I’d like to try to get fedora to host a second headless Wayland session in the background for a remote user. I have a GPU but I want to share its render and compute, not the physical HDMI output, so I need a virtual Wayland session for the second seat.
Supposedly logind could handle the seat and udev permission issues clean enough, but headless use is still beyond me there.
I’d like a KDE Plasma environment running headless and then sunshine can just stream this session out using the war capture method. I just don’t know how to start up a separate Wayland session under another linux user in the background with a plasma session drawing to an imaginary monitor.
There seem to be 2 ways of doing this.
- wlheadless-run - a young project made to solve this particular problem
- kwin --virtual can theoretically do this, but I’m not finding clear examples of it
I was investigating this some time ago when I wanted to remote login into my work PC on my local network so that I didnt need a KVM or multiple monitors and peripherals.
Fundamentally this works great in X11 because the core required for this is implemented in X11. Meaning it was easy to create software for this use-case no matter the DE.
Wayland is much more “hollow” in this regard. A lot of features that were core to X11 have been offloaded to the window manager. And by offloaded I mean “we do not handle this stuff, figure it out DE devs!”
This means that for what we want, the DE itself needs to implement it. Gnome does have a remote login feature that might fit the bill. KDE has made 0 attempts at implementing it. Not sure where the rest stand.
Well x11 was built from the ground up to solve this exact problem. Wayland was built for a more direct use case, then had to backpeddle when they realize that’s not the only way to use a computer so they either adapt or create and maintain a second stack.
Wayland is striking a pretty responsible balance here. Compositors are taking a bit to settle down on this bit it’s there. Wlroots and gnome had it best but KDE recently made enough improvements that I consider this matter settled from their side too. Cosmic, budgie, etc will be in limbo for a while.
Anyway I found out a method that works and it’s actually surprisingly clean and versatile. I just need to document and deploy. Expect a write up. I’m pretty pleased with my findings so far. There’s some old-world Linux ideas that worked really well here.
If you actually found a solution I would be very interested. Looking forward to it!