As you may already know (if you don’t, please check these older posts) openQA, the automated testing system used by openSUSE runs daily tests on the latest KDE software from git. It works well and uncovered a number of bugs. However, it only tested X11. With Wayland starting to become usable, and some developers even switching to Wayland full time, it was a notable shortcoming. Until now.

Why would openQA not run on Wayland? The reason lies in the video driver. openQA runs its tests in a virtual machine (KVM) which uses the “cirrus” virtual hardware for video display. This virtualized video card does not expose an interface capable of interfacing with the kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), which is required by kwin_wayland, causing a crash. To fix it, “virtio”, which presents a way for the guest OS to properly interface with the host’s hardware, is needed. Virtio can be used to emulate many parts of the VM’s hardware, including the video card. That would mean a working DRM interface, and a working Wayland session!

However, openQA tests did not handle the case where virtio was needed. This is where one of our previously-sung heroes, Fabian Vogt, comes into play. He added support for running Wayland tests in openQA using virtio. This means now that the Argon and Krypton live images now undergo an additional series of tests which are performed under Wayland. And of course, actual bugs have been found already.

Last but not least, now the groundwork has been laid down to do proper Wayland testing on vanilla Tumbleweed as well. openQA should be probably churning out results soon. Exciting times ahead!