Clutter Picks Up An EvDev Input Back-End, Helps Wayland

Development work towards the major Clutter 1.6 stable release has been progressing nicely within the Clutter 1.5 development branch. These recent development snapshots have brought performance improvements, a GLSL generation back-end, greater usage of OpenGL FBOs, new API functionality, and even a Clutter Wayland back-end. A new development release of Clutter (v1.5.10) is now here and it brings an evdev input back-end.

What good is an evdev input back-end for Clutter? Well, this provides support for input devices on Linux when using EGL-based back-ends rather than just a traditional X Server, etc.

EGL (also known formally as the EGL Native Platform Graphics Interface) is the interface between other Khronos Group APIs like OpenGL ES and OpenVG and the underlying window system. As described by Khronos, "It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs."

EGL is notably used by Wayland, among other projects. So now not only can the Clutter tool-kit draw to these other displays, but there's working input from Clutter events. For those not well-versed on input, evdev is the event device component of the Linux kernel that handles input from computer mice, keyboards, joysticks, and other input devices. There's also the very common xf86-input-evdev driver for the X.Org Server for reading the generic input events generated by evdev in the Linux kernel, but it's the kernel portion that Clutter can now tap and read.

The Clutter 1.5.10 snapshot also has updated build-scripts, updated documentation, a number of fixes, updates to the Wayland client back-end, the Clutter Windows build has been updated, and various other work has taken place.

See the release announcement for additional details.