Quick Recap
In my last post on the subject I explained how during the last WebKitGTK hackfest my colleague Eduardo Lima and I got a working GTK application that made use of the nested compositor design we need in WebKitGTK to get WebKit2 to work under Wayland and how the next steps would involve developing a similar solution inside WebKitGTK.
Current Status
During the last 2 weeks I have been working on this, and today I got Accelerated Compositing to work under Wayland and WebKit2. There are still a lot of rough edges of course since this milestone is mostly a prototype that only covers the basics. Its purpose was solely to investigate how the nested compositor approach would work in WebKitGTK to support the Accelerated Compositing code path. Still, this is an important milestone: Accelerated Compositing and WebKit2 were the biggest missing pieces to bring Wayland support to WebKitGTK and even if this is only a prototype it provides a solution for these two aspects, which is great news.
To Do List
There are probably a lot of things that need more work to convert this prototype into a proper solution. I have not tested it thoroughly but here is a quick list of things that I already know need more work:
- Support for multiple windows and tabs (the prototype only supports one tab in one window)
- For some pages the first composition can be very slow (as in taking >5 seconds). This problem only happens the first time the page is loaded, but it does not happen when reloading the same page (the demo video below shows this)
- Rendering of text selections does not seem to work
- There are rendering artifacts when going back using the browser’s back button to a previously visited page that activates the Accelerated Compositing code path. If the page is reloaded things go back to normal though
- There are some style rendering issues I have not looked into yet, might be on the side of GTK though
- All this was tested in a Wayland environment inside an X session, so it can be that some things still need to be fixed for this to work in a pure Wayland environment (with no X server running).
- Ideally we would like a solution that can make run-time decisions about the underlying platform (X or Wayland) so that we don’t have to build WebKitGTK specifically for one or the other. This is particularly important now that adoption of Wayland is still low. My prototype, however, only supports Wayland at the moment and would require more work to select between X and Wayland at run-time.
And there is probably a lot more to do that we will find out once we start testing this more seriously.
Demo
So here is a small video demoing the prototype. The demo uses WebKit’s MiniBrowser (WebKit2) to load 3 pages that activate the Accelerated Compositing code path in WebKitGTK. The browser is restarted for every page load only because it made it easier for me to record the video. You will see that for some pages, the first time the page is composited it takes a long time which is one of the issues I mentioned above. The demo also shows how this is not the case when the page is reloaded:
Next Steps
Once I reached this milestone I think we should start moving things to get this upstream as soon as possible: the current implementation provides the basics for Wayland support in WebKit2 and it would allow other interested developers to step in and help with testing, completing and fixing this initial implementation. I am sure there is still a lot of work to do for a fully operational Wayland port of WebKitGTK, so the more people who can contribute to this, the better.
I presume that upstreaming my code will still require a significant effort: my current implementation is a bit too hackish right now so there will be a lot of cleanups to do and a lot of back and forth with upstream maintainers to get the code in position to be merged, so the sooner we start the better. I also need to rebase my code against up-to-date versions of WebKitGTK and Wayland since I froze my development environment during the last WebKitGTK hackfest.
So that’s it. It is always good to reach milestones and I am happy to have reached this one in particular. If you are excited about WebKitGTK and Wayland I hope you enjoyed the news as much as I enjoyed working on it!
I would like to thank Igalia for sponsoring my work on this as well as all the other Igalians who helped me in the process, it would have not been possible without this support!