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: