Kristian Shows Off GTK+ 3.0 On Wayland

Earlier this month the Wayland TODO list was updated -- a month after it received some summer love -- and now we some new information from the founder of the Wayland Display Server, Kristian Høgsberg.

Over the past few days on the Wayland Display Server mailing list there has been a discussion about creating a daemon to manage DRM displays. An interested Wayland user proposed a D-Bus daemon to manage the DRM displays, would be similar to how UDisks manages disks on Linux, and be under full control of full control of frame buffers, modes, and page flips. Such a daemon would allow different clients (Wayland, Plymouth, X, GDM, etc) to cleanly hand off the display control to one another in a clean process without any potential flickers and avoiding any dirty hacks.

A discussion about such a daemon ensued. Another user responded that Wayland should be able to handle multiple displays properly and not let it be up to a separate daemon. Additionally, other user-level Wayland instances should be able to run atop the system-level Wayland session. This would be similar to how you can run multiple X Servers within Wayland right now and in a rather clean fashion. Kristian has now chimed in and said that this is part of his "grand vision" where the Wayland protocol works between a system level compositor for switching between multiple user sessions and it works between a desktop compositor and the window clients.

Kristian also provided a few comments regarding the state of tool-kits for running on Wayland. Jesse Barnes of Intel has been porting Qt 4.7 to run on Wayland and his current code-base can be found in his personal Git repository. Kristian himself has been working on porting GTK+ 3.0 to run under Wayland and feels he has "made some good progress" on this effort. He also offered up two screenshots showing GTK+ 3.0 running on Wayland and that he is able to run VTE on his GTK+ Wayland port. However, right now Kristian's GTK+ porting efforts are being held up by waiting on the "rendering-cleanup" branch of GTK+ to be merged to master before going any further with that code, but that should happen soon. Below are his GTK+ Wayland screenshots.