Wayland's Weston 11.0 Released With HDR Display & Multi-GPU Preparations

Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases.

Experimental color management support can be found in Weston 11.0 that can also work with monitor ICC profiles. A monitor can be set for HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode and to deliver HDR characteristics from the Weston configuration file, but this Wayland compositor does not yet produce any proper HDR content yet.

Also interesting with Weston 11.0 is the groundwork being laid for being able to support using multiple Weston back-ends concurrently. This can be useful for situations like driving a display with the KMS back-end while also running the RDP back-end for remote desktop support. Similarly, this multiple back-end support can be useful for multi-GPU support within the DRM back-end. However, as of Weston 11.0 this multi-back-end work is still a work-in-progress and not yet usable.

Weston 11.0 also features RDP improvements, performance improvements to the DRM back-end, support for the wp_single_pixel_buffer_v1 protocol, a refactoring to the Weston buffer code, and removal of the old FBDEV back-end in favor of just requiring KMS/DRM back-end support. The single pixel buffer protocol is used for more efficient buffers in case of otherwise having a larger buffer all filled with the same pixel color, such as for backgrounds and other plain surfaces, that now it can be a single pixel buffer and then scaled to the necessary size.

More details on Weston 11.0 via Simon Ser's release announcement on this Wayland compositor update.