Xephyr

Xephyr

Three recursive levels of nested Xephyr sessions, running on Linux Mint
Original author(s)	Matthew Allum
Developer(s)	freedesktop.org
Initial release	January 1, 2007 (2007-01-01)
Stable release	1.18.0 (November 9, 2015 (2015-11-09)) [±]
Written in	C
Type	Display server
License	MIT License
Website	freedesktop.org/.../Xephyr

Xephyr is a display server implementing the X11 display server protocol based on KDrive which targets a window on a host X Server as its framebuffer. It is written by Matthew Allum. Xephyr is an X-on-X implementation and runs on X.Org Server and supports Glamor. Future versions could make use of libinput. Replacing Xephyr with the xf86-video-dummy and xf86-video-nested drivers in the normal X.Org server is being considered as part of X11R7.8.

Features

Unlike the similar Xnest, Xephyr supports modern X extensions (even if host server doesn't) such as composite, damage, randr, etc. It uses SHM images and shadow framebuffer updates to provide good performance. It also has a visual debugging mode for observing screen updates.

Limitations

Xephyr doesn't pick up the correct keyboard configuration from evdev-based keyboard drivers, so users must configure Xephyr's keyboard layout manually when using such keyboard drivers.

Xorg's version of Xephyr only supports software rendering for OpenGL, but Feng Haitao has developed a forked version of Xephyr which supports hardware-accelerated rendering if the underlying X server supports it.

See also

• Thin client
• rio (windowing system)

External links

• Xephyr