Mir 0.25 Released: Pointer Confinement, Gamma KMS Support, Libmircore

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 25 December 2016 at 08:10 AM EST. 19 Comments
UBUNTU
For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25.

Mir 0.25 was quietly released last week as the newest stable version of their alternative to Wayland and the X.Org Server. Mir 0.25 introduces support for pointer confinement, as needed for some games. Mir 0.25 also now correctly identifies output types on the Raspberry Pi, adds dead key and compose key support, gamma support for KMS-driven hardware, Yakkety/Zesty GCC6 support, surface pass-through support for full-screen clients of nested servers, a new libmircore library, early support for VirtualBox, initial support for high precision frame-timing, a smoother desktop zoom implementation, and dozens of bug fixes.

Overall, Mir 0.25 is a big update with the pointer confinement, gamma support for KMS drivers, early work on VirtualBox, high precision frame timing, and other changes. Though with Mir 0.25 there still isn't Vulkan support. Mir 0.25 does contain ABI breaks, so watch out when upgrading.

Those wishing to learn more about Mir 0.25 can read the change-log via Launchpad. Ubuntu developers continue working on Mir and Unity 8 with the hope of having it ready for the desktop by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
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