It is a Wayland client and acts as a X11 server and allows to run X11 applications without modifications. A few of the limitations that currently exist in Wayland can be circumvented by using the XWayland client as it creates a 'normal' X11 server with full functionality. Migrating to Wayland requires all applications to be rewritten. Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager. The more long-term solution still hasn't landed yet. This is something that the group of people working on Wayland protocols (likely the XDG ones) will have to agree upon. There was an attempt to roll this into the xdg-namespaced Wayland protocols under the name xdg-toplevel-decoration. The patch eventually being marked superseded.

Functional Benefits?[edit]

The article only talks what things replace which other things, and who is committed to port which projects to Wayland. But why is it beneficial? What is the functionality that is impossible, or very difficult to implement, today and will be possible with Wayland? What is the end user benefit? It only says 'offering more flexibility and better performance', but what flexibility, why performance benefit and how? For example, I use gnome and kde desktops, many visual apps. Windows transparency works and many very fancy windows effects all work. What will I gain with Wayland? Article doesn't have much, and reader of this article is left wondering why this thing is out there? I only read this article, and I am not even convinced this is a good thing, except it will avoid extra copies of some buffers and will get some performance benefit because of this. Article reads like this is a reshuffling of existing functional blocks with unclear benefits. Yurivict (talk) 10:36, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Phoronix.com has extensive coverage of Wayland. Research there yourself and add the info to this article. --KAMiKAZOW (talk) 11:08, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Wayland does not exist to make it possible to do things we can't do. Wayland exists to make it a lot less obnoxious to do things we already do. So from an end user perspective, things should end up looking the same (even the same window managers), just maybe a little smoother. I guess to get a better answer you'd need to look into the details of what a compositing window manager has to go through to work with X. All the kludging of X that's been needed just to make it possible. If there's a single web page that explains this well, I don't know where it is. There are extensions to just let the compositing window manager (like compiz) have direct hardware output control of the display, and extensions to render client output offscreen so the window manager can have full access to their contents, so it can composite them and output them to the display. Wayland just gets X out of the freaking way. And lets X developers stop dragging around old X cruft and do other things. —Darxus (talk) 18:27, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Here we go: Compositing window manager#Linux and AIGLX. AIGLX is the X extension that allowed compositing window managers to work. Its creation was led by Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of wayland. So all those fancy things you can do with X, your 'Windows transparency... and many very fancy windows effects...' are all dependent on work by krh, and wayland is him continuing that work. —Darxus (talk) 19:09, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Compositing window managers waste a lot of resources – time and RAM. So Wayland is flawed from the beginning. -- Sloyment (talk) 03:04, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Common misconception. Window managers that use a lot of resources tend to be compositing, but it is not compositing that makes them use a lot of resources. Wayland is a protocol. It, and its reference implementation, use less resources than X. —Darxus (talk) 18:45, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

If every window has to use its own off-screen buffer, this will consume RAM. It will consume CPU time to move the buffer to the screen. In X, you don’t need an off-screen buffer for your windows. So where is the misconception? -- Sloyment (talk) 02:20, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Security[edit]

bloviating[edit]

'Security: Wayland isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability in both cases; X lacks these important security features'

This couldn't be further from the truth: the author of the above obviously hasn't read X11R6's documentation nor X.org's. See manpage XSecurity(1). What is true is that Myths about X are not new at all - one can google up X documentation citing them and answering them.

Much of the talk in the article, (ie, that networking isn't important, fonts aren't important, drawing lines isn't important, ...) simply denies the fact existing applications exist and the above are highly efficient and useful.

the only efficient way to provide client server (and network transparency, and that is compatible with various electronics): is X11. they did it right the first time. when wayland gets these things it will just be cut and past from X11 with the W name on it, which i imagine is the intent - like most copy lefts these days.

(all i see is a group effort to 'rebrand X11' by shifting it registers, supplying the missing parts from X11 later)

First, a Wikipedia Talk page is not a forum. Talk pages exist for the purpose of discussing how to improve articles. Talk pages are not for general discussion about the subject of the article. The purpose of an article's talk page is 'to provide space for editors to discuss changes to its associated article or project page. Article talk pages should not be used by editors as platforms for their personal views on a subject'. It's important to be constructive: 'Article talk pages should be used to discuss ways to improve an article; not to criticize, pick apart, or vent about the current status of an article or its subject'. See WP:TALK#USE for more information.

Second, the statement about the security comparation is well backed and properly referenced — no less but by a proceeding about Graphics stack security during the X Developer's Summit of 2012. The XSecurity(1) man page only talks about access methods to open a connection with a X Server. Once the connection is open, each X11 client has whole access (read and write) to all the X resources in the server, even those from another X clients, including window contents and events. That's the reason why X architecture doesn't comply with the CIA triad and is considered inherently insecure (opposite to Wayland architecture which doesn't allow such level of access between Wayland clients).

About the remainder comments, I'm only going to say you that Wikipedians don't tolerate those who come here to troll like this is another forum. Destructive intents are not welcome. You have been warned. --JavierCantero (talk) 10:28, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

The user is clearly annoyed with this repeated myth and to be fair, it's kind of annoying to see Wikipedia propagate this, but this is in line with Wikipedia's mission statement of simply reporting the mainstream consensus of 'authoritative sources', it is well cited, the authoritative 'experts' in this case however are wrong is the problem.

