13 February 2012, 16:04

Linux graphics system Wayland sees first "real release"

Wayland logo

Kristian Høgsberg has released version 0.85 of his Wayland graphics system for Linux. In his release announcement, he refers to it as the "first real release"; version 1.0 is due later this year. Wayland is written for the requirements of modern graphical applications and the capabilities of modern hardware. It could therefore eventually replace the X Window System which currently provides the graphics on Linux and Unix systems.

The Wayland library implements a protocol by means of which graphical applications can communicate with a compositor. The 0.85 release of the Weston reference compositor has also been released with Wayland; together, applications' graphics are rendered onto the display. Unlike X, Wayland provides no API for graphical primitives such as drawing lines, text and so forth. Instead, graphical applications – clients in the language of X and Wayland – use libraries such as Cairo or write directly via OpenGL. The popular Linux toolkits GTK and Qt already have Wayland support, in principle making it easy for GNOME and KDE applications to display using Wayland.

Version 0.85.0 of Wayland and Weston are available to download from the project's site.

See also: