Some Of What's Coming For Wayland's Weston 4.0 Compositor

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 14 January 2018 at 08:29 AM EST. 7 Comments
WAYLAND
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.

With Wayland itself quite mature, there isn't much that's exciting for end-users about Wayland 1.15. In fact, not many changes at all unless there's a last-minute rush of new work to land. As is the case these days, most of the interesting work is happening within the Weston compositor space as developers flesh out new functionality and prototype features that will hopefully be picked up by the other Wayland compositors that are becoming widely used on the Linux desktop.

In digging through the Weston 4.0 changes queued up so far, the prominent mentions include:

- Weston's OpenGL renderer now checks for EGL_KHR_fence_sync / EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync for asynchronous GPU timestamp information.

- DRM compositor back-end improvements including a property cache and better tracking of plane types,

- Fixes for FreeRDP 2.0 v2 handling in the RDP compositor code.

- FBDEV compositor back-end fixes.

- A New --wait-for-debugger option for Weston to help with debugging.

- A new --drm-device option when using the Weston DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) back-end for picking a DRM device to use instead of the default card selection. This is mostly for helping developers test Weston with multi-GPU systems.

- Mode switching support with the X11 compositor.

- Improved test cases for Weston.

- Various other fixes.

Weston 4.0 will likely be released in the next month or two, given the release planning is still in flux. More details as they come.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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