Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

BreakPoint · 2019-02-24 20:58:41

I'm not sure if this post belongs in Newbie Corner or GNU/Linux Discussion.

I have a PowerSpec 1510 laptop with an i7-7700HQ and a GTX 1070. This laptop has the ability to use the discrete GPU as the primary/only GPU, and I intend to use that feature. I originally planned to use the i3 window manager, but then I learned that Wayland is the more secure, more lightweight successor to Xorg, and that Sway is basically a drop-in replacement for i3 using Wayland.

I like to be forward thinking and relatively secure with my PCs, so Sway/Wayland seemed to be the obvious choice. Then I learned that Nvidia are very bullheaded regarding how their driver handles Wayland, so Sway won't support Nvidia proprietary drivers in the future. So my question is, are there any serious/significant drawbacks to using Xorg when compared to Wayland besides the more bloated code?

Last edited by BreakPoint (2019-02-24 21:00:36)

progandy · 2019-02-24 21:19:34

wayland will have better support for mixing "normal" displays and small HiDPI displays and scaling applications correctly on each monitor. Since your laptop has only 1080p that should be of no concern for you.

Last edited by progandy (2019-02-24 21:20:35)

seth · 2019-02-24 21:34:32

X11 (the protocol, not the implementation) has some security issues that the wayland compositors seek to prevent (process isolation, every X11 client can control almost every X11 window and usually also log its input)
See xev & xdotool for a basic idea of what's possible.

Trilby · 2019-02-24 22:38:38

Is wayland more secure than Xorg? Probably. But only in the way that my display server, the full source code of which is below, is even far more secure than either of them:

int main(void) {
   return 0;
}

Of course my display server does absolutely nothing you'd want it to, so it's not very useful despite being 100% secure. Wayland probably does a couple of the things you want it to, so you can judge how useful it is compared to Xorg despite being somewhat more secure. Xorg will do pretty much everything you'd want, with the potential of being slightly less secure in some particular conditions which may not even be relevant on your machine.

Then also keep in mind, if you want to run any programs in Wayland, you'll likely be running Xorg anyways, just as a child process of your Wayland compositor.

qinohe · 2019-02-25 00:46:56

Hi there, welcome to the boards. Not exactly a direct answer to your question regarding Wayland and it boils down to what level of isolation you need, Xorg is fine just don't run it as root in the first place but I wouldn't do that with Wayland either...
There are other ways to create isolation.
F.I. chroot/systemd-nspawn, very useful for all kinds of purposes.
There are also tools to implement/create a level of isolation, like Firejail, this tool may be be one that's worth exploring.
I wont just put my dollar on Wayland or Xorg if it boils down to securing/isolating X apps(if needed), my 50 cents;)

BreakPoint · 2019-02-25 01:20:53

Thanks guys. So basically Wayland is more secure, but Xorg doesn't need to be actively worried about. Or to put it another way, there are probably much larger security concerns to deal with first if one is worried Xorg vulnerabilities. One has to walk a fine line between having a reasonably secure system and not spending all their time trying to patch every way to get into a system.

Now I'm off to watch Matthew Garrett tell me whether or not I should use UEFI and how useful/useless is Anti Evil Maid.

seth · 2019-02-25 08:14:06

Maybe I should clarify that: there's a design aspect in X11 that makes perfect process isolation impossible. Wayland compositors try to deal with that, but that doesn't inherently make them (more) secure. You will never have perfect process isolation on a (desktop) system, because you want to transfer data between processes (aka copy and paste) and there's IPC everywhere.

The actual security depends on the implemented channels and guards and their quality.
Eg. privacy related input dialogs can (and at times will) grab the X11 input at which point other clients can no longer listen (what does not keep out a keylogger w/ root permissions, nothing does) and while it's certainly nasty if a foreign process can move/hide/close your windows, that doesn't mean the client attached to that process is compromised in any further way.
Otoh it's perfectly reasonable that there can be bugs in unrelated parts of the wayland compositors (which tend to be pretty damn complex, where sway is rather on the skinny side) that can bleed over into the compositor - esp. since the latter *will* have to weaken the isolation to some degree for a functional environment.

Security is war, not a peace of software.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-02-25 08:23:34

Interesting blog post about Wayland misconceptions by the author of sway:

https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayl … unked.html

BreakPoint · 2019-02-25 10:20:51

An interesting read. I wonder if there are any Nvidia engineers that wish they could open source their driver.

mmdamin · 2019-02-25 19:59:28

Wayland isn't complete, also most of gnulinux gui apps use xorg (they launch on wayland by Xwayland compatibility xorg server for wayland). Sway doesn't support my nvidia gt610, and nvidia driver at all (you need to use nouveau driver with sway)

snakeroot · 2019-02-26 02:03:23

BreakPoint wrote:

An interesting read. I wonder if there are any Nvidia engineers that wish they could open source their driver.

According to Mr. DeVault, they are:

I was sad to conclude that we still aren’t going to see any meaningful involvement in open source from Nvidia. Many of their engineers are open to it, but I think that the engineering culture at Nvidia is unhealthy and that the engineers have very little influence.

https://drewdevault.com/2018/09/30/Sway … -2018.html

mxfm · 2019-03-01 19:14:41

I remember sometime ago there was a similar thread about choice between Wayland and Xorg, but that time from the programmer perspective. The person was interested in whether Wayland security model fits his needs. After some days of research the person was highly dissatisfied with restrictions applied by Wayland.

Regarding your question about security. If you are the sole user of laptop, then using Wayland instead of Xorg would hardly make your laptop secure. If your are interesting in security, you should invest your efforts somewhere else.

Arch Linux

#1 2019-02-24 20:58:41

Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#2 2019-02-24 21:19:34

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#3 2019-02-24 21:34:32

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#4 2019-02-24 22:38:38

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#5 2019-02-25 00:46:56

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#6 2019-02-25 01:20:53

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#7 2019-02-25 08:14:06

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#8 2019-02-25 08:23:34

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#9 2019-02-25 10:20:51

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#10 2019-02-25 19:59:28

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#11 2019-02-26 02:03:23

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

#12 2019-03-01 19:14:41

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

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