Wayland's Weston 8.0 Reaches Alpha With EGL Partial Updates, Headless OpenGL

Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form.

Weston 8.0 is another significant update for this Wayland reference compositor in it offers EGL_KHR_partial_update support to reduce GPU vRAM usage on supported drivers/GPUs thanks to handling partial screen updates, support for building the DRM back-end without Mesa's GBM, greater hardware planes usage, the Weston headless back-end now supports OpenGL, a direct display extension, HDCP support in the DRM back-end, and various other improvements / features.

If all goes according to plan, the Weston 8.0 Beta will be out right before Christmas, the Wayland 8.0 RC in mid-January, and the official release likely before the end of January.

More details on the Weston 8.0 Alpha via the mailing list.