Wayland Losing Its Eagle-Specific EGL Bits

We first talked about the Wayland Display Server back in 2008 as a project that was conceived by Kristian Høgsberg to build a lightweight display server around the modern needs of the Linux desktop while leveraging all of the latest and greatest components in the Linux graphics stack (e.g. kernel mode-setting) and doing away with all of the cruft that has built up in the X.Org Server over the years. Wayland still is very much under development, but it hasn't received much traction yet. Part of the reason why is that as it's riding on all of the bleeding edge software bits with some of the code not even being in the mainline code-bases, there are a few hurdles that interested users first need to overcome.

Intel's kernel mode-setting and GEM (Graphics Execution Manager) support has been in the kernel now for over a year, but the Wayland Display Server needs the KMS page-flipping ioctl for tear-free rendering, which just landed with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. Wayland now no longer needs any out-of-tree kernel bits, but up to this point it's also depended upon another uncommon package called Eagle.

Eagle is another Kristian Høgsberg project that was started with Wayland to provide EGL support as Mesa's EGL implementation wasn't sufficient for the needs of this new display server. Eagle hasn't reached a release state and cannot be found elsewhere, which has posed another obstacle for those wanting to try out Wayland. Fortunately, this barrier is being taken down.

As the first commit for 2010, Kristian has just made a large code commit that is using FBOs instead of the Eagle-specific API. With Wayland now using OpenGL FBOs (Frame Buffer Objects) and not any Eagle-specific bits, it should now be possible (or soon) to run the Wayland Display Server with Mesa or Gallium3D's new EGL support. It was back in July that Kristian originally talked about merging the Eagle EGL loader into Mesa.

We have yet to test out this latest Wayland code and Kristian hasn't communicated anything yet in regards to whether Wayland will now properly work with Mesa/Gallium3D, but today's commit is good news for those wanting to more easily test out this new display server.