wlroots 0.17 Adds New Wayland Protocols, Continued Vulkan Renderer Work

Released on Tuesday was a new version of wlroots, the Wayland compositor support library that was born out of the i3-inspired Sway compositor project. With this new release are new Wayland protocols, continued work on their Vulkan renderer, and the ability for the Wayland back-end to embed a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client.

The wlroots 0.17 release brings the content-type-v1 protocol to tag surfaces with their content type, xwayland-shell-v1 for improving XWayland reliability, wp-fractional-scale-v1 so clients can submit buffers of a non-integer scaling factor, tearing-control protocol for clients to opt-in to tearing page-flips for better performance, security-context-v1 for identifying clients within sandboxes, and cursor-shape-v1 for server-side cursor themes.

The wlroots release also continues working on its Vulkan renderer with enabling more RGB formats, adding YUV buffers, and interoperability with implicit synchronization.

Wlroots 0.17 further goes on to add a new output layers API to make use of KMS planes, a new renderer API for better performance, improved scene-graph, a wl_shm shared memory implementation, and the Wayland backend now supports embedding a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client.

Downloads and more details on this big wlroots 0.17 release via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.