Tizen's Dawati Is Using A Hybrid X-Wayland

Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more.

The talk itself, which happened in the X.Org development room, was about "how-to write a Wayland compositor" and the speakers were Robert Bragg and Neil Roberts. Robert and Neil work for Intel's Open-Source Technology Center out of London and as of late have been tasked with Wayland work.

The duo talked about Wayland's Weston compositor, the couple of "toy Wayland compositors" that are currently around, and on the screen for their presentation happened to be Dawati. Dawati is the open-source user-interface expected to be the reference design for Tizen and was originally born out of Moblin and MeeGo (more details at Dawati.org). The Intel OTC developers ported the Dawati shell interface to be running on an XWayland-based compositor, which pairs X.Org element support with Wayland.

Other non-Weston compositors talked about during the 45-minute presentation were about Cogland (a COGL-based Wayland compositor), a small Clutter-based compositor with X and Wayland clients working together, and a hybrid Mutter compositor. With the hybrid Mutter compositor that was talked about, this is for GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter being the window manager for XWayland.

To find out about all of what was said on these Wayland compositors, a brief demo, how-to write your own basic Wayland compositor, and other details, the Phoronix-recorded video is embedded below.