Kicking Around The Wayland Display Server

The "still very experimental for the foreseeable future but promising" Wayland has been discussed more at UDS Budapest, on the mailing lists, and now this weekend in Berlin at LinuxTag.

Wayland was already discussed earlier in the week during the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest, Hungary. While I had left early on Friday to make it back to Deutschland for LinuxTag, Wayland was discussed some more.

Earlier in the week the Wayland conversation was pretty normal and nothing new to anyone who stays up to date about this display server on Phoronix. There's no plans to deploy Wayland at large before Ubuntu 11.10 and also now Ubuntu 12.04 since that is a Long-Term Support release so radical changes are unwelcome.

Friday's Wayland discussion came down to saying that for Ubuntu 11.10, Mesa will be updated to version 7.11 (as we already knew), the Wayland Git snapshot will be updated for the Oneiric universe repository, and will later move into the main archive.

The goal will be to run Wayland as early as possible and to potentially even replace Plymouth, Red Hat's KMS-leveraging boot splash screen. An X.Org Server could then be run atop Wayland initially. LightDM will also be a compositor for Wayland. That's the summary of what happened on Friday.

Wayland is also going to be discussed later today by SUSE's Egbert Eich at the Berlin Messe for LinuxTag. I'll be there seeing what he has to say (although we've already talked about it at length last night and last week) and will likely have his slides and perhaps some video recordings up this weekend.

I'll be wandering around Berlin today and tomorrow. For any Phoronix readers wanting to meet up, I'll get to the Messe in a few hours (circa 11.00). I'll be in the usual Phoronix uniform for easy spotting: lederhosens and "toe shoes." I'll also be wearing a Southern California Linux Expo t-shirt for easy spotting in a crowd of Germans, likely with a beer in-hand.

For those not in Berlin this weekend, there's a heated Wayland Window Management Proposal thread that can be read on the Wayland mailing list. I haven't caught up with those emails about this window management proposal so I am not commenting further on that matter at this time.