OpenWF Working Group Offers Hand To Wayland

While not a huge item as no work has yet been rendered, the Khronos Working Group responsible for the OpenWF standard have offered their support to the Wayland Display Server project.

OpenWF 1.0 launched in 2009 as an open, cross-platform API designed for composited windowing systems that is hardware independent. OpenWF is broken down into Composition and Display components with more technical details behind this hardware-independent API being available at Khronos.org. The Khronos Group is, of course, the entity also responsible for OpenGL, OpenVG, etc.

While OpenWF is primarily designed for mobile devices, there's been interested in implementing OpenWF within the Wayland Display Server project. There's already been some work in this direction with possibly using OpenWF to complement or replace targeting the Linux KMS APIs directly.

It may also be easier for the proprietary NVIDIA / AMD Linux drivers to provide support for OpenWF rather than the open Linux-specific APIs centered around the open-source DRM drivers. This would also be the case for the many ARM / embedded / mobile GPU drivers out there as well, especially as Wayland has high hopes on the mobile front and it's where the next-generation display server may be first deployed in large numbers.

Lars Persson, a Sony Ericsson engineer who's part of the Open Windowing Foundation Working Group with Khronos, has now extended the group's support to Wayland. The statement was made just today, so no development support action has yet been taken, but hopefully the OpenWF Working Group will end up being able to help those working on Wayland in working out this support. Still though, don't expect to see Wayland appearing en masse until around the end of the 2012 calendar year at least.