Red Hat Developing New xwayland-run & wlheadless-run Utilities

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

As part of Olivier Fourdan's work on making XWayland rootful mode useful and inspired by the xvfb-run script started by Debian to run a specified client/command in a virtual X.Org Server, he began developing xwayland-run. Using xwayland-run can be done to run XWayland rootful within a Wayland compositor headless as a replacement for existing Xvfb usage. This also serves as a convenient utility for running X11 clients within its own XWayland rootful instance.

He sums up these new utilities as:

* xwayland-run, to spawn an X11 client within its own dedicated Xwayland rootful instance,

* wlheadless-run to run a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors,

* xwfb-run, a combination of the two other tools above to be used as a direct replacement for xvfb-run specifically.

So far xwayland-run / wlheadless-run / xwfb-run support the Weston, Cage, GNOME Mutter, and GNOME-Kiosk compositors but is open to supporting additional compositors.

Olivier Fourdan at Red Hat has recently been working on improving the XWayland rootful experience and in turn began hacking on this new xwayland-run Python utility.

This new xwayland-run family of utilities was announced this morning on the Wayland mailing list.