Wayland 1.1, Weston 1.1 Pack Lots Of New Features

Version 1.1 of Wayland and the Weston reference compositor will soon be released. The first major post-1.0 updates to Wayland/Weston bring a number of exciting features to this next-generation Linux display server.

Kristian Høgsberg has been preparing to get Wayland/Weston 1.1 out the door, which originally he hoped to have done by the end of March. However, a few remaining issues lingered, but now those are getting addressed.

Originally the next major release of Wayland was going to be Wayland 1.2, but Kristian decided to use the Wayland/Weston 1.1.x series instead. Going forward, Kristian is planning for feature updates to Wayland/Weston on a quarterly basis.

Among the features that were incorporated for the soon-to-be-released Wayland/Weston 1.1 include a Raspberry Pi back-end, various optimizations, touch-screen calibration support, a software-based Pixman renderer back-end, a module SDK for out-of-tree development, buffer-age extension support with the KMS back-end, an RDP back-end for the Remote Desktop Protocol, an FBDEV back-end to run on a frame-buffer device, and a headless back-end.

This is quite an exciting feature release ahead! There's also a fair amount of bug-fixes and other optimizations too for this second major stable release of Wayland and Weston.

Not yet ready for the Wayland/Weston 1.1 series is the IMBus + OSK work, sub-surface / surface group support, and remote rendering functionality. There's still a chance though that Kristian's remote rendering support for Wayland will still be merged prior to Wayland 1.1.

Look for the Wayland/Weston 1.1 release soon, which will be covered again on Phoronix at that time. For more details on the imminent Wayland update, see this mailing list update.