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
  • nitrolife@hikki.team
    1·
    5 days ago

    Because of the Wayland architecture, you simply cannot do it differently. Because Wayland is not a window manager, but a subsystem for working directly with video. This is not a new X11 server, it’s a different architecture. Therefore, by default, no matter where you choose, the render will be output to tty0 of your main server. You have only 2 options - use Wolf as is or manually assemble https://github.com/games-on-whales/gst-wayland-display and limit it to one video card via systemd. gst-wayland-display literally forcibly transfers the render not to tty0, but immediately to the stream for Moonlight.

    So it’s not that Wolf is too complicated, it’s just that what you want is a rather complicated case.

    UPD: although it is possible that you will be able to do this using wlheadless-run, but this will most likely be worse in terms of performance compared to gst-wayland-display. Although for a simple KDE session, I think there is no difference.

    UPD2: I checked and, as I thought, regular applications will get along fine if you run them through wlheadless-run, but everything that requires vulkan may break. it’s the same with video cards. Simply specifying primary will not guarantee the use of a fixed card. But just for office work, I think it will be fine. however, as soon as the case starts to go beyond the standard, everything will start to break down if you have more than one GPU.