[webkit-dev] Announcing WebKit for Wayland

[Žan Doberšek]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Benjamin Poulain <benjamin at webkit.org>
wrote:

> Hi Žan,
>
> Thanks for announcing this project here.
>
> Can you explain a bit why you decided to use the UIProcess directly inside
> the compositor?
>
> I am a bit concerned about the security of this model because the
> UIProcess becomes an attack vector for the compositor. Sharing the memory
> space with the compositor would prevent aggressive sandboxing.
>

The main idea behind this design is to remove the intermediate purpose of
the UIProcess when it comes to updating the display server with rendering
results from the WebProcess, handling input events (originating from the
compositor) in the WebProcess, etc. For such tasks UIProcess did nothing
but relay them forward, and not necessarily efficiently.

This change in architecture goes hand-in-hand with the idea of removing the
dependency on any toolkit. Most of these are nowadays exclusively tailored
to run best under some specific desktop environment, relying on additional
protocols for window management that bring in unnecessary overhead. And
since the toolkit is utilized in the UIProcess, it requires that the
UIProcess is run under a compositor, and not in parallel to it. Removing
the toolkit also gives us a large amount of leeway in adjusting the input
processing, display updates and other things to our needs.

But even without the toolkit the whole setup could still easily run under
the more traditional environments, as we're recommending for developer
setups where the Weston compositor with the WebProcess client runs under
the parent X or Wayland display.

The current architecture does inhibit sandboxing, and the best alternative
solution we can offer at the moment is randomizing the address space
layout. We're still open to other possibilities, including perhaps again
moving the UIProcess into a separate process but keeping the current design
of the WebProcess acting as a direct client of the Wayland compositor.

The port has been in the works for four months now, and while we might have
not yet approached security seriously, we're definitely not keen on keeping
the issues unaddressed.

Cheers,
Zan


>
> Great Wayland support seems like an important target for WebKit on Linux.
> Do you know what are the plans for GTK and EFL?
>
> Benjamin
>
>
>
> On 12/9/14 7:44 AM, Žan Doberšek wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> now with proper formatting, Igalia is happy to announce the Wayland port
>> of WebKit.
>>
>> This port avoids using traditional GUI toolkits in favor of directly
>> operating with the Wayland display protocol. Leveraging the WebKit2
>> multi-process architecture, the UIProcess is implemented as a shared
>> library and loaded by the Wayland compositor, enabling the WebProcess to
>> act as a direct client of the compositor while still being controlled by
>> the UIProcess.
>>
>> EGL, the Wayland EGL platform, and OpenGL ES are used for
>> hardware-accelerated compositing of the rendered Web content. GLib,
>> Libsoup and Cairo are used under the hood.
>>
>> The port serves as a good base for building systems and environments
>> that are mostly or completely relying on the Web platform technologies
>> for building the desired interface.
>>
>> Overall the port is still in its early days, with some basic
>> functionality (e.g. functional keyboard and mouse input support) and
>> many other Web platform features still not supported. But with Wayland
>> EGL support constantly growing in graphics drivers for different GPUs,
>> it can already be tested on devices like the Raspberry Pi or the Jetson
>> TK1 development board.
>>
>> In terms of supported Wayland compositors, for the moment we only
>> support Weston (the reference Wayland compositor implementation), which
>> is also used for development purposes. It's also used for running the
>> layout tests by again pushing WebKitTestRunner functionality into a
>> shared library, though all that is still in very early stages.
>>
>> The code is available on GitHub. There are also short instructions for
>> building the dependencies and the port, and how to run it.
>> https://github.com/WebKitForWayland/webkit
>>
>> There's also additional repositories there (for Cairo, Weston),
>> containing changes that haven't yet been pushed upstream. In the
>> following days we'll also be providing Buildroot configurations that can
>> be used for cross-compiling the whole software stack for the supported
>> hardware.
>>
>> We look forward to continuing evolving this work, enabling further
>> features and improving performance on the software side and adding
>> support for additional devices. As with all open-source projects,
>> contributions are welcome.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Zan Dobersek
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 7:28 AM, Žan Doberšek <zandobersek at gmail.com
>> <mailto:zandobersek at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi,
>>     Igalia is happy to announce the Wayland port of WebKit.
>>     This port avoids using traditional GUI toolkits in favor of directly
>>     operating with the Wayland display protocol. Leveraging the WebKit2
>>     multi-process architecture, the UIProcess is implemented as a shared
>>     library and loaded by the Wayland compositor, enabling the
>>     WebProcess to act as a direct client of the compositor while still
>>     being controlled by the UIProcess.
>>     EGL, the Wayland EGL platform, and OpenGL ES are used for
>>     hardware-accelerated compositing of the rendered Web content. GLib,
>>     Libsoup and Cairo are used under the hood.
>>     The port serves as a good base for building systems and environments
>>     that are mostly or completely relying on the Web platform
>>     technologies for building the desired interface.
>>     Overall the port is still in its early days, with some basic
>>     functionality (e.g. functional keyboard and mouse input support) and
>>     many other Web platform features still not supported. But with
>>     Wayland EGL support constantly growing in graphics drivers for
>>     different GPUs, it can already be tested on devices like the
>>     Raspberry Pi or the Jetson TK1 development board.
>>     In terms of supported Wayland compositors, for the moment we only
>>     support Weston (the reference Wayland compositor implementation),
>>     which is also used for development purposes. It's also used for
>>     running the layout tests by again pushing WebKitTestRunner
>>     functionality into a shared library, though all that is still in
>>     very early stages.
>>     The code is available on GitHub. There are also short instructions
>>     for building the dependencies and the port, and how to run
>>     it.https://github.com/WebKitForWayland/webkit
>>     There's also additional repositories there (for Cairo, Weston),
>>     containing changes that haven't yet been pushed upstream. In the
>>     following days we'll also be providing Buildroot configurations that
>>     can be used for cross-compiling the whole software stack for the
>>     supported hardware.
>>     We look forward to continuing evolving this work, enabling further
>>     features and improving performance on the software side and adding
>>     support for additional devices. As with all open-source projects,
>>     contributions are welcome.
>>     Regards,Zan Dobersek
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
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