Enlightenment Is Enlightening Wayland

The Enlightenment project has made significant progress in making their key libraries compatible with the Wayland Display Server.

Back in November I reported on Enlightenment E17 coming to Wayland and shared the first screenshot. That first screenshot was very early and didn't show EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) doing too much under Wayland, but in the past two months there has been much more progress.

Details on the Wayland Enlightenment status can be found from the Wiki page, which was just updated yesterday.

Current support work is being done to enable client-side applications (as opposed to making a Wayland compositor itself - that is a future plan). Currently EFL applications that use the lower-level Ecore-Evas and higher level Elementary API's will work and display correctly in Wayland, handle input, resizing and moving. Client-side frames are already provided. Both Shared-memory buffers AND EGL/OpenGL-ES2 buffers are supported. The Shared-memory buffers are purely CPU-rendered, meaning that they will work with or without OpenGL hardware acceleration support. They are fast and usable. The OpenGL-ES2 display is fully accelerated with all primitives being rendered by OpenGL (Hardware acceleration) and already work fully due to a long history of supporting this under X11 and other embedded EGL/OpenGL-ES2 environments.

In future we plan to implement a complete Wayland compositor (stand-alone, no X11 needed) as well as Wayland support in the X11 compositor in Enlightenment 0.17 and beyond. At this stage this is just a plan, but it will happen. We will definitely need to extend Wayland protocol to make a fully functioning desktop or mobile environment.

All the source code for Wayland support is already in our source code repositories. You will need to check them out. Please see our Contribute page for information there.

You will need to add the following options to the configure options for evas: --enable-wayland-shm --enable-wayland-egl --enable-gl-flavor-gles --enable-gles-variety-sgx and the following 3 options to the configure options for ecore: --enable-ecore-wayland --enable-ecore-evas-wayland-shm --enable-ecore-evas-wayland-egl. Everything else will build automatically and support Wayland after you do this. This assumes you already have the Wayland client libraries and sample compositor running.

In addition, a new screenshot of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries current level of support under Wayland was posted this morning to the Wayland project site.

This progress is especially good news for the Tizen operating system camp, which like its MeeGo predecessor has plans to eventually switch to using Wayland as a replacement for the X.Org Server. Tizen is using EFL as its tool-kit rather than Qt and its first code (and a Tizen SDK preview) was released earlier this week.

Enlightenment's EFL joins GTK+, Qt, and Clutter as the other Linux tool-kits with Wayland back-ends in development. There's also a yet-to-be-merged experimental SDL back-end for Wayland.