Rust · 2026
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A Wayland compositor in Rust on Smithay whose entire shell — wallpaper, dock, window frames and titlebars — is a web page, composited zero-copy alongside native clients. Five interchangeable engine backends render that same page: WPE, WebKitGTK, Chromium, CEF and Servo.
The problem
Build a native Wayland compositor while letting ordinary web technology own the desktop shell and window layout, without copying rendered frames through the CPU.
Architecture
- Smithay handles DRM/KMS, input and the xdg-shell protocol.
- An engine backend renders the HTML shell to DMA-BUFs that become compositor render elements.
- Tiling is a tree of CSS flexboxes, so the browser computes every window rectangle and the shell only measures the result.
Highlights
- Five interchangeable engine backends behind one shell page — WPE, WebKitGTK, Chromium, CEF and Servo
- Zero-copy from engine to screen: DMA-BUF frames, drm_syncobj fences and real vblank pacing
- A Nix flake that builds WPE WebKit from source
Technology
Rust · wayland · smithay · wpe-webkit
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