An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland

On Wednesday of the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit, besides the X and Wayland integration talk, there was a second discussion concerning Wayland/Weston during a Tizen track. During this talk were a few tid-bits of interesting information revealed, such as an experimental GNOME 3.x desktop on Wayland.

Keith Packard did the first Wayland talk at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was about X-Wayland and ensuring legacy X applications will be able to run within the Wayland Display Server by having a seamless nested X experience with the modified xorg-server being automatically and transparently started when needed. That talk was covered in full in this article (the Phoronix video is still coming soon).

Later in the day, Keith's fellow Intel OTC employee Jesse Barnes also talked of Wayland. Jesse Barnes was giving a more brief Wayland overview during the Tizen track.

Jesse was stating the usual (and already known information if you read enough Phoronix) information surrounding Wayland and the reference Weston compositor... There's the GTK, Qt, and EFL ports being worked on mostly, the Qt 5.0 Wayland port is likely the tool-kit in best shape at the moment, Wayland is still a work-in-progress, a KMS/DRM and DRI driver is what you basically need to get going, etc. Here's also his accompanying slides for Wayland.

The most interesting points brought up during Jesse's brief Wayland talk were:

- Wayland 1.0 is still on track for release around this summer. It will be matched by the Weston 1.0 release and the stable API/protocol. (When talking with Kristian about the 1.0 milestone during FOSDEM in February, he said he doesn't expect Wayland 1.0 to mark "world domination" but after the release there will continue to be frequent updates, etc.)

- Wayland is apparently already shipping on some TVs... There's also a TV back-end for Wayland that's similar to their DRM back-end. The OpenWF back-end for Wayland also remains available.

- The Intel OTC developers who previously got Tizen's Dawati interface running on Wayland, have been toying around with the GNOME 3.x Shell on Wayland. Evidently they have had some success and do have an experimental GNOME 3 Shell environment running directly on Wayland. This was done by modifying GNOME's Mutter window manager to interact with Wayland. (As I previously reported).

- Jesse has been playing around a bit with some remote Wayland support using libvncserver. He's apparently had some success with this and expects to push some code upstream soon.

- While Mark Shuttleworth wants the Ubuntu Unity desktop on Wayland, there's still no indication of any Canonical developers actually working on Wayland at this point.

Below is a video I recorded of Jesse's talk. However, the video portion isn't as well off as some of the other Phoronix videos (or the still-uploading video of Keith's talk) as it was just quickly recorded at the last minute from an Apple iPhone 4S. Jesse's talk is just about 15 minutes in length.