Wayland News Archives

Canonical's Christopher Halse Rogers has blogged some more about their views on the Mir Display Server and its design relative to X11/X.Org and Wayland.

Enlightenment is starting to take shape on Wayland with its own compositor.

For those using Wayland's Weston compositor with the stock shell, a patch was proposed today for implementing "bubbles list" style notifications.

Aside from window minimizing and maximizing support, another feature missing from Wayland/Weston has been an easy way to change resolutions and other display functionality that up until recently was handled via XRandR, the X Resize and Rotate extension. Now Weston has received a similar port.

Support for minimize and maximize requests is still being worked on the for the Wayland protocol. Yes, this is to allow windows to be minimized or maximized within the Wayland environment.

The XBMC media player now has experimental code for running atop the Wayland Display Server.

The branch of the GTK+ tool-kit being used for introducing support for client side decorations is being prepped for review and ultimately being merged to mainline.

In addition to X.Org and Wayland developers criticizing Canonical on Google+ about the Mir display server, there was a colorful discussion about this new open-source project on the Wayland IRC channel.

There's now a Wayland compositor that's based upon FreeRDP, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol.

Kristian Høgsberg has published initial support for Wayland to support buffer sharing that's compatible with PRIME/DMA_BUF.

Kristian Høgsberg has proposed patches to Wayland and the Weston compositor for implementing pointer locks. Pointer locks allow for applications to lock the pointer so they receive relative inputs, which can improve the handling of some games running on Wayland.

The Dolphin emulator for the Nintendo GameCube has been ported to function as a Wayland client. Dolphin now works as a Wayland client and it also supports threaded EGL/GLSL. This is also quite likely the first game-related software that works either under X11 or Wayland/Weston using the same application binary.

While upstream Wayland developers are just concerning themselves with Linux support and are exclusively focusing their development efforts on taking advantage of the best Linux APIs and functionality, a developer has begun proposing patches that begin to work on FreeBSD support.

Kristian Høgsberg has shared that he's been working on some code that's ultimately a Software Development Kit (SDK) for dealing with Wayland's Weston compositor.

In conjunction with XWayland, Wayland's Weston reference compositor can now handle full-screen X windows.

Taking place in Canberra, Australia last week was Linux.Conf.Au. The videos from LCA 2013 have now been uploaded and one of the talks likely to excite Phoronix readers is Daniel Stone's perspective of X.Org and Wayland.

With the Green Island Compositor, the Hawaii Desktop is looking to be the very first Wayland-friendly desktop environment for Linux.

A number of improvements to QtWayland have been merged this month, primarily around the Client Side Decorations support and other functionality needed for proper support of this likely X11 Server successor.

While in December Canonical said they wouldn't fix GTK+ support for Wayland, earlier this month they decided they would enable the Wayland back-end for GTK+ in Ubuntu 13.04. That change has now been made and Ubuntu's GTK+ tool-kit will function in a Wayland environment.

Wayland 1.0.4 was released this week along with an adjoining update to its Weston reference compositor. Separately, a new patch-set has emerged for supporting per-output workspaces.

The Android back-end for Wayland's Weston compositor is being dropped thereby losing support for Google's mobile operating system on Wayland.

A set of seven patches published today allow Wayland's Weston compositor with its DRM back-end to support rendering through Pixman.

An FBDEV-based compositor back-end for Wayland's Weston has been published. This back-end allows for Wayland's Weston to run on a Linux frame-buffer device while the graphics rendering is done using Pixman and input is handled through evdev.

The code to wayland-java has now been made public, which is a project that provides Java bindings to the Wayland back-end library. This Java support will be useful for Wayland support on Google's Android mobile platform.

While Canonical developers previously said they "won't fix" GTK+ support for Wayland in Ubuntu, the matter has now changed. It looks like Ubuntu 13.04 will be able to handle GTK+ applications on Wayland.

There hasn't been too many new Wayland/Weston developments to report on recently, but being published this weekend for review and comments is a new Pixman renderer for Weston. This Pixman renderer allows for pure software rendering with the Weston reference compositor and adds MIT-SHM support to the X11 back-end.

While released yesterday was X.Org Server 1.14 RC1, there won't be XWayland support for this next X.Org Server release due out in Q2'2013. However, XWayland support continues to be worked on by Wayland developers so X.Org applications/games can be supported.

While there has been a Wayland back-end within GTK+ 3.x, Canonical won't be enabling the Wayland support within their GTK+ tool-kit package anytime soon.

Wayland 1.0.3 along with an adjoining Weston Compositor update were released on Friday. At the same time, Kristian Høgsberg has begun expressing plans for Wayland 1.2 as the next major release.

Kristian Høgsberg has announced the 1.0.2 releases of Wayland along with the Weston reference compositor.

For those wanting to bring Wayland to proprietary/embedded platforms, Pekka Paalanen has written a long and detailed technical post about doing so.

The first point release of Wayland 1.0 is now available for those interested in this next-generation display server environment.

The XWayland LiveCD has been updated to support XWayland on top of the Wayland 1.0 code-base.

Kristian Høgsberg has now branched the Wayland and Weston code-bases for the 1.0 series.

Pekka Paalanen has published initial patches that allow Wayland's Weston reference compositor to run from the popular low-cost Raspberry Pi ARM computer.

Daniel Stone has updated the XWayland patches for supporting X.Org/X11 applications on Wayland.

With the recent release of Wayland 1.0, here's a visualization that looks back on the development of Wayland/Weston going back to 2008 when it was born as a small project by Kristian Høgsberg at Red Hat.

The general X.Org discussion during the Ubuntu Developer Summit was held today to discuss X.Org/Wayland expectations for the Ubuntu 13.04 release.

The Wayland Linux Live CD distribution, a.k.a. the Rebecca Black OS, has been updated for the Wayland/Weston 1.0 release.

Less than one day after the official release of Wayland 1.0 there is a new Wayland compositor that emerges. This new compositor for Wayland is dubbed "Green Island" and leverages Qt, QtQuick, and QML for creating a new and unique Linux desktop experience.

Wayland 1.0 along with the reference Weston 1.0 reference compositor were officially released on Monday.

Wayland 1.0 will be released as soon as today, but this doesn't mark the death of X11 and Wayland beginning to secure major traction on the Linux desktop.

Wayland continues to be a topic that draws a lot of interest from Linux desktop end-users, based upon the turnout to a session regarding the Wayland/Weston Display Server Framework at LinuxDays in Prague.

For those curious about the size of the X11 API in relation to Wayland, it's about fifteen times bigger.

Wayland v0.99.0 was released yesterday evening along with a matching version of the reference Weston compositor. The planned Wayland 1.0 release is penciled in for next week Monday, 22 October.

David Herrmann has posted patches for implementing error recovery within the Wayland client library.

The release of Wayland 1.0 is expected to happen next week. Originally it was set to happen this week, but there's some last minute API and protocol changes.

For those wanting to use the GStreamer multimedia framework on Wayland while leveraging VA-API for video hardware acceleration, here's some setup information from Intel.

Igalia has accelerated WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany to work atop Wayland with the reference Weston compositor.

Taking a brief break from his direct work on Wayland, Kristian Høgsberg has published his "Render Nodes" work for DRM2 following the recent DRM2 proposal.