vortex

vortex is an independent wayland compositor written in C.

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Overview

Currently under active development as a high-performance, modern Wayland compositor focused on creating a visually appealing Wayland desktop experience.

The project's goal is to create a self-contained platform dedicated entirely to desktop compositing. In other words, the compositor is responsible only for compositing and its related aspects (such as window animations and IPC), while components like the desktop shell are intentionally abstracted away from it.

Build & Run

Make sure you have the required dependencies installed (debian packages shown):

meson ninja-build libwayland-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libinput-dev libudev-dev libxkbcommon-dev libglfw3-dev libcglm-dev libfreetype-dev libharfbuzz-dev

Clone & build:

git clone https://github.com/cococry/vortex.git
cd vortex

# needs to be in $PATH
meson setup build --prefix="$HOME/.local"
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

Simple test of vortex:

./build/vortex &
sleep 1
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 weston-simple-shm

Note: Use the wayland display that is logged by the output of ./vortex --verbose as the WAYLAND_DISPLAY variable when starting clients.

Note: The sink backend is automatically chosen at runtime, depending on context.

Supported sink backends are:

• DRM/KMS (hardware scanout)
• Wayland (nested session)

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CLI options

Usage

vortex [option:s] (value:s)

Options

Option	Description
-h, --help	Show this help message and exit
-v, --version	Show version information
-vb, --verbose	Log verbose (trace) output for debugging
-lf, --logfile	Write logs to a logfile located in: ~/.local/state/vortex/logs/ or $XDG_STATE_HOME/vortex/logs
-q, --quiet	Run in quiet mode (no logging)
-vo, --virtual-outputs [val]	Specify the number of virtual outputs (windows) in nested mode
-b, --backend [val]	Specify the compositor’s sink backend. Valid options: drm, wl. Example: vortex -b drm
-bp, --backend-path [val]	Specify the path to a .so file to load as a custom sink backend
-expt, --exclude-protocol [val(s)]	Specify the optional protocols (space seperated) you wish to not support during runtime

Sink Backend Configuration

The compositor supports pluggable sink backends that can be discovered at runtime.

Valid Backends

Valid options for backends are:

• drm
• wl

You can specify one directly:

vortex -b drm

Or load a custom shared object backend manually:

vortex -bp /usr/lib/vortex/backends/libcustom.so

Environment Variables

Vortex handles the following environment variables:

Env	Description
VT_DRM_NO_ATOMIC	Force legacy DRM/KMS implementation

Notes

• runara is currently vendored into subprojects/ but might not be in the future.

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