4 ms·

virtwl.ko really is the killer app for Wayland [Edit: virtwl.ko lets a wayland client inside a VM connect to a wayland server which is on the same machine but

virtwl.ko really is the killer app for Wayland [Edit: virtwl.ko lets a wayland client inside a VM connect to a wayland server which is on the same machine but outside the VM]. I mean without it, all the noise about Wayland being more secure than X11 is just noise, because Wayland doesn't do remote display, so you have to allow that evil app you're scared of to run on the same machine as the compositor and all your other apps, and you can't even put it in a VM. That's less secure than being able to put it on another machine and use the network. In theory you might be able to run the evil app under another userid, but in practice this often breaks in all sorts of ways because people just don't do that very often so it exposes untested codepaths in UI/widget/GUI libraries. You can't even put the evil app in a VM -- until virtwl.ko came along. If the Wayland folks want their security claims to no longer be laughed at they need to get virtwl.ko into mainline Linux. And get it supported by more hypervisors than just the one that comes with ChromeOS (crosvm). I've been using sway on both my desktop and laptop for over a year now, but that doesn't mean I don't get to complain about Wayland. Since leaving X11 I did finally get everything working again (except @#*&^@%@ torbrowser), but I've been underwhelmed with the benefits gained by all the effort I had to go through in order to switch to Wayland. And I still miss remote display always working all the time without special effort from each individual app developer. Every bolt-on remote display option offered for Wayland is a flaming dumpster fire of slowness compared to X11 on the LAN or xorg-xrdp over the public Internet. And the least-flaming dumpster-fire of slowness, waypipe, has turned into abandonware. > like many Wayland specifications, it seems to be in the process of being replaced by something else. Funny because true.

zajio1am 6y ago
> I mean without it, all the noise about Wayland being more secure than X11 is just noise, because Wayland doesn't do remote display, so you have to allow that evil app you're scared of to run on the same machine as the compositor and all your other apps, and you can't even put it in a VM. But you can run it with different UID.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Like I said: > In theory you might be able to run the evil app under another userid, but in practice this often breaks in all sorts of ways because people just don't do that very often so it exposes untested codepaths in UI/widget/GUI libraries. Regardless, privilege escalation bugs are a dime a dozen these days. Running evil things as another userid is no substitute for moving them into a VM or off of the machine completely.
slaymaker1907 6y ago
Can you explain what virtwl.ko is? I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything even remotely relevant when searching for that term.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  Here's the link from the article: https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/ https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/ It doesn't really have a better name. It was written by Google to allow Android apps to run inside a VM on ChromeOS. Although it does work with mainline Linux, Google is understandably not motivated to invest effort in branding virtwl.ko with a non-cryptic name, or marketing it as its own project independent of ChromeOS. AFIAK nobody outside of Google was using it until Alyssa (same person responsible for the panfrost awesomeness) got it working on Linux. As for what it does? Wayland clients and servers must (a) run on the same physical machine (b) as processes on the same kernel. Virtwl.ko removes requirement (b), allowing the client to be inside of a VM.
  - w0utert 6y ago
    Good explanation in the linked article! This way of using Wayland and VM's seems very interesting and useful. What I'm wondering though, is whether it would be realistically possible to also expose some kind of GPU acceleration to clients in VM's, for example by means of a virtual OpenGL adapter such as VirGL, which itself uses virtio on top of the host GPU driver. This would not get you anything near the performance required for games, but it should be way better than software rendering inside the clients. Do you think something like this would be possible already?

zajio1am 6y ago

> I mean without it, all the noise about Wayland being more secure than X11 is just noise, because Wayland doesn't do remote display, so you have to allow that evil app you're scared of to run on the same machine as the compositor and all your other apps, and you can't even put it in a VM. But you can run it with different UID.

KirillPanov 6y ago
Like I said: > In theory you might be able to run the evil app under another userid, but in practice this often breaks in all sorts of ways because people just don't do that very often so it exposes untested codepaths in UI/widget/GUI libraries. Regardless, privilege escalation bugs are a dime a dozen these days. Running evil things as another userid is no substitute for moving them into a VM or off of the machine completely.

slaymaker1907 6y ago

Can you explain what virtwl.ko is? I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything even remotely relevant when searching for that term.

KirillPanov 6y ago
Here's the link from the article: https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/ https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/ It doesn't really have a better name. It was written by Google to allow Android apps to run inside a VM on ChromeOS. Although it does work with mainline Linux, Google is understandably not motivated to invest effort in branding virtwl.ko with a non-cryptic name, or marketing it as its own project independent of ChromeOS. AFIAK nobody outside of Google was using it until Alyssa (same person responsible for the panfrost awesomeness) got it working on Linux. As for what it does? Wayland clients and servers must (a) run on the same physical machine (b) as processes on the same kernel. Virtwl.ko removes requirement (b), allowing the client to be inside of a VM.
- w0utert 6y ago
  Good explanation in the linked article! This way of using Wayland and VM's seems very interesting and useful. What I'm wondering though, is whether it would be realistically possible to also expose some kind of GPU acceleration to clients in VM's, for example by means of a virtual OpenGL adapter such as VirGL, which itself uses virtio on top of the host GPU driver. This would not get you anything near the performance required for games, but it should be way better than software rendering inside the clients. Do you think something like this would be possible already?