Wayland's Weston 12 Alpha Brings Multi-GPU Support, PipeWire Backend, Tearing Control

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 26 April 2023 at 10:38 AM EDT. 52 Comments
WAYLAND
Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland.

With Weston 12.0 there are tons of changes that have built up in the code-base since the release of Weston 11.0 last September. There is support for tearing-control and other new protocols, initial multi-GPU support, and a lot of other features for this next version. Some of the Weston 12.0 highlights include:

- Support for the tearing-control protocol to let clients request to be flipped asynchronously. This can allow tearing if so desired.

- A PipeWire back-end has been added that is based on the PipeWire plug-in.

- Multi-GPU support for running a single Weston instance with multiple DRM devices. This adds a new "--additional-devices" option when launching Weston.

- Basic drawing tablet support for Weston.

- Various debugging and profiling improvements.

- Various XWayland compatibility fixes, including to not leak file descriptors on failures.

- Many random DRM back-end updates, including support for the plane alpha DRM property.

- Initial multi-head support for the RDP back-end.

- Weston's Wayland back-end now allows resizing support for XDG-Shell to allow resizing the Weston window on another Wayland compositor.

- xwayland_shell_v1 protocol support.

- Documentation updates.


The lengthy list of patches making up the Weston 12 Alpha release can be found via the mailing list announcement.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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