Wayland Becomes A FreeDesktop.org Project

Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.

Wayland is now a project living under FreeDesktop.org. There's a new Wayland web-site, a new mailing list, and even a new Git repository. Oh yeah, Wayland even has a logo now too.

Perhaps most interesting though from Kristian's announcement is the brief status update on Wayland.

Quite a few things have happened since the last update, so I'm overdue for a blog entry update on the project. We're now running on all upstream software, no personal branches necessary, we have an X11 compositor, we have a multi-pointer, input redirection aware DnD protocol, we can set cursor images, we have a SHM buffer transport mechanism. We have fairly complete gtk+ and Qt ports, there's wayland backend in the clutter project, we're using libxkbcommon for keyboard layouts.

Of course, if you're a faithful Phoronix reader, this news isn't too surprising. We've reported weeks ago on running Wayland off mainline code-bases, GTK+ becomes more friendly towards Wayland, Qt is drawing on Wayland, and Clutter has a Wayland back-end, among other accomplishments. It may not be too long before Wayland is deployed in a production environment.