Weston Work Still Ongoing For A Fullscreen Shell Protocol

For a while now there's been work happening to come up with a fullscreen shell protocol for Wayland's Weston to address some interesting use-cases. With this protocol, clients run entirely full-screen as the only client exposed to the user.

Jason Ekstrand has been the developer leading this new Weston protocol for several months of development and on Tuesday he published the latest version of this work. This fullscreen shell protocol is designed to make it easy to support simple full-screen clients like splash screens and terminal emulators in an easy and convenient manner rather than having the simple clients talk to DRM/KMS directly, input/output abstraction, easing up development of compositors, and allowing support for screen sharing and recording.

Besides come up with this wl_fullscreen_shell implementation, the set of 15 patches also allow simple-shm to act as a simple client, Weston clients in full-screen mode can now use this protocol, the Wayland back-end library supports using this new protocol, and there's a new screen-share.so plug-in for Weston that by a key combination (CTRL + ALT + s) a new Weston copy is spawned that is running on the Weston RDP back-end and mirrors the output for the RDP session.

More details on the latest Weston full-screen shell protocol work can be found by looking at the very latest patches.