Wayland's Weston 8.0 Bringing Direct-Display Extension, HDCP On DRM Back-End + More

Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January.

For making a January release target for Weston 8.0, Simon has laid out plans for the initial alpha release around 6 December, a beta release on 20 December, and the first release candidate on 17 January. If all goes well with Weston 8.0 RC1, the actual release could be on or around 24 January.

When digging through the Weston 8.0 changes so far this morning, some of the highlights include:

- The Weston-Direct-Display extension is a Collabora-led extension in development that informs clients the DMA-BUF buffer will be forwarded directly to the display controller. By using this extension when available/supported to then send DMA-BUF buffers directly to the display controller, there are performance benefits / lower bandwidth usage implications.

- Support for content protection on Weston (HDCP support) with the DRM back-end, going along with Intel's recent HDCP DRM driver work in kernel space, and building off earlier Wayland HDCP bits this year that shipped without the back-end support.

- Support for XYUV format with the OpenGL renderer.

- Support for double-loading the same modules.

- A memory optimization when using a solid-color background to just set a 1x1 pixel buffer and then set the viewport to the full size of the output.

- Using _XWAYLAND_ALLOW_COMMITS for repainting with XWayland to avoid bad effects.

- The Weston DRM back-end now treats GBM as optional, which for now allows Weston to build with the DRM back-end without depending upon Mesa for GBM, not that there is any new NVIDIA (non-GBM) bits or the like merged.

- A "--use-gl" switch for Weston to use OpenGL rendering with the headless back-end.

The planned Weston 8.0 release calendar can be found on Wayland-dev.