XWayland 23.1 Released With High Resolution Scroll Wheel, DMA-BUF v4 Feedback

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

Red Hat engineer Olivier Fourdan organized the XWayland 23.1 release that is now out in time for appearing on the likes of the upcoming Fedora Workstation 38. XWayland 23.1 is quite a worthwhile update with support for high resolution scroll wheel support, DMA-BUF v4 feedback support, skipping GLAMOR with the Mesa Softpipe driver, fixing GBM for drivers without explicit modifier support, using Wayland/XDG output names for RandR, and many more lower-level changes to the XWayland code. While the traditional X.Org Server code rarely sees much new work today, there is still a healthy amount of code churn on the XWayland side with continuing to support legacy applications and games on Wayland compositors.

For end-users having high resolution scroll-wheel support is one of the most exciting changes with XWayland 23.1. The updated DMA-BUF feedback support though is important too as moving ahead will allow for scanout modifiers to be delivered from Wayland compositors to X11 applications/games.

Rounding out XWayland 23.1 are various fixes and other minor updates. The very brief XWayland 23.1 release announcement can be read on the X.Org mailing list.