Wayland's Weston IVI Figuring Out Surface Remoting Over Network

A new proposal was published today for adding per-surface remote support to Wayland's Weston compositor with regard to its IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) shell.

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora explained with the RFC message, "Before you get carried away, I must note that this will not work on desktops without considerable work. The design is written for ivi-shell which has a trivial Wayland protocol extension. The design could support desktops too, in theory, but you will need to think how to get all the desktop shell protocol features implemented, and you probably want something friendly to control the remoting, too. What this design does do, is give a plan how to remote the essentials of the core Wayland protocol. This includes creating wl_surfaces and wl_buffers, transmitting pixel data, feedback in the form of frame callbacks, and also relaying input events, and how to expose remote output and input to Wayland applications."

The Weston IVI remoting proposal can be found via this Collabora PDF. This is separate from the Wayland remote access proposal from the past (among many) or the Wayland network transparency patches from earlier in the year. This current work is focused on the IVI in-vehicle support where Wayland has been making great inroads and is being developed by Collabora under contract with clients. It will be interesting to see this proposal evolve and materialize.