Mir 1.6 Released With New Wayland, DispmanX Platform Support

Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility.

The two big additions to Mir 1.6 are on the graphics platform front. First, there is now a "Wayland platform" for running Mir as a nested compositor on top of a Wayland compositor. Secondly, the rpi-dispmanx platform is for Broadcom's DispmanX API.

Regarding DispmanX support, as explained before, "It's interesting that Canonical is working on a Broadcom DispmanX API for Mir, which presumably is out of enterprise customer interest. There had been indications before DispmanX was deprecated and the most notable Broadcom SoC case for Linux users is in the form of Raspberry Pi boards where there is good Mesa/KMS coverage these days thus working with Mir's other platform support. Alan indicates this Broadcom proprietary stack has the potential for potentially higher performance as well as supporting OpenMAX for video handling."

Mir 1.6 also has some fixes around Wayland window manager, improved diagnostics, a generic way to handle Wayland buffer consumption, a new miral-system-compositor as part of the demos package, and a number of bug fixes. The bug fixes do resolve building Mir on Arch Linux.

More details on Mir 1.6 via GitHub. More information on 1.6 via Ubuntu Discourse.

Canonical continues investing in Mir seemingly for use-cases like digital signage and other IoT and special purpose use-cases.