Wayland and Weston 1.1 work without 3D drivers

Kristian Høgsberg has released version 1.1 of Wayland and the Wayland-based reference compositor Weston. The new version of Weston is now able to compose images using the Pixman library and includes new backends for forwarding images to X Servers or framebuffer devices (FBDEV) for output. Consequently, it is now possible to test Wayland and Weston in the absence of 3D drivers with Wayland interfaces.

There are also new Weston backends for outputting images using the Raspberry Pi's graphics driver or displaying the images of programs through the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Although the latter is useful for testing multihead support in Wayland, it is not planned to be used to enable individual Wayland clients to be displayed on remote systems. There are also new logging functions and a program for calibrating touch screens. The developers have also improved the documentation and implemented an SDK (software development kit) for developing Weston plugins without requiring Weston.

Version 1.1 is the first major update since Wayland 1.0, which was released in October. Until the appearance of Mir, it was regarded as the only serious successor to the X Window System (X11). X11 currently takes care of displaying the graphical interface in Linux distributions. The next major version increment is likely to come in around four months time, as chief Wayland developer Kristian Høgsberg has announced that new versions with new features will now be released quarterly, with minor bugfix releases in the interim.

(fab)