"LIBOUTPUT" Proposed As New Library For Helping To Bring Up New Compositors & More

Coming out of informal discussions from this week's X.Org Developers Conference in Montreal, a "liboutput" library has been proposed as a theoretical new library for helping to bring up Wayland compositors, X11 window managers, and anything else wanting to interface with DRM/KMS kernel interfaces.

Liboutput would be a common library helping out anything targeting DRM/KMS interfaces directly whether they be X11 window managers, Wayland compositors, or cases like direct Vulkan display support. Liboutput would take care of some of the heavy lifting around dealing with these interfaces and the modern features of those APIs and of today's graphics/display hardware. There would be proper support for multiple planes, making use of the KMS leasing infrastructure, projective transforms, multiple output handling, atomic presentations, and other bits.

So far liboutput is just a proposal but it will be interesting to see if this evolves into a common output library for Linux systems to facilitate more code sharing between these different compositors and other components.