What you’ll learn

In this tutorial we will create a snap of an X11 application to act as the graphical user interface for an IoT or kiosk device. For the introduction to this tutorial series and the Mir display server please visit here.

X11 is a legacy protocol, it is known to be insecure, so we need to take steps to ensure it is secured correctly. To do this we shall embed an intermediary Xwayland server in the application snap and use snapd’s infrastructure to maintain security.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar with the material in Make a Wayland-native Kiosk snap. In particular, techniques for debugging problems in your snap are not repeated here.

What you’ll need

• An Ubuntu desktop running any current release of Ubuntu, or an Ubuntu Virtual Machine on another OS.
• A ‘Target Device’ from one of the following:

  • A device running Ubuntu Core 18.
    This guide shows you how to set up a supported device. If there’s no supported image that fits your needs you can create your own core image.

  • A VM. You don’t have to have a physical “Target Device”, you can follow this tutorial using Ubuntu Core in a VM instead.

    • Install the ubuntu-core-vm snap:

      sudo snap install --beta ubuntu-core-vm --devmode

      For the first run, create a VM running the latest Core 18 image:

      sudo ubuntu-core-vm init.

      From then on, you can spin it up with:

      sudo ubuntu-core-vm

      Which should show you a new window with Ubuntu Core running inside. Setting up Ubuntu Core on this VM is the same as for any other device or VM. See, for example, https://developer.ubuntu.com/core/get-started/kvm.

  • Using Ubuntu Classic You don’t have to use Ubuntu Core, you can use also a “Target Device” with Ubuntu Classic. Read this guide to understand how to run kiosk snaps on your desktop, as the particular details won’t be repeated here.

We use Wayland as the primary display interface. We will use Mir to manage the display and support connections from Wayland clients and Snapd will confine the applications and enable Wayland protocol interactions through Mir, securely.

Wayland is relatively new in the Linux world however. Its predecessor - X11 - has been the dominant graphics technology for decades. As a result, not all toolkits have native support for Wayland - they only support X11.

To deal with the limitations of X11 in a secure fashion we will embed a tiny intermediary X11 server called “Xwayland” inside the application snap, which translates the X11 calls to Wayland ones, allowing the X11 application to talk Wayland - a far more secure protocol.

The Snap security framework then ensures this X11 server is private to the application snap.

Toolkits without Native support for Wayland

• GTK2
• Qt4
• Electron apps
• Java apps
• Windows apps emulated under Wine
• Chromium

It may also be your application is written using X11 calls directly, in which case this guide is for you.

A large fraction of applications are still written for X11 - there are those written with Qt4 and Gtk2, but also Java, Mono or Wine-based. We can snap these for a kiosk just fine, we just need to add some extra bits to the snap.

We’ll take a trivial example to start with (glxgears). glxgears is again a handy snap to have, as it will help prove OpenGL is working for X11 apps inside Ubuntu Core.

On your desktop, install the following:

sudo apt install xwayland mesa-utils i3-wm

Now launch

miral-app -kiosk -launcher 'Xwayland -wr :1'

(the -wr is optional, causes Xwayland to create a white window, so we see it is running in Mir-on-X, the “:1” specifies a local socket which won’t collide with your desktop’s X11 server which uses “:0”).

If we run glxgears right now, it will appear on your desktop, not inside the Mir-on-X window. Mir doesn’t talk X11 itself, but it relies on an intermediary “Xwayland” to translate. and we now can launch glxgears and tell it to connect to Xwayland:

DISPLAY=:1 glxgears

You should see the gear animation in the Mir-on-X window.

But it’s not perfect - why is it not fullscreen? The reason is that in the X11 world, a window manager is a separate process which takes the responsibility of sizing and positioning windows. Xwayland does not do this, so we need an additional process to manage this.

We’ll use the “i3” window manager, as it is simple to configure with a text file.

i3 needs to be told what X11 window should be fullscreen. To do this, we need to identify a unique property of the X11 window to be fullscreened. Run glxgears, this time on your desktop:

glxgears

and in a separate terminal, run

xprop

your cursor will change to a cross-hairs - click on the “glxgears” window. You’ll see window metadata printed to your terminal like this:

