After various development time the release of the new version of the wayland-protocol 1.18 package has been published, which contains a set of protocols and extensions that complement Wayland's basic protocol capabilities and they provide the capabilities necessary to build composite servers and user environments.
If you still don't know about Wayland, you should know that this is a graphical server protocol and library for GNU / Linux. Wayland provides a method for window composition managers to communicate directly with video hardware and applications.
Although in the future it is expected that communication with input hardware using other libraries will also be possible.
The applications render the graphics in their own buffers and the window manager becomes the graphics server, making a composition with these buffers to form the on-screen display of the application windows.
This is a simpler and more efficient approach than using a window composition manager with the X Window System.
Existing window composition managers, such as KWin and Mutter, are expected to implement support for Wayland directly, to become Wayland composers / graphics servers.
Each and every application is a "client" and its video hardware is a "server.". Unlike X11, each program will be able to use the Wayland protocol on its own. This means that the performance is better as the display server is not working hard to keep a lot of clutter and instead only allows to draw things that need it.
Along with all that, the Wayland protocol has something called XWayland. This is a tool that enables the incorporation of X11-based programs. This means that as soon as the new display server is ready, popular programs will continue to function normally.
Main new features of wayland 1.18
As we already mentioned, version 1.18 of this protocol was released where one of the main features that stand out is that small additions were made to existing protocols, the documentation was improved and the errors were fixed.
Currently, the following stable protocols are part of the Wayland protocols, that provide backward compatibility:
- Viewporter: allows the client to perform actions to scale and trim the edges of the surface on the server side.
- Presentation time: Provides video display.
- Xdg-shell - This is an interface for creating and interacting with surfaces such as windows, allowing them to move around the screen, collapse, expand, resize, etc. Unstable protocols, the development of which is not yet complete and is not guaranteed to be backward compatible.
- Fullscreen-shell: managing work in fullscreen mode
- input-method - processing input methods
- Iidle-inhibit: start the lockscreen saver (screensaver)
- Input-timestamps: timestamps for input events
- Linux-dmabuf: share multiple video cards using DMABuff technology
- Text input: text input organization
- Pointer gestures: control from touch screens
- Relative pointer events: relative pointer events
- Pinter constraints: pointer constraints (lock)
- Tablet: support for the input of tablets.
- xdg-foreign: interface for interaction with the surfaces of the "neighbor" client;
- xdg-decoration: representation of window decorations on the server side;
- xdg-output: additional information about the video output (used for fractional scale);
- xwayland-keyboard-grub - Capture input in Xwayland applications.
- Primary selection: by analogy with X11, it provides the primary clipboard (primary selection), the insertion of information from which is usually done with the middle mouse button. Explicit Linux sync is a Linux-specific mechanism for syncing buffers bound to a surface.
Finally Weston 7.0 and this new version of Wayland 1.18 are expected to be released next month, on August 23rd.
For those interested in testing the performance of Wayland, you can download Fedora as it is one of the Linux distros to implement this protocol, as well as being considered one of the most robust.