Wayland & Weston 1.3 Have Been Released

While it's arriving late, the Wayland 1.3 release with the adjoining Weston 1.3 reference compositor is now available for your next-generation display server needs.

Wayland 1.3 isn't particularly exciting for this quarterly update, but Wayland's founder Kristian Høgsberg acknowledges this as a sign of maturing and that the core protocol code is useful and stable. Among the changes that made it into Wayland 1.3 were support for more pixel formats with wl_shm, documentation improvements, multi-resource support, support for language bindings, release requests for Wayland pointer/keyboard/touch, install support for the core Wayland XML protocol definition, and only a couple of bug-fixes. Very few bug-fixes made it into Wayland 1.3 as they actually haven't found many bugs, even after all of the GNOME 3.10 implementation work.

Meanwhile, Weston 1.3 is a bit more exciting as the reference compositor and shell. Among the Weston 1.3 changes are hardware-accelerated screen capturing using the VA-API library for H.264 screen capture, libhybris support with the fbdev back-end for using Weston on Android's EGL/GLES2 drivers, multi-resource input events, better touch support, better full-screen support, new weston-launch capabilities, support for RGB565 client buffers, a new Wayland output udev attribute, new configure options, new Weston.ini configuration options, new Weston command-line options, and Weston terminal improvements.

Overall, it's an extremely exciting release for Weston 1.3 while the Wayland 1.3 changes aren't as exciting as the protocol stabilizes and matures. More details on the new releases can be found via the Wayland-devel mailing list.