Wayland's Weston 10.0 Compositor Released With DMA-BUF Feedback, Libseat Support

Weston 10.0 has been released as the newest feature update to Wayland's reference compositor that often works as a proving grounds and compositor showcasing shiny new features for Wayland.

Arguably most exciting with Weston 10.0 DMA-BUF feedback support is added to allow zero-copy direct scanout in more situations like with hybrid/multi-GPU laptop setups. Other Wayland compositors have also been quick to support the DMA-BUF feedback extension.

Libseat support has been added in Weston 10.0 and will replace all other seat/launcher code in a future release. Libseat provides seatd, (e)logind, and direct seat back-ends. It ultimately comes down to a seat management library and the seatd daemon, which work on Linux and FreeBSD (thus improving Weston's BSD support compared to the Linux-specific alternatives) for handling of graphics/input devices as non-root users. More details on libseat is available via the seatd project.

Weston 10.0 also presents initial work on color management support for the Weston compositor. However, it's not yet ready for end-users but just the necessary steps in working toward a complete implementation.

Weston 10.0 also adds the ability to automatically launch a client after start-up, such as if wanting a web browser to launch on log-in. Meanwhile with the new release there is deprecation of Weston's wl_shell, weston-launch, and fbdev back-end code. Weston developers recommend those using the Weston FBDEV back-end to migrate to kernel mode-setting (KMS) usage.

More details on the Weston 10.0 release via its release announcement.