KDE's KWin To Still Pursue X11 Composite Unredirect, More Wayland Improvements

KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans.

Recent and ongoing work covered includes the night color support for KWin on X11, simplifying the X11 compositor and GLX back-end, redesigning the output management code, and internal clients going through KWin's own QPA. But where the most exciting work is happens to be out in the future work.

As part of KDE's new goals this year that include prioritizing Wayland support, more Wayland plumbing will be happening for KWin. Some of the Wayland work still ahead includes making their code more robust, handling screen rotation, XWayland multi-DPI handling, multi-GPU support on Wayland, renderizing optimizations, and various input improvements. Ultimately they also plan to further split their X11 and Wayland specific code paths.

On the X11 front, they still plan to support composite unredirect as well as blocking and other improvements. Those wanting to learn more about KWin can do so from this slide deck (PDF) from Roman's XDC2019 presentation.