What's New In The Land Of Wayland?

It's been a few weeks since really mentioning the Wayland Display Server at Phoronix (the last time was in June when XWayland and xf86-video-wlshm were released). It's not because development of this next-generation Linux display server has stalled, but there's been some progress made and overall just the lower level of activity during the summer months.

The last commit to the Wayland Git repository was more than two weeks ago (29 June) and that was just a matter of adding touch events to the Wayland protocol. Four touch events were added to the protocol: touch down, touch up, touch motion, touch frame (the end of a contact point list), and touch cancel (the event that's emitted if the compositor decides the touch stream is a global gesture and not for any clients). Touched just nine days ago was the Wayland demos repository where a simple memory client was added.

While the number of commits flowing into the Git repository may have slowed down during the summer, there still are active discussions on the mailing list -- lately it's largely surrounded Wayland's input support. Tiago Vignatti, the former Nokia developer who was hired with the dozens of others out of Helsinki after Nokia switched from MeeGo to Windows Phone 7, has also been publishing patches to the list. Just yesterday, Tiago published four Wayland patches to the list.

Intel is busy at work on making Wayland ready for use in MeeGo Touch UX 1.3, to be released later in the calendar year.

Being worked on for Wayland right now is also remote display support as part of Google's Summer of Code. Additionally, in the KDE world they've been quick to experiment with Wayland with various activities taking place to make the KWin compositing window manager ready for this next-generation solution.

At the Desktop Summit early next month in Berlin, Martin Gräßlin (the lead KWin developer) will also be talking about Compositing after X - KWin on the Road to Wayland. I'll be at the Berlin Desktop Summit, so there will be Phoronix information about what's been discussed shortly thereafter. Additionally, XDC2011 Chicago is taking place in September where almost surely Wayland will be discussed in greater detail.

For those looking to get involved with the Wayland Display Server project, there is a 275-line TODO list in the Git tree.