XWayland Pointer Confinement & Warping

Playing legacy/X11 games on Wayland via XWayland may soon be in better shape with the latest slew of X Server patches.

Jonas Ådahl today published a set of 12 patches for implementing pointer confinement and warping within XWayland.

The pointer confinement and warping is important for gamers. With Fedora 25 looking to ship with Wayland by default, the last remaining features needed for parity to X.Org have been -- and are still being -- worked out. Just days ago was the SDL2 relative mouse mode for Wayland and that's already ended up in Fedora packages.

Jonas commented on today's X Server patches, "All of this seems to work fairly Ok on various games I have tested. I've tested SDL 2 using the X11 backend (ioquake3), GLFW using the X11 backend, OpenTTD, Half Life 1, Half Life 2, Shadow Warrior, Trine 2, Portal, and they seem to work with no obvious flaws right now."

However, as the X.Org Server 1.19 feature freeze is imminent it's not yet known if these patches will be cleared in time for landing with 1.19.0. At the very least, Jonas is hoping the ABI-breaking patches can at least land so it will be cleaner to ship patches with Fedora's xorg-server to add in the rest of the support without changing the ABI. X.Org Server 1.19 is coming together at the last minute with hopes to be released in October so it can ship with Fedora 25.