libdisplay-info Marks Its First Release To Reduce EDID/DisplayID Parsing Fragmentation

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing.

For years it's been known that particularly in the Wayland ecosystem there is a lot of fragmentation around EDID/DisplayID parsing with different compositors rolling their own Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) parsers for reading monitor metadata or copying various other parsing code.

libdisplay-info is about coming up with a de facto open-source library for monitor EDID / DisplayID parsing on Linux systems.

There hasn't been a dominant and centralized EDID/DisplayID parsing library that all compositors and other software users can simply leverage. But libdisplay-info is aiming to resolve that. Extended Display Identification Data is able to communicate a lot of the display characteristics and VESA DisplayID is the newer metadata format to ultimately replace EDID.

Well known Wayland developer Simon Ser has been leading the development of libdisplay-info and today marked its v0.1 inaugural release. Simon commented in today's release announcement:

libdisplay-info is an EDID and DisplayID library. It provides a low-level API exposing all of the details of these formats, plus a high-level API which abstracts these details for common operations.

The API isn't yet stable. For this release, the library includes full support for EDID, partial support for CTA-861-H, and very basic support for DisplayID 1.3.

With time -- and once having a stable API -- hopefully more Wayland compositors and other user-space software in need of EDID/DisplayID information such as for HDR handling will begin making use of libdisplay-info. Those wanting to check out this new library can find it via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.