Wayland Has Working Screensaver Support

Patches have been published for Wayland today for an idle animation interface and implementation within its demo compositor. In other words, you can now have a working screensaver in Wayland.

Pekka Paalanen, a developer working on Wayland for Collabora, has been working on the screensaver infrastructure for the Wayland Display Server. His patches published today are of "RFC" (Request For Comments) status but Pekka says they are ready to be merged aside from one hack.

His wscreensaver implementation provides the following for Wayland and the demo compositor:

- interface implementation and surface type handling: screensaver surface only mapped during idle or lock screen
- automatic launch and kill
- automatic launch is opt-in, you need to enable it in your wayland-desktop-shell.ini
- works also with manual launch of wscreensaver
- separate timeouts for screen locking and animation
- all rendering stops on animation timeout
- supports multiple outputs with independent animations

Last month Pekka Paalanen contributed the screen locking infrastructure support to Wayland, which this screensaver support tacks on top.

On Pekka's blog he posted a screenshot in late November of an OpenGL screensaver (GLMatrix from XScreenSaver) running within Wayland and was previously talked about on Phoronix.

Pekka's message today announcing the idle animation interface and implementation can be found on the wayland-devel list.