Wayland 1.2.0 Released, Joined By Weston Compositor

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 13 July 2013 at 09:23 AM EDT. 81 Comments
WAYLAND
After about three months of development, Wayland 1.2.0 along with the matching version of its Weston reference compositor have been released. The updated Wayland/Weston stack bring many new features to the table.

Highlights of Wayland/Weston 1.2 include:

- Color management for Wayland/Weston. GNOME's Richard Hughes implemented support for providing CMS plug-ins and colord integration. This plays nicely with GNOME's color management support.

- The Wayland Input Method Framework was merged and is feature complete but for now is living in just Weston before it becoming an official Wayland API. There's also now an on-screen keyboard for Weston and other features.

- Sub-surface protocol support. This allows building application windows from multiple Wayland surfaces, regardless of color space or buffer type.

- Output scaling with HiDPI support for scaling an entire output by an integer factor. This does work with GNOME's support for HiDPI and GTK+3.

- The low-cost ARM Raspberry Pi board has a new renderer for Wayland and Wayland back-end. This is for allowing the Raspberry Pi board to now run Wayland instead of an X.Org Server.

- Improved thread safety with the Wayland client library.

- The Wayland server API is inow deemed stable (previously it was only the client API that was stable since v1.0).

- Multi-seat improvements with configuration support through udev properties.

- A new example client for illustrating an application compositor idea.

- The XKB common library (libxkbcommon) is now optional for situations where Wayland doesn't need full keyboard support.

- Other minor fixes and lots of bug-fixes too.

More details can be found via the mailing list announcement.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week