It turns out there's a rather serious issue for some systems when having Wayland support within GTK+ exposed, which may hinder the Wayland GTK+ availability in the near-term.
Wayland News Archives
884 Wayland open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2008.
Landing today within Ubuntu's 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won't have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November.
Tiago Vignatti on Friday published initial code seeking comments regarding a state machine for display control on the Wayland Display Server.
After laying out plans earlier this month at FOSDEM for releasing Wayland 1.0 this year, Kristian Høgsberg has now written a more detailed message to the Wayland developers that outlines some of the TODO list and other plans for making Wayland 1.0.
Kristian Høgsberg has just announced Wayland 0.85 and Weston 0.85, which mark the first official releases of Wayland and its reference compositor, respectively.
Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more.
For those Linux enthusiasts interested in the Wayland Display Server, here's a video recording of an interesting technical discussion worth watching.
A few days ago I wrote that the Wayland Display Server is preparing for a stable 1.0 release and now this weekend from FOSDEM new information has been learned.
The other Wayland-related news yesterday besides the surprise announcement that the Wayland 1.0 stable release is approaching was the first-shot attempt at "weston-launch", an easy launcher for the demo Weston compositor.
This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Høgsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first -- stable -- release. Wayland is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world.
If you haven't tried out the Wayland Display Server as of late, after there being a stream of new announcements, you probably should or at least check out the videos in this posting. The Wayland Display Server is becoming more lively and slowly reaching a point where it may be possible for some to use it on a day-to-day basis.
Patches have landed so that the Wayland Display Server can now handle surface transformations. Separately, there's also an easy-to-understand guide for using the Qt 5.0 tool-kit with Wayland.
Tiago Vignatti, one of the active developers at Intel who's dedicated to the Wayland team, has shared some active TODO list items that for those wishing to contribute can easily jump on.
Besides tool-kit advancements, other happenings in the world of Wayland this week pertain to coming up with a suitable window stacking and raising design for this next-generation display server.
The Enlightenment project has made significant progress in making their key libraries compatible with the Wayland Display Server.
There's some RFC patches out this week from Intel's Jesse Barnes that provides sprite support for the recently announced Weston Compositor for the Wayland Display Server.
Kristian Høgsberg of Wayland fame has announced Weston for Wayland...
As a slightly belated Christmas gift, Juan Zhao of Intel has published a new Wayland Display Server patch-set for allowing full-screen mode-setting support.
The plethora of Wayland news continues. Here's a guide on how to run Qt applications within the Wayland Display Server for those not waiting until the 2012 onslaught begins.
While patches for multi-touch with the X.Org Server were only published this week, Intel has already been working on multi-touch support for the Wayland Display Server. On Friday they published a separate multi-touch implementation for Wayland.
There's some new year-end work going on in the land of Wayland following a mysterious event.
Patches have been published for Wayland today for an idle animation interface and implementation within its demo compositor. In other words, you can now have a working screensaver in Wayland.
For those wishing to follow the development of Wayland Display Server, there's some new progress to report on. This time it's about supporting screensavers under Wayland.
While we're at least a year away from seeing the Wayland Display Server play any semi-serious role in the Ubuntu stack, for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS there may actually be an experimental Wayland preview session available.
Intel's Juan Zhao has written and published some new documents on Wayland. In particular, a step-by-step guide for building and setting up Wayland under Ubuntu 11.04 and also a document briefly going over the Wayland architecture and API.
A number of months ago I wrote about plans for some of the Wayland code to be re-licensed under the LGPLv2. That didn't happen and now Kristian is looking at a new license for the Wayland reference code.
With the 2011 Google Summer of Code, we now know how the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker and morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) turned out, but how did the remote display capabilities for the Wayland Display Server evolve over the summer? It's something that hasn't yet been reported about on Phoronix.
Besides the exciting news last week that KDE has drawn up plans for Wayland in 2012, there's more good news in the land of this next-generation display server: the Google Chrome/Chromium web-browser is being ported to run on Wayland.
Since last month when reporting What's New In The Land Of Wayland, not much has changed. There's been a handful of commits pushed to the Git repositories and a few messages to the development list.
It's been a few weeks since really mentioning the Wayland Display Server at Phoronix (the last time was in June when XWayland and xf86-video-wlshm were released). It's not because development of this next-generation Linux display server has stalled, but there's been some progress made and overall just the lower level of activity during the summer months.
One of the Clutter tool-kit developers has announced a tiny Wayland compositor that was written and it provides support for multiple display emulation. This Wayland compositor is capable of emulating four displays and for now basically serves as a technical example.
The "still very experimental for the foreseeable future but promising" Wayland has been discussed more at UDS Budapest, on the mailing lists, and now this weekend in Berlin at LinuxTag.