_NET_WM_STATE(ATOM) = _NET_WM_STATE_FOCUSED
WM_STATE(WM_STATE):
       window state: Normal
       icon window: 0x0
_NET_WM_DESKTOP(CARDINAL) = 0
_GTK_EDGE_CONSTRAINTS(CARDINAL) = 170
_NET_FRAME_EXTENTS(CARDINAL) = 0, 0, 30, 0
_NET_WM_ALLOWED_ACTIONS(ATOM) = _NET_WM_ACTION_MOVE, _NET_WM_ACTION_RESIZE, _NET_WM_ACTION_FULLSCREEN, _NET_WM_ACTION_MINIMIZE, _NET_WM_ACTION_SHADE, _NET_WM_ACTION_MAXIMIZE_HORZ, _NET_WM_ACTION_MAXIMIZE_VERT, _NET_WM_ACTION_CHANGE_DESKTOP, _NET_WM_ACTION_CLOSE, _NET_WM_ACTION_ABOVE, _NET_WM_ACTION_BELOW
WM_ICON_NAME(STRING) = "glxgears"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "glxgears"
WM_NORMAL_HINTS(WM_SIZE_HINTS):
       user specified location: 0, 0
       user specified size: 300 by 300

We can use the “name” option above, i3 refers to this as a window “title”. Create a text file called “i3.conf” and insert the following:

# i3 config file (v4)
font pango:monospace 8
# always start in fullscreen
for_window [title="glxgears"] fullscreen

See https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#configuring for info on the syntax used. Start Mir-on-X again:

miral-app -launcher 'Xwayland -wr :1'

Then launch i3 with:

DISPLAY=:1 i3 -c i3.conf &

you won’t see any evidence of it running on screen though. But running

DISPLAY=:1 glxgears

you see that glxgears is now fullscreen.

This is the basic setup that we’ll have in our snap. It seems like a lot of work, but there’s a helper that does it all automatically: xwayland-kiosk-helper! We’ll use that from now on.

For our first pass we will snap glxgears and run it in devmode (i.e. unconfined) on our Ubuntu desktop. We will include an xwayland-kiosk-helper part that makes life easier, it contains a script that runs the above commands for us.

This guide assumes you are familiar with creating snaps. If not, please read here first.

Create the snap directory by forking https://github.com/snapcrafters/fork-and-rename-me

git clone https://github.com/snapcrafters/fork-and-rename-me.git glxgears-example

Change to the new glxgears-example directory.

cd glxgears-example

Replace the “snap/snapcraft.yaml” file with the following:

name: glxgears-example
version: '0.1'
summary: glxgears example kiosk
description: |
  glxgears example X11 kiosk, using Xwayland and Wayland
base: core18
confinement: strict
grade: devel

layout:
  /usr/share/X11:
    bind: $SNAP/usr/share/X11

parts:
  xwayland-kiosk-helper:
    plugin: cmake
    source: https://github.com/MirServer/xwayland-kiosk-helper.git
    build-packages: [ build-essential ]
    stage-packages: [ xwayland, i3, libegl1-mesa, libgl1-mesa-glx ]

  glxgears:
    plugin: nil
    stage-packages:
      - mesa-utils

environment:
  XWAYLAND_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW_HINT: title="glxgears"

apps:
  glxgears-example:
    command: xwayland-kiosk-launch glxgears
    plugs:
    - opengl
    - wayland

xwayland-kiosk-helper uses XWAYLAND_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW_HINT to set up the i3 configuration (as we did manually in the previous step).

The other thing you may not have encountered is:

layout:
  /usr/share/X11:
    bind: $SNAP/usr/share/X11

This brings the X11 element of the snap into the expected location: /usr/share/X11.

Create the snap by returning to the “glxgears” directory and running

snapcraft

You should be left with a “glxgears-example_0.1_amd64.snap” file.

Let’s test it!

miral-kiosk&
sudo snap install --dangerous ./glxgears-example_0.1_amd64.snap --devmode
snap run glxgears-example

You should see a fullscreen gear animation in the Mir-on-X window.

Device Setup

Open another terminal and ssh login to your device and from this login install the “mir-kiosk” snap.

snap install mir-kiosk

Now you should have a black screen with a white mouse cursor.

“mir-kiosk” provides the graphical environment needed for running a graphical snap.

Here is a suitable first candidate snapcraft.yaml file:

name: glxgears-example
version: '0.1'
summary: glxgears example kiosk
description: |
  glxgears example X11 kiosk, using Xwayland and Wayland
base: core18
confinement: strict
grade: devel

layout:
  /usr/share/X11:
    bind: $SNAP/usr/share/X11

parts:
  xwayland-kiosk-helper:
    plugin: cmake
    source: https://github.com/MirServer/xwayland-kiosk-helper.git
    build-packages: [ build-essential ]
    stage-packages: [ xwayland, i3, libegl1-mesa, libgl1-mesa-glx ]
    
  glxgears:
    plugin: nil
    stage-packages:
      - mesa-utils

environment:
  XWAYLAND_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW_HINT: title="glxgears"

apps:
  glxgears-example:
    command: xwayland-kiosk-launch glxgears
    plugs:
    - opengl
    - wayland

  daemon:
    command: xwayland-kiosk-launch glxgears
    daemon: simple
    plugs:
    - opengl
    - wayland

