Wayland's Weston Can Now Run On DirectFB

As the latest interesting event in the Wayland world, DirectFB developers have ported Wayland's Weston compositor to run on DirectFB so that any DirectFB platform can now use Weston, including EGL and OpenGL ES support.

The Direct Frame Buffer project remains popular in the embedded space and just last week was talking about their interesting Ilixi tool-kit. DirectFB has a very small footprint and controls not only the graphics display but also has input device abstraction and an integrated windowing system.

With a patch posted on Sunday evening, Denis Oliver Kropp of the DirectFB project posted the first integration patch to allow Weston to run on DirectFB. Additionally, the developers are working on a new "EGL United" project to provide a complete EGL implementation while integrating different low-level EGL implementations in one EGLDisplay. EGL United means that no vendor support is needed for Wayland extensions to work.

The DirectFB Weston implementation will support hardware layers, accelerated 2D compositing, Wayland client windows wrapped into DirectFB windows, DirectFB client management, and Pixman-based software rendering. This method can also allow Wayland clients to use DirectFB directly for access to 2D hardware acceleration over just using OpenGL ES support on Wayland itself.

The developers view the advantages to having DirectFB in the mix over "pure" Wayland/Weston is frame-timing for accurate animations, allowing more than one buffer in the queue, and other DirectFB clients can be integrated.

This Weston DirectFB work is very interesting and the initial patch can be found on the Wayland mailing list. Wayland 1.3 will be released in the coming days but hopefully this DirectFB support can be merged for Wayland 1.4. There's also some other interesting developments happening in the DirectFB camp that will be covered later today on Phoronix in a separate article.