On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 07:32:17PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> I was just blithely explaining on stackoverflow that we can open host
> windows and... not on linux/arm I can't! I'll admit I haven't tried in,
> well, I suspect the computer I last tried it on was powered by a tyrannosaur
> in a treadmill.
> 
> Does it work on Mac? Windows? Have we lost this incredibly useful facility?
>

As far as I know, this was never implemented on the Unix VM. Ian implemented
the display in loadable VM modules, which typically will be the vm-display-X11
VM module for a Unix or Linux platform with X11 based user interface (OS X
is probably a Unix VM using vm-display-Quartz nowadays, right? I'm not sure).

For a Linux VM you will find the hostWindow display functions in
platforms/unix/vm-display-X11/sqUnixX11.c with function names such as
display_hostWindowCreate() as the implementation of hostWindowCreate().

If you look at those functions in sqUnixX11.c you will see that they
are stub implementations that do not actually do anything. So the
the stub code was added by Vanessa a long time ago, but no actual
implementation has been done in the intervening years.

So no, we have not lost this facility. It has never been implemented
for the X11 display on Unix/Linux.

This might be a good project for somebody to pick up. Volunteers?

Dave