Wayland Now Has A Nested Compositor Back-End

Wayland has received quite a number of new patches in the past month from a variety of different developers, including the ability to run Wayland off a Linux frame-buffer, but now this weekend it has picked up another interesting feature: the ability to run another Wayland compositor instance within itself. There's now patches out there for running a nested/session compositor of Wayland on top of an existing Wayland Display Server that in turn is running on a X11/DRM compositor and communicating with the hardware.

This nested Wayland compositor in turn just communicates to whatever Wayland compositor is running underneath. While with X.Org Servers multiple servers use the DISPLAY environmental variable, for now this nested Wayland implementation introduces the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environmental variables.

The patches adding this relatively simple nested compositor can be found on Wayland-devel. It took less than 600 lines of code to implement this support.