Wayland's Weston Nukes Its Raspberry Pi Backend/Renderer

Upstream Wayland developers have decided to drop the specialized Raspberry Pi back-end and renderer from the Weston compositor code-base.

Back in 2012 was the premiere of this Raspberry Pi back-end for Weston that made use of the DispmanX API for initializing the display and other changes compared to the more traditional DRM back-end for Weston. This Raspberry Pi code in Weston hasn't received much attention lately to Weston and has now been dropped.

Collabora's Pekka Paalanen went ahead today and dropped the code while commenting how much of a mess the code has become and not too useful these days.

Pekka noted, "The rpi-backend is a good example of how using an API that is only available for specific hardware, even more so as it is only available with a proprietary driver stack, is not maintainable in the long run. Most developers working on Weston either just cannot, or cannot bother to test things also on the RPi. Breakage creeps in without anyone noticing."

While this may affect some Raspberry Pi users today, fortunately the Raspberry Pi boards should soon be working with the DRM back-end and standard EGL/GLES paths thanks to all of the work being done by Eric Anholt and others on the VC4 driver stack with its mainline DRM driver and VC4 Gallium3D driver.