Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues
phoronix.com
Among the Firefox Wayland bugs, one of the top crash bugs is over a lost connection to a Wayland compositor. For dealing with it is to have a proxy between Firefox and the Wayland compositor to cache messages and prevent compositor message queue overflows.
When you need a proxy between your application and your graphics server then something fundamental went wrong long before.
Would be interesting if this is more on Firefox side, or on compositor side. I've been running Firefox in Wayland for about 9 months now, without any issues.
this is a wayland issue. Due to how wayland works, it cannot drop messages, this means if the messages stop being accepted (IE. the program becomes very slow and not very responsive) the application will wind up dying. EEVDF helped resolve a lot of these issues. but they arent gone yet.
a fairly easy replication cause is to start a large rust project compile since cargo will thread to oblivion if it gets the chance, then use the PC on wayland. Applications can frequently die, Firefox, MPV, Kate, gnome web, chromium, games, etc. it also doesn't matter what compositor you use right now as gnome, kde sway all share the issue
EEVDF really does help stop a lot of these crashing though
BeOS solved the issue of unresponsive GUIs in the 1990s. The GUI just must never run in the same thread as the logic.
while this is good on theory, when your CPU is being absolutely hammered, you need to re-adjust priorities to make a system responsive again, it's actually not a simple thing to do without a context aware scheduler. Even though EEVDF is pretty good, it still struggles some times
My PC with a 133MHz Pentium 1 processor was pretty responsive all the time back in the day. It's definitely a solved problem.
You're describing Wayland running into issues due to overall high system load, and not been given enough scheduler time to accept messages?
edit: This issue? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 - didn't find anything else matching the description, and personally have never seen that, both on my low specs notebook or my workstation, which probably counts as higher spec.
correct, this is the same issue, this generally really only happens with a sustained all core workload that will consistently leave you cpu at 100%, since if it's not sustained, the kernel will allot some time to the programs, and the crash wont happen
I guess that explains why I'm not seeing it - my workstation has 64 threads and more than enough memory, and on my notebook I'm scheduling load intensive stuff to not interfere with interactive device usage.
Interesting, Firefox did crash more often for me on Wayland, but I hadn't dug into it further yet.
Let's see if this reduces crashing again.
Personally I didn't have any problems with that yet fortunately.
My bigger problem right now is a bug that prevents me from copying stuff from the url bar when middle-click pasting is disabled in the KDE settings...
In X11 the bug doesn't exist
What. For me it's the opposite - I can't copy stuff to other apps from Firefox if that setting is not enabled
Yeah sorry. I was half asleep while I wrote this. That is the problem I have as well.
One workaround I found is to use the separate search bar (if you have it enabled) as a buffer.
When I copy the URL I can paste it into the search bar but nowhere else. If I copy the search bar I can paste it everywhere just fine
Ah. For me it's not the search bar only but also if I select text and press Ctrl+C/press context menu Copy as well.
Interestingly, if sites put something in the clipboard (eg. Mastodon toot Copy link button) it works anywhere else.
Is this on Fedora? My girlfriend had lots of similar issues on Fedora that disappeared on pop os.
EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma desktop
I had to force it to run in xwayland because in wayland it no longer remembers window positions, so with wayland it was opening all my windows in a big pile on the current desktop, instead of putting them in the positions and on the desktops they belong.
That sounds more like a compositor problem - typically a client should not have control over where windows are placed, and that X11 allowed that got heavily abused with negative impact on UI. Wayland fortunately fixed that, so it is now up to the compositor where to place windows. Those can send hints, but the compositor is free to ignore them.
In your situation your compositor should remember where to stick the windows.
Kwin. It works with xwayland, doesn't with wayland, I'd love a solution, but I found nothing.
Window rules based on the application name and window title?
Doesn't the window title change on firefox depending on tab or even web-page?
Yeah, if you want certain pages in certain screens it would work, and then they'd stay there
And if I ever browse away from that page and forget to return to it before closing firefox...
This has a million caveats and isn't even close to a solution for how I use firefox. Each desktop has their own windows and I want them to stay there because the tabs open are relevant to that desktop.
Meanwhile forcing xwayland, just works.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer.
Among the Firefox Wayland bugs, one of the top crash bugs is over a lost connection to a Wayland compositor.
For dealing with it is to have a proxy between Firefox and the Wayland compositor to cache messages and prevent compositor message queue overflows.
Martin Stransky with Red Hat wrote Wayland-Proxy as a C++ version of a prior proof-of-concept written in Rust.
Wayland-Proxy can work either as a standalone application or a library called upon by Wayland apps.
Those wishing to learn more about Wayland-Proxy and its Firefox use can see today's post on Stransky's blog.
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