general/other wayland graphical session as freebsd guest?

[ilsubyeega]

hello. I hope this doesn't touch the forum rules (closing not exists posts, mentions about other os-es). I'm a linux daily driver who wants to test FreeBSD. The goal is to check the performance difference and maturity of freebsd's wayland environment compared to Linux.

So I tried installing freebsd 15 on a virtual machine. But after hours I couldn't find a way to run a graphical wayland session. Here is some cases:
- virtualbox: Graphics were fixed to `vmsvga` (cannot be modified in gui), and could not be changed to `vboxsvga`, etc. I couldn't find the relevant driver in FreeBSD (I looked at the package, but there was no activity in a year and I couldn't confirm whether it ran properly).
- vmware: `vmwgfx` driver not found in FreeBSD 15.
- virt-manager/libvirt/qemu: `virtio-gpu` driver not found in freebsd.

I believe that GPU and DRI/DRM are needed to run wayland. I'm wondering if there is a hypervisor with FreeBSD as a guest that properly runs virtual GPUs. How can I run a wayland graphical session?

I also posted a question on Reddit[0] yesterday, but couldn't find any new clues.
There doesn't seem to be any special guidance in FreeBSD book (mentions driver and package names, but running as a guest in wayland's own section, etc.)

Your advice will be helpful.

Although I did not install X.org separately, I confirmed that the existing freebsd fork ran although there were graphics-related problems.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rw18zm/

 

[SirDice]

Graphics were fixed to `vmsvga` (cannot be modified in gui)

It can, but the VM must be off. And the interface is going to complain about "invalid" settings, just ignore those.

I couldn't find the relevant driver in FreeBSD

Not sure what you searched for but the driver is included with the emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions-72. Don't know if it supports Wayland though. Looking at its dependency list I doubt it does.

Chapter 24. Virtualization

Virtualization software allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same computer

docs.freebsd.org

 

[T-Daemon]

So I tried installing freebsd 15 on a virtual machine. But after hours I couldn't find a way to run a graphical wayland session.

As far as I know, running Wayland exclusively requires a drm-kmod graphics video driver on FreeBSD, which is not available for virtual machines (at least not for VirtualBox, or bhyve(8), I don't know of other virtualizer support).

It's possible to run a wayland compositor in a FreeBSD VM, executed in a xorg session, from a xterminal, through x11-servers/xwayland .

Example: 15.0-RELEASE in a VBox VM, running xorg, xterm launching x11-wm/labwc (on-top window "wlroots", right top corner), running x11/lilyterm inside.



Running x11-wm/sway:

 

[ilsubyeega]

It can, but the VM must be off

just found that i needed to turn off the 3d graphic virtualization option, gui was really bugged, it was disabled(non togglable) and now today got enable checkmark and now i can see vboxsvga in the options.

driver is included with the emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions-72

was that one, added and applied from mentioned freebsd book, it seems do not introduce drm drivers(ls /dev/dr*)

It's possible to run wayland in a FreeBSD VM, executed in a xorg session, from a xterminal, through x11-servers/xwayland .

thanks, i forgot that could be one of options, but would look for native wayland on userspace and accelerated graphics.

will wait for some experiences with wayland users, thank you guys for helping me!