Kristian Talks About The Wayland Display Server

A few weeks back there was the Linux Plumbers Conference and one of talks was hosted by Kristian Høgsberg where he talked about his Wayland project. We were the first to publicly talk about the Wayland Display Server when it was in its very infancy at being an alternative to the X Server. Wayland leverages kernel mode-setting, DRI2, and other newer Linux technologies to provide a much simpler implementation than running a full-blown X Server (though you can run multiple X Servers inside Wayland) and its code-base is remarkably small. Wayland is also designed around the modern-day needs of the Linux desktop with compositing and ensuring that each frame is rendering perfectly with no tearing, etc.

Unfortunately, besides this recent talk by Kristian, there hasn't been a lot of work on Wayland in the past few months. The last time there was any real work done to Wayland was in September when it picked up a basic PDF viewer, support for Ctrl-Alt-Del, and some other basic changes. Before the September commits, there wasn't much work done since May of this year, but fortunately, while Wayland may not be receiving a continual stream of new work, some of the other work being done within the Linux graphics world by Kristian and other developers still benefit Wayland.

The KMS page-flipping ioctl was proposed again this week and hopefully this revision will end up hitting the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. This ioctl can be used by the X.Org Server, but it's also one of the pre-requisites for running the Wayland Display Server. Once this hits the mainline kernel tree, the barrier for users interested in trying Wayland is lowered a bit more.

Anyways, below is the video of Kristian's recent Wayland talk, courtesy of the Linux Foundation.