geraintwalesuk / balena-weston

A drop-in wayland compositor block for Balena

balena-weston

Project Status: No Longer Under Active Development

This project was an experiment to integrate WPE into the Balena Hub.
It is not currently actively developed or maintained. The current version available from Balena Hub does not reflect the most recent advancements or patches in the WPE ecosystem.

If an up to date Balena block is very important to you, we'd be very interested to hear more. Meanwhile, if you encounter issues or are seeking updates, we recommend exploring alternative solutions or resources that align with your requirements.

Should you have any further questions or inquiries, please feel free to get in touch.

Description

Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, as well as an useful environment in and of itself.

Out of the box, Weston provides a very basic desktop, or a full-featured environment for non-desktop uses such as automotive, embedded, in-flight, industrial, kiosks, set-top boxes and TVs. It also provides a library allowing other projects to build their own full-featured environments on top of Weston's core.

The core focus of Weston is correctness and reliability. Weston aims to be lean and fast, but more importantly, to be predictable. Whilst Weston does have known bugs and shortcomings, we avoid unknown or variable behaviour as much as possible, including variable performance such as occasional spikes in frame display time.

---

Requirements

Configuration	Value
Define DT overlays	vc4-kms-v3d

Usage

docker-compose file

version: '2'

volumes:
    weston:

services:
  weston:
    restart: always
    build: ./weston
    privileged: true
    volumes:
      - 'weston:/run/weston'

  myBlock:
    restart: always
    build: .
    privileged: true
    volumes:
      - 'weston:/run/weston'

Customization

Extend image configuration

Dockerfile.template

FROM igalia/balena-weston:%%BALENA_MACHINE_NAME%%

COPY data/	 /data/

COPY weston-init /weston-init
RUN chmod +x /weston-init

CMD [ "/weston-init" ]

weston/weston-init

...
[shell]
# Set a custom wallpaper
background-image=/data/wallpapers/MyWallpaper.jpg
...

Environment variables

There are several environment variables that can be used to tweak the Weston settings. The defaults should be okay for most cases.

Environment variable	Options	Default	Description
WESTON_IDLE_TIME	integer	0 (never)	Idle time in seconds (e.g. 900)
WESTON_SHELL	string	desktop	The shell to use (desktop, fullscreen, kiosk etc.)
WESTON_OUTPUT_USE_CURRENT_MODE	0, 1	0	Inherit the display mode from KMS console
WESTON_OUTPUT_MAX_WIDTH	integer	0	Maximum horizontal resolution the compositor may set
WESTON_OUTPUT_MAX_HEIGHT	integer	0	Maximum vertical resolution the compositor may set

The maximum-resolution environment variables rely on the list of modes advertised by the DRM subsystem. That means if you set for example the maximum horizontal resolution to 1920 and the list contains 3840x2160, 2560x1440, 1920x1080 and 1280x800, 1920x1080 will be picked.

The shell used will be ${WESTON_SHELL}-shell.so. You can use any shell shipped with Weston by default.

How to build

• Getting the sources

  git clone https://github.com/Igalia/balena-weston.git
  repo init -u https://github.com/Igalia/balena-weston.git -m manifest-hardknott.xml -b main
  repo sync --force-sync

• Generating the image root filesystem with Yocto:

  MACHINE=raspberrypi3
  ./build.sh

• Pushing the image to the registered Docker repository:

  MACHINE=raspberrypi3
  IMAGE_DOCKER_PATH=igalia
  # BALENA_BUILD_EXTRA_ARGS="-e"  # In case of balena is being executed on a different host architecture than the balena machine target
  ./push.sh