vortex

vortex is an independent wayland compositor written in C.

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Overview

Currently under active development as a high-performance, independent Wayland compositor focused on creating a notoriously fast and 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):

sudo apt install meson ninja-build libwayland-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libegl-dev libgl-dev libwayland-egl-backend-dev libinput-dev libudev-dev libxcursor-dev xcursor-themes libxkbcommon-dev libpixman-1-dev libseat-dev libliftoff-dev libcglm-dev libx11-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libxcb-present-dev

For Vulkan rendering support, additionally install:

sudo apt install libvulkan-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

Build Options

Vortex supports configuring which sink backends and rendering backends are built through Meson options.

Option	Values	Default	Description
backends	drm, wayland, x11, all	all	Specify which sink backends to build
renderers	opengl, vulkan, all	opengl	Specify which rendering backends to build
profiling	true, false	false	Build and link the Tracy client for CPU profiling

Simple test of vortex:

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

Running

Note

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

Supported sink backends are:

• DRM/KMS (hardware scanout)
• Wayland (nested session)
• X11 (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, x11. Example: vortex -b drm
-r, --renderer [val]	Specify the compositor’s renderer. Valid options: opengl, vulkan. Example: vortex -r vulkan
-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

Note

When no renderer is specified, OpenGL (3.3) is used by default.

Sink Backend Configuration

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

Valid Backends

Valid options for backends are:

• drm
• wl
• x11

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
VT_DRM_NO_HARDWARE_CURSOR	Force cursor compositing
VT_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT	Composite every surface, never try to put client buffers on hardware planes.
VT_DRM_NO_LAYER_PLAN_CACHE	Disable layer-plan caching, reevaluating Liftoff each frame (Worse performance, more realiable).

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