X11 forwarding in Singularity with new MacOS X capability

[Alan Sill]

Trying out the new alpha MacOS X (more) native support, I ran into the following problem launching a container that expects to have X11 forwarding set up:

$ singularity pull library://najlabioinfo/default/datascience:rstudio463-v1.0.0

[…]

$ singularity exec datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif rstudio

QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display 

[    2.088968] reboot: Power down

This particular image has the following note in its project page:

• Don't forget to add (config.ssh.forward_x11=true) in your vagrant file.

Of course, in the new method, there is no vagrant file (right)? So what needs to be adjusted to accomplish the same step and enable X11 forwarding for this image?

(Note X11 forwarding is already enabled in my OS-level individual ~/.ssh/config file.)

Thanks,

Alan

[Jason Stover]

Hi Alan,

Right now X11 forwarding doesn't work. I've downloaded XQuartz and
am playing with it. As an aside here's what I _think_ we'll need to
do:

When you echo $DISPLAY on the Mac, you'll get a path to the X11
socket. We need to bind mount this socket in when ran (I'm guessing
just see if DISPLAY is set, and figure it out from there). Then pass
that along the chain to the Singularity run, and set the DISPLAY
variable to it.

So ... I have an idea on how to get X11 forwarding to work, I just
need to figure out how to actually implement it. So far, I can pass
the socket to where I need it, but can't actually use it. So trying to
see if there's something special that needs to be done here. :/

-J

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[David Godlove]

Would it make sense to make open an issue about this for tracking purposes?

[Alan Sill]

Possibly. First, let’s see what Jason has done to pass the socket. I thought that required the “capability” controls for singularity to be enabled — or was that an older version?

Another related problem is that the SINGULARITYENV_xxxxx method to set environmental variables does not seem to work. This makes trying  the various recipes and tricks for sharing sockets (such as using socat) with containers that depend on passikng environmental variables don't seem to work. Here is an example:

$ SINGULARITYENV_DISPLAY=:0 singularity shell datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif

Singularity datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif:~/singularity-desktop> env

SHELL=/bin/bash

singularity_arguments=

SINGULARITY_NAME=datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif

SINGARG=

PWD=/Users/alansill/singularity-desktop

LOGNAME=alansill

_=/usr/bin/env

USER_PATH=:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin

HOME=/Users/alansill

USERNAME=alansill

SINGCWD=/Users/alansill/singularity-desktop

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

SINGULARITY_CONTAINER=/dev/sda

SINGULARITY_APPNAME=

TERM=linux

SINGACT=shell

sing_cwd=/Users/alansill/singularity-desktop

USER=alansill

SHLVL=4

sing_img_name=datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/.singularity.d/libs

PS1=Singularity datascience_rstudio463-v1.0.0.sif:\w> 

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

sing_user=alansill:501:20

R_BASE_VERSION=3.5.2

singularity_binds=|home:/Users/alansill

SINGULARITY_BINDPATH=

singularity_action=shell