3 ms·

I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to r

I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.

vidarh 3y ago
That's because under Wayland there's no separation between display server and window manager.
- jchw 3y ago
  To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan. That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    You're right, of course, and I should've been more precise about that given I have looked at doing exactly that myself (main thing stopping me: I was able to switch to my own X11 window manager within a day - it was painful but worked; meanwhile I'd locked up my machine's display hard within 5 minutes of running some DRI/GBM test code and had to reboot) I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example clients..) And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol, you can layer any X functionality right back in...
jchw 3y ago
That's because what is restarting, if I understand correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is the compositor... it of course does still do compositing under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the display server. So you can't restart it without disconnecting all of the clients... kind of. Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.
- fullstop 3y ago
  That makes sense. I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.
greatquux 3y ago
That's why I'm happy the KDE developers and others have acknowledged this is actually a problem and are creating solutions for it, unlike many GNOME developers who say "it's your fault it crashed!"

vidarh 3y ago

That's because under Wayland there's no separation between display server and window manager.

jchw 3y ago
To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan. That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
- vidarh 3y ago
  You're right, of course, and I should've been more precise about that given I have looked at doing exactly that myself (main thing stopping me: I was able to switch to my own X11 window manager within a day - it was painful but worked; meanwhile I'd locked up my machine's display hard within 5 minutes of running some DRI/GBM test code and had to reboot) I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example clients..) And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol, you can layer any X functionality right back in...

jchw 3y ago

That's because what is restarting, if I understand correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is the compositor... it of course does still do compositing under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the display server. So you can't restart it without disconnecting all of the clients... kind of. Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.

fullstop 3y ago
That makes sense. I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.

greatquux 3y ago

That's why I'm happy the KDE developers and others have acknowledged this is actually a problem and are creating solutions for it, unlike many GNOME developers who say "it's your fault it crashed!"