Wayland's Weston now able to run without 3D drivers

Weston running under X11, using 3D acceleration in this case

The development version of reference Wayland compositor Weston is now able to run on X Servers, where it is not possible to use 3D acceleration. This is thanks to changes developed by Vasily Khoruzhick which mean that Weston no longer has to leave image rendering to the 3D drivers, but can instead use the Pixman library to do the job itself.

Following a brief discussion, Wayland chief developer Kristian Høgsberg has now merged this recent change into the main Weston development tree. He also expressed his pleasure that the reference compositor is now able to run without acceleration features and without relying on Mesa for software rendering. At present, Weston is only able to run in the absence of 3D drivers if the compositor is run under an X Server. Weston uses its X11 backend to do this in the same way that an X Server can be run on another X Server.

If Weston is launched via a test console in the same way as a standalone X Server, it remains reliant on 3D drivers with EGL support and Wayland extensions, but Khoruzhick is reportedly already working on an fbdev backend to allow Weston to run without 3D drivers when run in this fashion.

(fab)