Wayland's Weston Gets A FreeRDP-Based Compositor

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 2 March 2013 at 10:24 AM EST. 22 Comments
WAYLAND
There's now a Wayland compositor that's based upon FreeRDP, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol.

An independent developer announced the FreeRDP-based compositor on Friday via the wayland-devel list. "This patch adds a FreeRDP based compositor. This backend waits for incoming RDP clients and sends frame updates to connected clients. Each RDP client register his own seat which make it nice to test multi-seat (with 2 RDP clients we have 2 pointers on the screen). Frame updates are done either with surfaces in raw format (that means flipping the dirty region and cutting in 64x64 tiles), or using the remoteFx codec (when the client supports it)."

FreeRDP implements most of Microsoft's RDP 7.1 protocol including RemoteFX, clipboard redirection, multimedia redirection, and numerous other interfaces. However, it doesn't yet have official support for USB redirection, terminal server gateway, and window composition.

As the patch on the mailing list explains, the back-end simply waits for remote clients implementing the RDP protocol to connect and from there frame-updates are sent out over the wire -- in a raw format or RDP's RemoteFX -- for displaying remotely. Multiple clients are supported simultaneously.

This FreeRDP back-end (assuming it gets merged) joins the FBDEV, Headless, Wayland, and DRM back-ends inside Weston.
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