Wayland-Protocols 1.26 Released With New Single-Pixel-Buffer

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols.

The Wayland Single-Pixel-Buffer protocol is for creating single pixel buffers. The intention here is to be more efficient rather than having to create a real buffer that would all be of the same pixel color. The use-case around this is for drawing background surfaces or top-level decorations that may all be of one particular color. Wayland clients can scale the single-pixel RGBA buffer to the desired size.

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 also introduces a "wm_capabilities" for the XDG-Shell protocol. This wm_capabilities can be used for the compositor to announce their capabilities of XDG_Shell as currently not all compositors implement every feature and it can lead to some UI client elements not behaving as expected. Clients can check wm_capabilities and then adjust accordingly if running on a compositor lacking some XDG-Shell functionality.

The Wayland protocol and Wayland compositors continue advancing after more than a decade in development. (Pictured: Wayland on Ubuntu in 2011.)

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 also adopts RFC 2119 keywords ("MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALLNOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL") and clarifications to existing protocols.

More details on this update via the release announcement.