Canonical Posts More Wayland Patches

While Canonical isn't known for making many low-level upstream Linux contributions, new patches authored by one of Canonical's Ubuntu developers has been posted for mainline Wayland.

Back in May the Ubuntu developers came up with very ambitious Wayland integration plans to use this next-generation display server as a system compositor for Ubuntu 12.10. The plans were very ambitious and it's still not clear if they will succeed for the Ubuntu 12.10 roll-out in October. Their initial plans also called for forking the Weston compositor of Wayland, but Wayland developers tried to steer them to create a plug-in.

Since the landmark announcement in May, Canonical contributed a few Wayland patches. They haven't contributed that many to date and their rate of upstream Wayland/Weston contributions is very low and even outpaced by many of the unpaid independent developers. However, over the night at least they did post two more patches:

Add xwayland support (v2) (Well, it's basically an updated version of their earlier work, but now it works with the X.Org Server 1.13 API changes.) and dri2: Pass a ScreenPtr through to the driver's AuthMagic.

xwayland drivers need access to their screen private data to authenticate. Now that drivers no longer have direct access to the global screen arrays, this needs to be passed in as function context. The way it was working was ugly, anyway.

This work was written by Christopher James Halse Rogers of Canonical. Back in April I shared the top contributors to Wayland, of which there were no Canonical developers on the list.