XWayland Gets XDG-Output Support For Potential Fractional Scaling

The long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20 has yet another XWayland addition: XDG-Output protocol support.

XDG-Output is a newer Wayland protocol extension for providing more display output device information with a focus on desktop display details not already exposed otherwise.

Thanks to Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan, XWayland can now make optional use of XDG-Output for obtaining the output position and size in a global compositor space. This in turn can be useful for X11 XWayland clients to support fractional scaling, as explained in this commit.

In other Wayland protocol news, Marius Vlad of NXP is proposing a new unstable protocol for DRM leases.

Keith Packard as part of his contract work for Valve has been spearheading the concept of "DRM leases" over the past year for dealing with virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) so they would not interfere with the conventional Linux desktop environments. The kernel side bits of DRM leasing is present in the Linux 4.15 kernel but up to now Keith's work has been focused on X.Org Server support.

This proposed Wayland unstable protocol would bring DRM lease support to the Wayland space for having an interface to create/revoke these Direct Rendering Manager leases. That initial patch was published today to wayland-devel.