Check this builds locally before proceeding:

snapcraft

One day, perhaps, snapcraft will fully support cross building with the --target-arch option. But getting that to work is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Instead we’ll make use of Snapcraft builders to build the snap for all architecture$

Create a GitHub repository for your snap and push your changes to the snap project there:

git init
git commit -a
git remote remove origin
git remote add origin https://github.com/<username>/<repo>.git
git push -u origin master

Now visit Snapcraft Build and follow the “Set up in Minutes” link. You can configure Snapcraft Build to watch your GitHub repository, and it will auto-build Snaps supporting multiple architectures: amd64, i386, armhf and amd64, ppc64el and s$

Visiting the link

https://build.snapcraft.io/user/<username>/<repo>

will show you your build status, allow you to find where the built Snaps are, and trigger a new build.

To download the built Snap, you need to click on the build number of the architecture you need, and the first line of the build log will be a URL pointing at Launchpad (of this form):

https://launchpad.net/~build.snapcraft.io/+snap/91eff219d76d5721eb24ffb6a83032b6/+build/593821

Visiting this URL, you can find the built Snap under the “Built files” section.

To test your snap on your target device, find the build for your device architecture and download it. Or you can grab its URL and download it directly to your device:

## Deploy the snap on the device

Duration: 4:00

Push the snap you built to your device:

``` text
scp glxgears-example_0.1_amd64.snap <user>@<ip-address>:~

using your device’s SSH username & IP address details.

We now have the .snap file on the device in its home directory. We need to install the snap, configure it to talk Wayland to mir-kiosk and run the application. In your ssh session to your device:

snap install --dangerous ./glxgears-example_0.1_amd64.snap --devmode

On your device, you should see the same graphical animations you saw earlier. It will continue to run until you run “snap stop glxgears-example”

Your device is now a kiosk! Rebooting will restart mir-kiosk and glxgears-example automatically.

One thing still needs to be resolved: this snap is installed with the --devmode option.

To use fully confined snaps which use Xwayland internally, you will need a build of snapd that allows Xwayland to work in a confined snap.

To update the snap to use Xwayland internally we need to update the “snap/snapcraft.yaml” file to add the network-bind plug. The resulting file:

name: glxgears-example
version: '0.1'
summary: glxgears example kiosk
description: |
  glxgears example X11 kiosk, using Xwayland and Wayland
base: core18
confinement: strict
grade: devel

layout:
  /usr/share/X11:
    bind: $SNAP/usr/share/X11

parts:
  xwayland-kiosk-helper:
    plugin: cmake
    source: https://github.com/MirServer/xwayland-kiosk-helper.git
    build-packages: [ build-essential ]
    stage-packages: [ xwayland, i3, libegl1-mesa, libgl1-mesa-glx ]
    
  glxgears:
    plugin: nil
    stage-packages:
      - mesa-utils

environment:
  XWAYLAND_FULLSCREEN_WINDOW_HINT: title="glxgears"

apps:
  glxgears-example:
    command: xwayland-kiosk-launch glxgears
    plugs:
    - opengl
    - wayland
    - network-bind # Needed (NOT the x11 slot) to serve X11  

  daemon:
    command: xwayland-kiosk-launch glxgears
    daemon: simple
    plugs:
    - opengl
    - wayland
    - network-bind # Needed (NOT the x11 slot) to serve X11  

The new lines are:

…
apps:
  glxgears-example:
    plugs:
    …
    - network-bind # Needed (NOT the x11 slot) to serve X11  
  …
  daemon:
    plugs:
    …
    - network-bind # Needed (NOT the x11 slot) to serve X11  
…

Then we need to push the changes, import the changes to launchpad and rebuild.

Push the snap to your device, and install like before:

scp glxgears-example_0.1_amd64.snap <user>@<ip-address>:~
snap install --dangerous glxgears-example_0.1_arm64.snap

and you should see the graphical animation again.

Now we are confident the X11 server is fully secured by the snap architecture!

Should you wish to share this snap, the next step would be to push your snap to the Snap Store. And, once you are satisfied that the snap is working well from the store, you should change the grade to stable so that you can publish to the “stable” channel:

…
grade: stable
…

Congratulations, you have created your first graphical snap of an X11 app for Ubuntu Core.