wlroots 0.16 Released With More Stable Vulkan Renderer, High Resolution Scrolling

[phoronix]

Phoronix: wlroots 0.16 Released With More Stable Vulkan Renderer, High Resolution Scrolling

The wlroots Wayland compositor support library that started out as a companion project to Sway is out with a shiny new feature release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/wlroots-0.16-Released

[Nuc!eoN]

Sorry to blow the party, but what is the benefit of wlroots running on vulkan?

[Kjell]

Hyprland features wlroots-0.16

https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland

[Quackdoc]

ive been waiting for this, a lot of fixes in wlroots that I would like, but wayfire only targets stable.

probably need to wait a couple days, but hopefully it will be worth it.

[skeevy420]

Sorry to blow the party, but what is the benefit of wlroots running on vulkan?

Some newer devices only support Vulkan so they have to run the compositor through something like Zink first and some devices with less-than-stellar OpenGL support can potentially run Vulkan better. Don't ask me what any of those devices are since I don't own any of them to warrant keeping up with that aspect of it. I just get the gist of why people would want Vulkan support.

That all helps to move everyone towards the endgame of as much as possible outputting to Vulkan. Another benefit of that is Metal and DX12 are sub or supersets of Vulkan so going to Vulkan helps to make cross platform programming easier. That's the exact opposite of back in the day where OpenGL 1 to 4.6 and DirectX 1 to 11 weren't even similar to one another which greatly increased cross platform difficulties until.....Dun Dun Dun.....we got the Vulkan based DXVK and D9VK shims.

Basically, outputting to Vulkan is future forward while simultaneously covering legacy users and programs with shims like Zink and DXVK as well as it assists with cross platform, cross driver, etc programming.

[Berniyh]

Sorry to blow the party, but what is the benefit of wlroots running on vulkan?

If it is done well: less overhead and CPU usage, which could turn into improved battery lifetime on mobile devices.

[RejectModernity]

I wonder how's wlroots based KWinft developing going on? It looked promising year ago.
Maybe @romangg can share something with us?

[piotrj3]

If it is done well: less overhead and CPU usage, which could turn into improved battery lifetime on mobile devices.

Also it is technically less buggy API. Drivers have very explicit work to do (so in general drivers don't have to guess some wierd optimalizations) and on developer side you have validation layers to make sure everything works right. Of course that is only if everything was done right.

I am not sure for how many stuff WLroots is responsible for, but it can also allow good multithreading. Common issue in wayland on implicit sync is that if you have one lagging program your entire desktop lags. And vulkan allows you to break that things (if done right)

[romangg]

I wonder how's wlroots based KWinft developing going on? It looked promising year ago.
Maybe @romangg can share something with us?

Hey, thanks for asking. Development is ongoing but slowed down because I can't work on it fulltime anymore as my main sponsor decided to not fund my work on it anymore. So I'm working in my free time on it like a handful of other contributors too. I plan to write a blog post at some point soon about the current progress.

EDIT: there is some stuff in the wlroots 0.16 release we were looking for. So it's great news it now got released. Took longer than anticipated, probably because the development of wlroots is also severely underfunded.

[timofonic]

I hope wlroots gets a lot more adoption, even by major desktop environments. Stupid code duplication is bad for Free/Open Source, this should be taken seriously by Wayland too.

Wayland project should have done this instead that end user useless test experiment known as Weston.