Wayland On Android Is Continuing To Come Along

The Wayland port for Google's Android platform is continuing to be hacked on by Collabora. Here's some new details.

Back in April I showed the first signs of Wayland running on Android following work done by Pekka Paalanen at Collabora. Since then he's continued to work on bringing this next-generation Linux display server over to Google's popular mobile platform.

By late May, Wayland's Weston was working on Android and the Android Weston back-end was published. There was a Collabora meeting this month where Pekka wrote up some slides on his work, which he has now shared with the community.

As far as why Collabora is investing in this work to begin with, one of his slides explains, "Device manufacturers (especially ARM SoC vendors) concentrate on enabling Android. Generic Linux systems may come later, but likely
never. We want to leverage all that hardware enablement, to be able to offer well-known, stable, and superior free open source software technologies, and an alternative to an Android-only operating system: Android hardware, freedesktop.org middleware, familiar FOSS user
applications."

As far as what's next for Paalanen's work, he's still tackling input support for the Android Weston back-end, possible vsync support, support for hardware overlays, and other features.

The slides are available from Pekka's blog for those wanting to know more about the work to enable Wayland under Android.