Wayland & Weston Compositor Ported To DragonFlyBSD

Wayland has been ported to DragonFlyBSD along with its Weston compositor!

In the past we've seen some minor experiments by BSD developers with Wayland/Weston, but for the most part all of the BSDs are still focused on X.Org Server support -- need I remind Phoronix readers that DRM/KMS support is in varying stages across the BSD distributions too as one of the support stepping stones. Just a few days ago I ran into the DragonFly Radeon kernel module failing to properly mode-set with a several year old (pre-GCN) graphics card while meanwhile FreeBSD's Radeon KMS port worked. It's still rather a mine field when it comes to open-source graphics acceleration and support on the BSDs while slowly but surely their catching up with the kernel code.

It was back in 2013 we reported on some early work porting Wayland to FreeBSD but that work hasn't seemed to progress too far in the two years since.

This Wayland/Weston port to DragonFlyBSD is being led by John Marino, a developer to DragonFly of several years. This past weekend he published the initial Wayland and Weston ports and is looking to add them to DragonFly's dports as graphics/wayland and graphics/weston. The code is currently DragonFlyBSD-specific due to its handling of device enumeration and other non-portable changes. The ported Weston compositor can work with the X11 back-end or with the DRM back-end when using DragonFly's i915kms or radeonkms kernel drivers. DragonFlyBSD mainline lacks a Nouveau KMS driver port.

Wayland founder, Kristian Høgsberg, showing off Weston progress at XDC Nürnberg.

As you can see from the ports on GitHub, the changes needed to Wayland and Weston for DragonFlyBSD support are quite extensive with the upstream Wayland developers just being focused on Linux support. Hopefully these ports will continue to be maintained and that DragonFlyBSD will find some interesting uses for Wayland/Weston.