Cage Wayland Compositor For Kiosk Use-Cases Updated With Direct Scan-Out, New Protocols

Joining Sway 1.5 for an exciting week in the Wayland space is an update to Cage, the Wayland compositor designed for kiosk-like experiences.

Cage is the Wayland effort for kiosk and full-screen, one-application usage environments. Cage is built off WLROOTS and has seen a lot of work over the past year into making it suitable for various kiosk setups.

With Thursday's release of Cage 0.1.2, there is support for a number of additional Wayland protocols, support for direct scanout, support for switching VTs with Cage running, an initial multi-monitor setup, and support for keyboard groups.

The new protocols supported by Cage 0.1.2 are wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1, xdg-output-unstable-v1.xml, wlr-gamma-control-unstable-v1, and wlr_export_dmabuf_unstable_v1.

The direct scanout support for Cage is a nice efficiency improvement and works when only one surface is being outputted without any subsurfaces / popups or any other extras. One of the beneficial use-cases here is during video playback when not having to render any on-screen display or other extras.

Downloads and more details on the Cage 0.1.2 Wayland compositor via GitHub.