Wayland's Weston Sees Patches For FreeBSD, Fractional HiDPI, Rust Bindings

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 15 December 2017 at 11:08 AM EST. 11 Comments
WAYLAND
A new contributor to the Wayland/Weston camp has been working on several improvements to the Weston reference compositor.

Improvements made to Weston via unmerged patches include adding FreeBSD support to Weston, static linking for backends and gl-renderer, Rust bindings for libweston, and fractional HiDPI scaling support.

FreeBSD support for Weston is interesting with the Intel/Radeon DRM/KMS drivers maturing in the *BSD space as a prerequisite for good Wayland support. For these FreeBSD Weston patches, upstream Wayland developers have already expressed apprehension over merging the patches due to the greater maintenance burden and the upstream developers not being experienced with BSD development. It's looking like a partial solution will be to merge some prep patches that add some preprocessor directives around some portions of the code that is Linux-specific. From there it's easier for the FreeBSD ports folks to maintain their FreeBSD-enablement patches on their end.

The Rust bindings for libweston are also interesting and said to be good enough so far for writing some basic Wayland compositor examples.

Of excitement to end-users should be the fractional HiDPI scaling support and it's likely this work will end up getting merged upstream. But at this point the fractional HiDPI support in Weston isn't yet working with XWayland.

More details on these Weston patches via this wayland-devel thread.
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