Wayland was talked about this morning at the summit in Budapest. In particular, the outlook for Wayland in Ubuntu and Linaro. Separately, there's also X.Org notes from today's meetings.
Besides OpenWF support in Wayland being talked about and on the roadmap, another item that's been hotly discussed the past couple of days is about client side decoration support for the Wayland Display Server.
Besides the obvious requirements and demands of needing to design a display server that can fully replace the needs of the long-standing X Server, and making all the tool-kits and major software support running natively on Wayland, another inhibitor to Wayland's adoption has been its graphics driver requirements. In particular, Wayland requires kernel mode-setting, EGL (in place of a DRI2 requirement), in-kernel memory management (GEM), and 3D acceleration.
When Mark Shuttleworth announced last year that Ubuntu will eventually deploy Wayland instead of an X.Org Server with their new Unity Desktop, there were many mixed reactions. There were many Phoronix enthusiasts excited since this means replacing ancient X11 code with a brand new code-base designed around modern graphics technologies that takes advantage of KMS, OpenGL, etc. Others, however, were less excited since Wayland is still a work-in-progress. While Wayland has come a long way in recent months, it's still not as full-featured as an X.Org Server, but the features coming are beginning to trump the current capabilities of the X stack.
While proposals for this year's Google Summer of Code is quickly coming to an end, there's been a last minute proposal for the Wayland Display Server. This proposal is to work on a hot-replace server.
Martin Gräßlin has been making some very interesting advancements to KWin in the past year or so, after having issues with open-source Mesa drivers, this German developer has made this compositing window manager for the KDE Plasma desktop run on OpenGL ES 2.0 and even optional support for OpenGL 3.x. He wouldn't mind some help though, so this summer for KDE's involvement in Google's Summer of Code he has proposed three fairly interesting projects, two of which benefit KWin on Wayland.
If you're not following the many Linux development mailing lists out there, the latest major discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server that's spanned the Wayland, DRI/DRM, and Fbdev mailing lists has been about using Wayland on "dumb frame-buffers", KMS vs. fbdev, and DRM drivers on embedded SoCs.
If you head on over to the Nokia Labs Qt Blog there is a post about "multi-process Lighthouse", which is worth reading. It's written by Jørgen Lind about how up until now Qt has lacked a multi-process client/server solution, but now they are looking for the Wayland Display Server to fill this void. Jørgen and other Qt developers ended up writing "Qt Compositor", which is a Nokia Labs project for making Qt-based Wayland compositors.
In recent days on the Wayland development mailing list there's been a discussion about a HPC (High Performance Compute) architecture for Wayland. A few interesting ideas have been brought up.
While there have been some battles waged recently between Canonical and GNOME developers over collaboration with regard to the Unity desktop shell and revenue sharing for purchases made within their online music store (even this morning with another post by Mark Shuttleworth), on a more positive and productive note: how's the Wayland plans coming along?
Canonical's Bryce Harrington has just announced he has uploaded a snapshot of the Wayland Display Server to the Universe repository for Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. the upcoming "Natty Narwhal" Linux release.
For those of you interested in running the Wayland Display Server on your NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards, without running it nestled inside an X Server, it should work if you use the newest Linux kernel code.
Two weeks ago the hot discussion item being talked about by those interested in the Wayland Display Server was how to handle input with Wayland (e.g. using X Input, create a separate "Inland" input project, or designing something entirely different). The new subject now brought up on the Wayland mailing list is how to handle multiple monitor support. Fortunately, it looks like Kristian plans to implement multiple monitor/display support in a different -- and better -- way than how it's dealt with by the X.Org Server.
Benjamin Franzke, an independent open-source developer, has published patches that provides Wayland EGL support for Mesa. This provides a EGL Wayland platform library so that it can be used by this new display server as an alternative to X.
If you have any interest at all in the technical side of the Wayland Display Server, there's been two mailing list threads in particular worth paying attention to this week. One is about proposals for Wayland's input system an the other is in terms of defining a Wayland implementation.
Yesterday there was quick, airborne coverage of the GTK+ Wayland back-end moving forward for GTK+ 3.0. Not only was the back-end merged, allowing the GTK+ tool-kit to begin working on this alternative display server that's quickly garnering attention, but it also works with the new GTK+ multi-backend capabilities.
While busy discussing Sandy Bridge Linux support, it's been brought to my attention en route to Las Vegas that the Wayland back-end for GTK+3 has been merged!
Development work towards the major Clutter 1.6 stable release has been progressing nicely within the Clutter 1.5 development branch. These recent development snapshots have brought performance improvements, a GLSL generation back-end, greater usage of OpenGL FBOs, new API functionality, and even a Clutter Wayland back-end. A new development release of Clutter (v1.5.10) is now here and it brings an evdev input back-end.
884 Wayland news articles published on Phoronix.