A Handful Of Patches Arrive For Wayland

Since last month when reporting What's New In The Land Of Wayland, not much has changed. There's been a handful of commits pushed to the Git repositories and a few messages to the development list.

Fortunately, it looks like Intel has been busy with some work behind the scenes on Wayland, or at least one of their new hires from Nokia, Tiago Vignatti. Tiago has just published a handful of patches for Wayland to the mailing list. The patches aren't terribly exciting but deal with some fixes and compositor work.

There's also work by Matt Peterson on supporting relative touch movement on touch-pads so that they are no longer treated like a touch-screen device.

Also worth reminding is the Wayland-related session taking place this weekend during the Berlin Desktop Summit. For those not in attendance, I will be at the Wayland talk and will be putting my notes online shortly thereafter. Martin Gräßlin will be talking about "compositing after X", and in particular the bring-up work for getting the KDE KWin compositing window manager working under Wayland. Below is Martin's talk abstract.

After more than 25 years of reign over our desktops, it looks like the X Server is approaching retirement. With Wayland finally a possible successor seems to be found. The year 2010 showed important development efforts in the field of Wayland. Major distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora announced that they want to switch to Wayland and the Qt framework was ported to Wayland - the code is already merged into the Qt tree.

Having a possible successor for the X window system is not the only factor for its success. In order to be able to transit to Wayland our desktop environments need to embrace the new environment. Providing a powerful Wayland compositor is one of the most important implementation tasks for the existing desktop environments like the KDE Plasma Workspaces. Without a compositor being on par with the X11 window managers it is unlikely that there is any user acceptance for Wayland.

In this talk the possibilities of providing a Wayland compositor for the KDE Plasma Workspaces based on KWin's existing source code will be discussed and presented. KWin has already done a major step towards Wayland by supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 as a compositing backend. The work currently going on in KWin will be presented in the context of the Wayland porting efforts and the steps to go from here will be elaborated.

Anyhow, the Wayland Display Server still has a ways to mature if it's to be used by MeeGo Tablet UX 1.3 this calendar year as Intel has high hopes to achieve.