Wayland News Archives

Following the recent discussions of moving Wayland's Weston compositor to a 4-month release schedule and possibly doing away with time-based Wayland releases itself, Weston 5.0 will now be coming out in August.

The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place.

Libinput 1.11 is out today as a significant update to this generic input handling library for Linux systems that is used by both X.Org (in the form of xf86-input-libinput) as well as Wayland systems for their unified input needs. The Libinput 1.11 release offers several new features.

Derek Foreman at Samsung's Open-Source Group has initiated a formal discussion over the Wayland and Weston release schedules.

Wayland's Weston reference has now received its new touchscreen calibrator within Weston Git.

Months ago we had reported on Igalia's efforts for improving hardware video/media acceleration on the Chromium browser stack for Linux and getting Chromium ready for Wayland but it's been relatively quiet since then with no status updates. Fortunately, a Phoronix reader pointed to a fresh round of ongoing work in this space.

Within the libinput world, the 1.11 development cycle has been going on long with Libinput 1.10 having debuted in January. But this long development cycle is bringing with it many changes.

Purism's Dorota Czaplejewicz has been active within the Wayland community recently as they work on their Librem 5 phone Wayland compositor and Phosh shell for this software stack and iMX8 hardware they hope to begin shipping next year.

A new version of the Wayland protocols collection is now available.

Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations.

Following last week's release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has already landed a big patch series for what will likely become Weston 5.0.

The latest libinput hackery being worked on by Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is custom profile support for pointer acceleration.

Following this week's Wayland 1.15 launch, there are now patches on the floating list to add Meson build system support to Wayland-Protocols.

Today marks the long-awaited debut of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor.

When it comes to Mir acting as a Wayland compositor, feature support continues to be extended for making this a more viable offering for those looking to have full Wayland support.

Libinput 1.10.14 is now available and while it's just a point release, there is at least one change sure to catch your attention.

The Sway Wayland Compositor that is known for its compatibility and inspiration from the i3 tiling window manager is nearly out with its version 1.0 release.

Not only is there a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate today but the folks managing Wayland/Weston development have today announced the first release candidates of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor.

With Vulkan 1.1 it should be possible to write a pure Vulkan Wayland compositor while a Phoronix reader has tipped us off to a developer starting work on a proof-of-concept Vulkan window compositor.

With Wayland appearing in more places from automobile in-vehicle infotainments to planes to smartphones, having a good touchscreen calibration system is certainly important. Collabora developers have been working on a new touchscreen calibrator and new protocol extension for Weston.

Wayfire is a new independent Wayland compositor project built atop libweston. Wayfire supports compositor plug-ins to offer a desktop cube and more, so you can relive the old days when having a spinning desktop cube was all the rage in the early days of Compiz/Beryl.

The beta releases are available today of Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 reference compositor.

While Purism continues eyeing KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell for delivering the user-interface options of the Librem 5 smartphone, they have begun developing their own Wayland compositor and their own shell too.

Last year Intel open-source developers squared away priority GPU scheduling support within their kernel DRM driver and from Mesa are exposing support for "high priority" GPU processes via the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension. There hasn't been any major real-world user of this support yet, but a patch would allow Wayland's Weston OpenGL renderer to make use of it.

Shortly after announcing the Wayland 1.15 Alpha release on Monday, Samsung's Derek Foreman did the adjoining alpha release of the Weston 4.0 reference compositor.

Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.15.

Samsung OSG developer Mike Blumenkrantz is proposing a new Wayland protocol for dealing with session management behavior.

Jonas Ådahl on Wednesday announced Wayland-Protocols 1.13, the collection of stable and unstable protocols to Wayland.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has announced the release of libinput 1.10, the latest feature release of this input handling library used by Wayland-based Linux desktops and optionally by those still using the X.Org Server.

Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 compositor had been planned for release in February but Wayland developers decided there was still enough material on the verge of landing that they decided to delay the release. A new release schedule has now been put forward for getting these updates out in April.

The SDL library that's most commonly associated with being an abstraction layer used by Linux games now has Wayland XDG-Shell support.

Going back about two years has been work towards supporting atomic mode-setting on Weston and we are finally seeing this support land for Wayland's reference compositor.

Igalia has been one of the companies working on improving Chromium's support for Wayland and they shared their story about it at this weekend's FOSDEM 2018 event in Brussels.

Yesterday we heard of Purism's plans to support desktop diversity but by default for their Librem 5 smartphone they will likely be using GNOME in order to maintain a unified experience across their devices. The latest now is they might develop a new Wayland compositor in line with GNOME.

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.10 today, which isn't a big feature release but rather incorporates a few new features with many bug fixes for this input handling library used by X.Org and Wayland systems.

Earlier this week ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung laid out plans for Wayland 1.15 and Weston 4.0. There's been some push-back on the proposed dates to try to allow some more work to land in these upcoming six month releases to Wayland/Weston, but long story short, these next releases will be here in the near future.

Ongoing Wayland/Weston release manager Bryce Harrington of Samsung's Open-Source Group has laid out plans for the next releases of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor.

Wayland had a very successful year with Ubuntu 17.10 now using it by default, more niche/hobbyist Wayland compositors making progress, KDE Plasma on Wayland becoming more usable for day-to-day use, more applications/libraries natively supporting Wayland, GTK4's Vulkan renderer becoming very usable, and other advancements.

Drew DeVault who is the lead developer of the i3-compatible Sway Wayland compositor has introduced wlroots as a new modular Wayland compositor library.

Collabora's latest Wayland enablement effort is on getting the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) running nicely under Wayland with the Mus/Ozone infrastructure.

Samsung OSG developers have been investigating and dealing with a nasty Wayland bug whereby a Wayland event could be delivered to an incorrect file descriptor. This ends up being due to a shortcoming in the Wayland protocol, but as to not break all existing software out there built against the current Wayland protocol, a workaround has been devised.

After going through fourteen rounds of patch revisions, Daniel Stone of Collabora might be ready to land his 40+ patches implementing atomic mode-setting support within Weston.

Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has begun the overdue task of providing documentation on XWayland.

Samsung's Open-Source Group has been working on making their Wayland support in the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) even better.

A new contributor to the Wayland/Weston camp has been working on several improvements to the Weston reference compositor.

Wayland had a very eventful year with it conquering more Linux desktops now since the switch to using GNOME Shell on Wayland with Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu's Mir compositor still being around but having switched to adding Wayland protocol support, KDE's Wayland support becoming day-to-day usable, and much more.

When it comes to having an i3-compatible Wayland compositor, Sway manages to capture much of the limelight, but Way-Cooler continues to advance as an alternative compositor.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat has released a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocols that extends/introduces new functionality not part of the core Wayland protocol.

Linux input expert and libinput creator Peter Hutterer of Red Hat is working on support for libinput to handle natively recording and replaying of input events.

Earlier this year we covered the Westfield project as Wayland for HTML5/JavaScript by providing a Wayland protocol parser and generator for JavaScript. Now that code has morphed into Greenfield to provide a working, in-browser HTML5 Wayland compositor.