Minecraft doesn't run natively upon Wayland

With the release of the GNOME Shell 3.22 on September 21, 2016, the "Wayland Display-Server Protocol" became the standard regarding graphical user interfaces (GUI) on Linux.

Read more about Wayland at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)

As a result, Minecraft is now running under the XWayland Compatiblity Layer. This results in an overhead and thus a decrease in the overall game performance in the sense of the FPS.

For example, the Intel HD 520 in Minecraft usually comes over 100 FPS. Under XWayland, only the half of this are reached.

Wayland: 1.12.0
XWayland: (xorg-server-xwayland) 1.18.4

A porting to Wayland is needed. See MC-92393

I've updated the affected versions. Still very important issue.

xprop still shows Minecraft running under XWayland with snapshot 18w01a. It looks like LWJGL has experimental wayland support for lwjgl 3.14 (https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/releases) , but the snapshot is still using 3.12. I don't know if there are any breaking changes between versions, but I don't think Wayland support will happen without updating.

Is Minecraft 1.13-pre5 running under Wayland? At least LWJGL 3.1.6 is now used.
There may be some mouse issues: MC-132460

This bug is still present in Minecraft 1.13.2. Game still runs with Xwayland and not natively.

Since LWJGL 3.1.4, it is possible to tell LWJGL to use the Wayland backend by launching the game with "-Dorg.lwjgl.glfw.libname=glfw_wayland". Doing this results in a crash that seems to be caused by GLFW.

However, using a version of GLFW newer than the one bundled in LWJGL 3.1.6 seems to fix the problem. I'm on Arch Linux and the package glfw-wayland currently provides GLFW 3.3 compiled with Wayland support. Launching the game with "-Dorg.lwjgl.glfw.libname=/usr/lib/libglfw.so" gets me past the first problem. But this time, the game crashes with GLFW complaining that "Focusing a window requires user interaction". Wayland does indeed not allow applications to arbitrarily take the focus, which is what Minecraft seems to be doing (probably via a call to glfwFocusWindow).

So, :

• Updating LWJGL;

• Removing calls to glfwFocusWindow (maybe replacing it with an attention request?);

Should get us closer to running Minecraft under Wayland natively.

Then remains the (arguably less important) problem of automatically determining whether or not we're running under Wayland, and then passing the "-Dorg.lwjgl.glfw.libname=glfw_wayland" argument to the game or not. This post suggests checking the $XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable.

On my system, running Minecraft through XWayland seems to incur a near 50% performance penalty. With Ubuntu considering the switch to Wayland by default, this issue might soon become a pretty big deal for a large portion of Linux users.

EDIT:

By the looks of things, a lot of GLFW functions remain unimplemented under wayland (basically everything related to window positioning / resizing / icons). So removing those calls on Wayland is probably not a solution.

I guess we just have to wait for GLFW to either implement those functions for the wayland backend or make it easier to know if the platform supports those operations before attempting them.

Just had a go at making this work, and it was very easy.  All you need to do is get rid of the error messages which abort the application in _glfwPlatformSetWindowIcon and _glfwPlatformFocusWindow and preferably replace them with warnings.  This makes minecraft boot up and work.

It's hard to determine on which side changes should be made. On one hand, Minecraft treats all messages from GLFW as fatal errors. But on the other hand, the flag GLFW_PLATFORM_ERROR used for unimplemented methods in GLFW is the same as the one used for actual fatal errors such as window creation failures, so Minecraft can't make the difference between legitimate fatal errors and unimplemented methods.

Ideally, GLFW would add a new flag used by unimplemented methods, and Minecraft could filter errors and silently ignore those, hoping their absence won't break anything. And later on, when GLFW implements them and stops throwing errors, Minecraft won't have to do anything and things will Just Work™.

I'd love some progress on this as Wayland support is becoming more mainstream.

1.15.2 still launches in using Xorg.

minecraft-launcher uses CEF. Its wayland support was upstreamed, a while ago. There are also some new pull requests related to ozone. I filed another bug report (MCL-13763). Lack of wayland nativity is a major problem.

Any chance of this getting fixed in 1.16?

Hey guys, I worked last 2 days on debugging all glfw wayland related issues to make Minecraft work smoothly!

While I will try pushing this work upstream, let me know if someone at Mojang would like to work directly with me on the matter 🙂 I know wayland pretty well
Here's the pull request with glfw fixes: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/pull/1725

@ninja- Your code works, but Minecraft still doesn't use Wayland. It appears to use GLX still, and xeyes can tell where my cursor is on the surface. If I disable Xwayland, Minecraft crashes at com.mojang.blaze3d.platform.GLX._initGlfw at line 79 in "SourceFile". Did you get different results? I assume you didn't, since GLX is explicitly mentioned, so I assume that blaze3d depends directly on GLX unfortunately. I wonder what it uses it for, when GLFW should be enough. Maybe it can be worked around without changing the source code.

Actually, it seems that Minecraft isn't using the GLFW I compiled somehow, nevermind? Will need to debug this further