Wayland

Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-17 | Status: DRM resolved, Plasma Wayland session pending

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Problem

After upgrading to FreeBSD 15.1-BETA3 and getting DRM 6.12 working see:freebsd-15.1-drm-i915-runbook.md, Plasma Wayland would not start through SDDM. Logging in via SDDM’s greeter bounced back to the login screen with no error output. wayland-session.log was empty. XFCE (X11) worked fine through SDDM.

Root Cause

Session activation failed in this configuration. ck-list-sessions showed:

$ ck-list-sessions | grep active
        active = FALSE

When a session is not marked active, kwin_wayland cannot acquire DRM device access : /dev/dri/* access fails, libseat/seatd integration may not work, and the Wayland compositor exits immediately, often with no log output. This matches the symptom exactly.

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Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-10 | Status: Deployed and running

blight is a backlight idle ‘daemon’ I made to use on KDE Plasma/Wayland on FreeBSD 15 because I needed something to dim the screen. It blanks the screen after a configurable idle timeout, suspends on battery after extended idle, and restores brightness on any input activity : no D-Bus, no logind, no powerdevil, no device polling. It is a shell script wrapping swayidle, which speaks the org_kde_kwin_idle Wayland protocol directly to KWin.

This is a rewrite. The original was a Python daemon that polled input devices directly. That approach had fundamental problems on FreeBSD and was replaced entirely with a sh wrapper around swayidle.

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