About your second point, the X11 SECURITY extension which Xorg implements stops all that of which you speak, this is for instance used by OpenSSH by default and any client can be launched inside Xorg and most other X servers as 'untrusted', in which case that can't access all that data at all. Your interpretation of the X11 SECURITY extension is wrong. X11 allows a client to connect with limited privileges, it can only read input events that belong to its own 'subview' if the server, so it can read from other clients input that exist in the same subview with multiple untrusted subviews being able to exist. 'trusted' clients can read everything. The problem is again that a lot of sources which are perceived as 'authoritative' act like it doesn't exist which is unusual since it is widely used and OpenSSH is a major consumer of it. When people use X forwarding over OpenSSH by default they use an untrusted client, that client cannot get input events from the rest of the display. So what do we do here? I'm not going to edit the page because it has authoritative citations, but I will leave you with a primary source ( https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Security/ ) that under the header 'server access control' explains succinctly what it does. 81.204.20.107 (talk) 05:55, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

My interpretation of what the original message is arguing is right: go to the XSecurity(1) manpage (that is the source he/she provides to justify his/her complains) and see yourself that there is no mention to the SECURITY extension; it only talks about X Server authentication methods, i.e. methods to authenticate within the X Server and gain access (total access) to it. He/she is not only contemptuously arguing, but also not providing sources to support his/her claims —even the opposite: providing a source that defeat his/her claim. (FWIW there is not almost any documentation about SECURITY extension anywhere, is something totally obscure but that is not an excuse for behaving the way he/she did).

Regarding your complain of Wikipedia propagating a myth: this is not a myth, this is a real situation. No distribution uses the SECURITY extension (as well as nobody uses XACE, a more appropiate security framework) to avoid/limit local X applications to run as untrusted ones. The criticism exposed by the experts (without quotes) are not only valid, but on point, since it's a real problem that affects X users in the real world, and therefore something that must be accept as a valid argument. The opposite will not be a neutral point of view, but trying to hide the flaws of one of the 'contenders'.

Also, as I said, this is not a forum and therefore is not the place to discuss about this (or really anything subject-related). And trying to 'hijack' WP pages to favor one's stance in a discussion is not very 'well received' in Wikipedia either. --JavierCantero (talk) 10:50, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

1) Well, he or she didn't link anything, and neither did you, I did link something which says that it is wrong. I'm the only one here that did provide sources which pretty unambiguously say your interpretation is wrong.

2) My distribution uses it, as well as many others, as I said, a known real world consumer of it is OpenSSH which is pretty big. You ca see if your distribution does it by doing `ssh -X somehost` and see if it fails, if it fails and `ssh -Y somehost` works, your distribution compiles without the SECURITY extension most likely.

3) It indeed isn't, as I said, Wikipedia's mission is to simply restate what 'authoritative' people say. However the talk page is definitely the forum to address what do when Wikipedia contains a clear factual inaccuracy. And there is certainly room for discussion when the Xorg documentation pages contradict what authoritative people having talks on conference say. At this moment, Wikipedia contains a factual inaccuracy and there is an authoritative citation on point that shows it as much. The discussion here is whether or not Xorg's own documentation which is a primary source and thus biased and not objective over talks of people may or may not also have their own biases. In any case, the sentence 'X lacks these important features' is incomplete at best, the X security extension which does exactly that is provided by any big X server implementation that I know of. Xorg, Xephyr and Xpra all provide it. In that sense I do believe it should be mentioned. 81.204.20.107 (talk) 13:07, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

1) man Xsecurity (I'm sure there is some outdated version of the man page out there if you bother to find it, but I prefer the source)

2) No, your distribution doesn't use it for local applications, that is the relevant scenario to compare with here (Wayland is not a remote protocol).

3) No, there is not 'factual inaccuracy'. Right now, there is only this sentence with two facts: 'Security: Wayland isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability in both cases; X lacks these important security features'. The first is obviously true (it's how Wayland protocol is designed). The second, 'X lacks these important security features' is what I understand you want to challenge. The fact is, no distribution provides isolation between local X clients as the Wayland model does, not even using SECURITY, XACE or another extension (standard X can't). That is the true, and that is what the related cites are supporting (BTW, from recent XDCs, presented by X developers to X developers). There is not ' Xorg documentation pages contradict what authoritative people having talks on conference say', there is some (obscure and not very developed in the case of SECURITY) documentation to extensions that might be used to implement the equivalent of the Wayland isolation in an X environment. And I said might because I suppose you are right and they are equivalent, but Wikipedia is not built upon assumptions and a study from an appropiate source to support it should be provided before being considered factual. And that's not the case. --JavierCantero (talk) 14:52, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

size in {{infobox software

Where does the 100kb size estimate in the infobox come from? For instance, does it refer to the collection of Wayland source code or the approximate size of the compiled binaries? 128.12.254.132 (talk) 02:09, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Latest version[edit]

In the releases section, under 1.13, it says: 'The ABI of Weston has been changed, thus the new version was named 2.0.0 rather than 1.13.0'If the new version was named 2.0.0 instead of 1.13.0, why is the table entry for the version is still 1.13 ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.246.40.56 (talk) 21:05, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Remove preview version from Info-Box[edit]

I would suggest to remove the preview version as I'm not sure anyone who's not an expert on wayland will use it. And if they are an expert on wayland, they would know what and where the preview version is. And people seem to not update the preview version on wikipedia frequently enough. Maltimore (talk) 10:01, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Does Wayland Server Still Exist Youtube

@Maltimore: You are right, please remove it and link this page and section (copy-paste: [[Talk:Wayland (display server protocol)#Remove preview version from Info-Box]]) as the consensus.--Editor-1 (talk) 15:54, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response. I removed it and linked this page as you suggested. Maltimore (talk) 09:16, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Does Wayland Server Still Exist