FreeCAD natively under Gnome/Wayland

[tsadowski]

Hi,

with Qt 5.12 it is possible to run FreeCAD natively under Wayland. All window decorations are nicely drawn. It is also crisper on HiDPI displays because scaling is handled better. I had to hack the Coin3d build to prevent the linking with libglx, because otherwise FreeCAD would crash as soon as a new document is created or opened.

Cheers, Torsten

[NormandC]

Thank you for your report, Torsten. I had been wondering about it, since Linux distros are gradually phasing out the old X server.

[yorik]

Very nice!! Haven't tried wayland yet, but it's impressive to see that a complex 3D app with lots of (some old) dependencies like freecad works...

[Kunda1]

@tsadowski can you show the code that you hacked to make this happen ?

[tsadowski]

It was quite easy. Coin works without glx for FreeCAD probably because the funtionality is not needed by FreeCAD and Coin has a dummy implementation. I just had to add a patch to the Arch build recipy:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/coin-hg/

not to find glx:

Code: Select all

diff -ura coin/CMakeLists.txt coin.new/CMakeLists.txt
--- coin/CMakeLists.txt 2019-01-10 00:06:52.081521372 +0100
+++ coin.new/CMakeLists.txt     2019-01-10 00:08:32.785648305 +0100
@@ -431,7 +431,7 @@
   check_include_files("GL/gl.h" HAVE_GL_GL_H)
   check_include_files("GL/glu.h" HAVE_GL_GLU_H)
   check_include_files("GL/gl.h;GL/glext.h" HAVE_GL_GLEXT_H)
-  check_include_files("GL/glx.h" HAVE_GLX_H)
+#  check_include_files("GL/glx.h" HAVE_GLX_H)
 endif()
 
 check_include_file(OpenGL/gl.h HAVE_OPENGL_GL_H)
@@ -459,9 +459,9 @@
 check_symbol_exists(CGL_VERSION_1_0 OpenGL/OpenGL.h HAVE_CGL)
 set(HAVE_CGL_PBUFFER ${HAVE_CGL})
 
-if(NOT (HAVE_WGL OR HAVE_AGL OR HAVE_CGL))
-  check_library_exists(GL glXChooseVisual "" HAVE_GLX)
-endif()
+#if(NOT (HAVE_WGL OR HAVE_AGL OR HAVE_CGL))
+#  check_library_exists(GL glXChooseVisual "" HAVE_GLX)
+#endif()
 
 if(HAVE_WINDOWS_H)
   set(SIM_INCLUDE_WINDOWS_H "#include <windows.h>")

I tried to add some runtime workarounds in FreeCAD but this is awkward and probably doomed. Coin probably needs to use EGL instead of GLX. I will check if there is an easy solution and contact the Coin team.

Cheers,
Torsten

[triplus]

I will check if there is an easy solution and contact the Coin team.

Cheers,
Torsten

That would be great. Likely still a few years before Wayland becomes more widely used and majority of applications add support. But FreeCAD providing support should happen sooner rather than later. If possible. Therefore Coin3D needs to get adapted and as for the Qt. You likely had to use QtWayland module in the procedure somehow? Can Wayland/X11 option be set with an environment variable before starting FreeCAD?

[hobbes1069]

I tried to add some runtime workarounds in FreeCAD but this is awkward and probably doomed. Coin probably needs to use EGL instead of GLX. I will check if there is an easy solution and contact the Coin team.

Any luck with the Coin team with EGL support?

Thanks,
Richard

[hobbes1069]

For posterity with the current 4.0.0 release I had to update the patch to the following:

Code: Select all

--- a/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -586,11 +586,11 @@ if(NOT (HAVE_WGL OR HAVE_AGL OR HAVE_CGL
     list(APPEND COIN_TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES OpenGL::GLX)
   endif()
   set(CMAKE_REQUIRED_LIBRARIES ${COIN_TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES})
-  check_cxx_source_compiles("
-    #include <GL/gl.h>
-    #include <GL/glx.h>
-    int main() { (void)glXChooseVisual(0L, 0, 0L); glEnd(); return 0; }
-  " HAVE_GLX)
+#  check_cxx_source_compiles("
+#    #include <GL/gl.h>
+#    #include <GL/glx.h>
+#    int main() { (void)glXChooseVisual(0L, 0, 0L); glEnd(); return 0; }
+#  " HAVE_GLX)
 endif()

 # Checks specific OpenGL configurations
 

Thanks,
Richard

[ElliotLee]

I don't see any issues open in the Coin issue tracker on this topic - https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/issue ... tatus=open

Would someone (with a better grasp of the topic than I) file one?

[kkremitzki]

BTW, a move to github.com/coin3d is underway.