Handling Overlays & Input With Wayland's Weston

This year during the X.Org development track at FOSDEM 2013 were just two talks concerning Wayland. One talk covered input with the Weston reference compositor while the other covered using hardware overlays for Weston.

Ander Conselvan de Oliveira, one of the Intel developers who is part of the Wayland team, covered support for using hardware overlays with Weston in conjunction with the new atomic page-flipping for the Linux kernel. "The addition of atomic page flip to the kernel should allow the configuration of overlays within a frame boundary. This allows KMS Wayland compositors, such as Weston, to use overlays seamlessly. In this talk we'll cover how Weston assigns different surfaces to overlays and other planes, to reduce the portion of the screen that is composited using GL." Embedded below is the talk by Ander on Wayland/Weston overlays.

The other Wayland talk was on input methods. This talk was by Michael Hasselman. "There is a reason why XIM -- X11's input method -- is still popular, 18 years after its initial design: A unified API that works across toolkits is highly appealing to developers of CJK input methods. Even today, input method frameworks are expected to have decent XIM support. The downsides of XIM and X11 are the complexity and the lack of protocol evolution over the last years. Everyone who tried to integrate input methods with an X11 window manager will know the pain of focus stealing and window stacking issues. Initiatives to improve X11 in that area have stalled for years. In the meantime, toolkits have come up with their own solutions, ignoring the fragmentation caused for input method developers. On the other hand, Android's input method framework is a good showcase for modern use-cases (think virtual keyboard) and the tight integration with the system compositor. With Wayland, we can achieve the same. The talk will be an open invitation to device manufacturers, toolkit providers and input method developers alike to give Wayland and its new input method protocol a try and help us with feedback."