Wayland's Weston 12 Alpha Brings Multi-GPU Support, PipeWire Backend, Tearing Control

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland.

With Weston 12.0 there are tons of changes that have built up in the code-base since the release of Weston 11.0 last September. There is support for tearing-control and other new protocols, initial multi-GPU support, and a lot of other features for this next version. Some of the Weston 12.0 highlights include:

- Support for the tearing-control protocol to let clients request to be flipped asynchronously. This can allow tearing if so desired.

- A PipeWire back-end has been added that is based on the PipeWire plug-in.

- Multi-GPU support for running a single Weston instance with multiple DRM devices. This adds a new "--additional-devices" option when launching Weston.

- Basic drawing tablet support for Weston.

- Various debugging and profiling improvements.

- Various XWayland compatibility fixes, including to not leak file descriptors on failures.

- Many random DRM back-end updates, including support for the plane alpha DRM property.

- Initial multi-head support for the RDP back-end.

- Weston's Wayland back-end now allows resizing support for XDG-Shell to allow resizing the Weston window on another Wayland compositor.

- xwayland_shell_v1 protocol support.

- Documentation updates.

The lengthy list of patches making up the Weston 12 Alpha release can be found via the mailing list announcement.