MeeGo Tablet UX 1.3 May Use Wayland This Year

There is wayland-demos for MeeGo as a simple compositor that uses EGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 directly. The demo compositor provides a simple 2D scenegraph and provides simple full-screen animations. A higher-level interface is provided by meego-ux-daemon.

The initial MeeGo Wayland work is done using QML Scenegraph, which in turn implements QML and straight to the OpenGL ES back-end. This work is scheduled to be part of Qt 5, but not the forthcoming Qt 4.8. Qt 5 will be released next year. As a result, this work needs to be back-ported for MeeGo or to stay with the QDeclarativeView for the time being.

Qt 4.8 will though provide the initial release of Qt Lighthouse, which provides the platform abstraction whereby Wayland and other targets can be more easily supported, as talked about in March. MeeGo 1.3 is set to be released in October and they could switch over at that point or they could end up waiting for the official release of Qt 4.8, which will come in a few months.

Part of the challenge in adopting Wayland is that it has stiff graphics driver requirements in comparison to simply running an X Server. With the MeeGo Tablet UX focus, lots of the tablet hardware is powered by PowerVR graphics. In particular, tablets using Intel's Poulsbo, Moorestown, and forthcoming Cedarview all have graphics cores derived from PowerVR SGX IP. Intel is also working on some other things in this area of current PowerVR graphics being ridden by binary blobs.