacus 7y ago
I see this a lot and now I need to ask: do you actually use it and find it usable? Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?
- ianai 7y ago
  Believe it or not, there are production environments that use X-forwarding over ssh. Modern computing relies more and more on remote streaming of interfaces. Even games are going that way.
- jkaplowitz 7y ago
  It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.) Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.
  - a-wu 7y ago
    +1 to this. For my first two years the university didn't have student Matlab licenses but the CS department machines had copies so I would ssh -X for my coursework requiring Matlab (needed the GUI to see plots).
  - therein 7y ago
    Yup, I did this in college all the time as well. It was usable for most applications. Even wireshark is usable this way.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    Even if it's usable, it's probably not a good idea. X windows are not rendered by the server anymore. The client (i.e. the application) renders them and just transmits a full pixmap to the server. Depending on the redraw strategy, you could have a worst-case scenario where 60 frames per second of the entire window are transmitted completely uncompressed (except for the compression that SSH applies). You'll be sailing much more efficiently by using a VNC client.

Is there any plan by Wayland to incorporate ssh forwarding? Last I heard it wasn't in the cards, and I think that feature is useful enough; it's probably the only feature I really would miss.

kaendfinger 7y ago

Waypipe does this in a really similar way to x forwarding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

sprash 7y ago
No not really similar. It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. X11 is capable of drawing primitives. Even though the most popular toolkits (Gtk, QT) sadly did not use them, those who did (e.g. Athena, Tcl/Tk) worked perfectly over the network, even modem lines. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections.
- wmf 7y ago
  It is basically a raw video that transfers the full window content over the wire. Because that's more efficient. If Wayland would contain modern drawing primitives like those that Cairo offers which could easily be serialized, we would have real network transparency even over slow low bandwidth connections. Nope, drawing commands for a modern UI are more bytes than the window contents. This is a deeply counterintuitive topic and it's unfortunate that nobody implemented waypipe until recently so it was impossible to measure.
  - sprash 7y ago
    Any proof for this? I don't believe you. Every SVG is smaller than the rendered PNG counterpart. And SVG is a really inefficient way to serialize drawing commands. Also including drawing into your Compositor (like Windows and MacOS do) gives you additional infinite scaling for free which would solve the multi dpi monitor problem.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Very little modern software uses the X drawing functions. GTK uses Cairo, but so does X (that's where it came from, the library behind the X drawing API). But apps will use the GTK implementation of Cairo (client side) because it works on other platforms as well (windows and OSX). In most cases it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Cairo wasn't the library behind the X11 drawing API, it was originally the Xr rendering extension, that was an alternative to the original X11 drawing API. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) >The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho. You're right, it doesn't actually make sense to put your drawing functions in the display server any more (at least in the case of X11, which doesn't have an extension language to drive the drawing functions -- but it did make sense for NeWS which also used PostScript as an extension language as well as a drawing API). So Cairo rose above X11 and became its own independent library, so it could be useful to clients and toolkits on any window system or hardware. https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-rendering-for-vector-graphics/ https://www.osnews.com/story/3602/xr-x11-cross-device-render... https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030805030147/http://xr.xwin.or... https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004-html/ https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch-ols2004... Here's some email discussion with Jim Gettys about where Cairo came from: From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 9, 2007, 11:04 PM The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha. It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time). So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. From: Don Hopkins <dhopkins@donhopkins.com> Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2007, 10:50 PM Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people). Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way. And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript." The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X. >So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again. Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk From: Jim Gettys <jg@laptop.org> Date: Jan 17, 2007, 11:41 PM > Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun. Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him. https://cairographics.org/bibliography/ https://cairographics.org/bibliography/
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  I would be careful about describing cairo’s Primitives as modern. Cairo-style rendering apis and implementations are struggling to keep up with modern user interfaces and modern resolutions. It isn’t super clear which way 2d rendering apis will go in future. It seems silly to me to bake such an assumption into a protocol
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    What realistic alternative designs are there?
_delirium 7y ago
This is pretty interesting! I'm worried it's going to be a long path to getting things up and working again like they do with X today though. For example, my typical remote-X use-case is connecting to a Linux server from my macOS laptop. I haven't been following Wayland and/or waypipe enough to know how feasible that kind of setup would be with them. Are they potentially cross-platform enough that one end could run on macOS?

ambrop7 7y ago

It appears that one person is working on it and the project is in a prototype phase: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe

izacus 7y ago

I see this a lot and now I need to ask: do you actually use it and find it usable? Every time I've tried it, it was plagued with problems (fonts, HiDPI issues, different environments) and horrible performance. I mostly had to resort back to NX, which is okish, but not better at all than Windows' RDP or better VNC solutions. So what's the big draw here?

ianai 7y ago
Believe it or not, there are production environments that use X-forwarding over ssh. Modern computing relies more and more on remote streaming of interfaces. Even games are going that way.
jkaplowitz 7y ago
It was pretty great when I was a university student using X forwarding within the campus network between my dorm and the CS department (in either direction). Certainly not as fast as local, but extremely usable when not trying to do graphics-centric things. (Even using Eclipse was viable.) Your mileage may vary by use case and bandwidth, especially over the public internet. But if someone has a similar use case to mine in 2019, it's still probably usable.
- a-wu 7y ago
  +1 to this. For my first two years the university didn't have student Matlab licenses but the CS department machines had copies so I would ssh -X for my coursework requiring Matlab (needed the GUI to see plots).
- therein 7y ago
  Yup, I did this in college all the time as well. It was usable for most applications. Even wireshark is usable this way.
- majewsky 7y ago
  Even if it's usable, it's probably not a good idea. X windows are not rendered by the server anymore. The client (i.e. the application) renders them and just transmits a full pixmap to the server. Depending on the redraw strategy, you could have a worst-case scenario where 60 frames per second of the entire window are transmitted completely uncompressed (except for the compression that SSH applies). You'll be sailing much more efficiently by using a VNC client.