XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users.

The XWayland code within the X.Org Server is one of the main areas still seeing activity on the X.Org Server Git code-base along with other components like xf86-video-modesetting. But short of organizing a new X.Org Server release, the XWayland release is being spun out from there for providing a more manageable, standalone release.

The standalone XWayland releases are planned to be part of the Fedora 34 features and will presumably work its way into RHEL and the like with time. Ubuntu developers are also looking at potentially making use of the standalone XWayland packages too with their Ubuntu 21.04 Wayland-by-default plans. We will likely see the standalone XWayland packages widely adopted across distributions over time especially if no 1.21 release manages to happen and at a time while KDE Plasma and other desktops work out the rest of their Wayland issues to bring it up to production quality.

XWayland 21.1 as the inaugural release is planned to be tagged by mid March. For that to happen, the XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate was made available today.

Over X.Org Server 1.20, XWayland 21.1 is bringing many fixes, EGL-backed GLX provider support, expanded RandR screen size limits, support for falling back to OpenGL ES 2.0 if not having at least OpenGL 2.1 in GLAMOR, improved video mode emulation handling, memory leak fixes, XWayland GLAMOR handling changes, support for multiple window buffering, the Wayland viewport extension (wp_viewport) now being supported, xdg-output-unstabl1-v1 version 3 support, and dozens of other XWayland patches.

More details on the XWayland 21.1 RC1 via the release announcement with the standalone releases being managed by Michel Dänzer.