Replacing X With Wayland On The Raspberry Pi

Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged.

The Raspberry Pi crew is interested in replacing an X.Org Server with Wayland to better improve the Linux desktop experience on this low-end ARMv6 hardware. In particular, they want to make better use of the graphics core on the BCM2835 SoC. Collabora, in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi team, implemented the Broadcom hardware video scaler for Wayland with this new renderer. Aside from the new renderer, the developers are working on making CPU and memory improvements too, making Wayland an ideal fit for the Raspberry Pi rather than X.

More details can be found on the Raspberry Pi blog along with information from Collabora's Daniel Stone and Pekka Paalanen.