Sprite Support For Wayland's Weston

There's some RFC patches out this week from Intel's Jesse Barnes that provides sprite support for the recently announced Weston Compositor for the Wayland Display Server.

Jesse is trying to get Wayland to use DRM overlay planes to display surfaces at re-paint time where possible. "For long lived surfaces getting lots of changes, this can be a big power win since the plane blender is a bit more efficient than using the GPU to blit & blend surfaces together for final presentation (at least that's the theory)...Overall, the compositor has to walk the surfaces at repaint time anyway, so at that time we'd also like to allocate sprites to surfaces and then switch back to GPU blending as needed."

His set of patches to Weston, which up until recently was just known as the Wayland demo compositor, can be found on the Wayland mailing list.

It's also interesting to see Jesse Barnes dabbling more with Wayland. Jesse's one of the Intel OSTC developers responsible for the Intel Linux graphics stack and not the Wayland team that's been mostly Kristian, Tiago, etc pumping out Wayland patches from Intel.

Kristian Høgsberg, the founder of the Wayland project, has already provided some feedback on the sprite support for Weston.