4 The Wayland display

Alright, so the “display” is the “core” object that everything hinges on? (Much like a display in X11.) It provides access to the “registry”, which you can use to allocate or retrieve other objects.

In 4.1, finally get our hands dirty with some code! To test the first code example, I just fired up `weston` inside of my X session. I am a tiny little bit confused at this point, because I can use my standard hotkey to launch a new terminal – inside of weston. How is that possible? Left-overs from previous Wayland experiments? Oh, no! GTK simply prefers Wayland over X11, so when I press my hotkey, my normal X11 hotkey daemon interprets it and starts a new terminal process, which then proceeds to … pop up in my nested Wayland session. Bit confusing at first, but understandable.

Wait, I’m stumped. `wl_display_run()` in the server runs the event loop, but how do I get to process the events? What am I missing here? I would have expected that there is a way for me to specify callbacks or something like that. “On event $foo, call function $bar.”

I peaked at chapter 5 and expect these questions to be answered there.

Nope, but they’re answered here: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/blob/m...ywl.c#L910 I guess it’s just because the book is focused on clients. It worries me a bit that tinywl links to Drew’s blog instead of “official” documentation.


5 Globals & the registry

When you bind to the registry, the server emits events for each existing object. Is that correct? That’s a bit unusual, isn’t? I kind of expected that I could query the registry and receive a list of objects, by doing a synchronous request. How do I know when the server has finished emitting those events? I probably don’t.

Also a bit surprising to see that the client allocates IDs.

We learn about the environment variable `$WAYLAND_DEBUG`. That’s going to be handy, I guess.

Registering globals on the server appears to be a bit tedious at first glance with all the interfaces and their implementations.


6 Buffers and surfaces

So, a surface is, I would say, a “window” and a buffer is something that clients actually draw into – or “a source of pixels”, as they call it.

I tried to play the puzzle, i.e. create a working client that displays a window showing the XOR pattern. I failed. I’m missing the basic program skeleton: The example in 5.1 only calls “wl_display_roundtrip(display);” once, but what is the full event loop supposed to look like? At which point do I create and commit my surface? At the moment, my “main()” looks like this:


At the end of “registry_handle_global()”, I have this:


And “pixels()” does the whole dance of creating the buffer and committing the surface. Doesn’t work and I’m a bit too tired at the moment. Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.

– edit: The end of chapter 7 contains a full working example. My code above is very wrong.