Recently the release of the new version was announced of the package wayland protocols 1.26, which contains a set of protocols and extensions that complement the capabilities of the base Wayland protocol and provide the capabilities needed to build composite server and user environments.
All protocols constantly go through three phases: development, testing, and stabilization. After completion of the development stage ("unstable" category), the protocol is placed on the "staging" branch and officially included in the wayland protocol suite, and after completion of testing, it is moved to the stable category. Protocols in the "staging" category can already be used in composite servers and clients where the functionality associated with them is required.
Unlike the “unstable” category, in “staging” changes that violate compatibility are prohibited, but if problems and bugs are identified during testing, replacement with a significant new protocol version or other Wayland extension is not ruled out .
For the part of the Wayland protocols that are currently available, the following stable protocols that are compatible with previous versions stand out:
- viewporter: Allows the client to perform scaling and cropping actions on the edges of the surface on the server side.
- presentation-time: which provides the video display
xdg shell: which is an interface for creating and interacting with surfaces like windows, allowing them to move around the screen, minimize, maximize, resize, etc.
For the part of the protocols tested in the "staging" branch we can find:
- drm lease : Provides the necessary resources to form a stereo image with different buffers for the left and right eyes when sent to virtual reality headsets.
- ext-session-lock: Specifies the means to lock the session, for example during a screen saver or authentication dialog.
- single-pixel-buffer: Allows you to create single-pixel buffers that include four 32-bit RGBA values.
- xdg-activation: which allows to transfer the focus between different surfaces of the first level (for example, using xdg-activation, one application can change the focus to another).
Main new features of Wayland-Protocols 1.26
This release introduces the new single pixel buffer test protocol,
which, together with the viewer extension, allows customers to
create surfaces of a single color of arbitrary size…This is also the first release requiring new protocol extensions to
follow the RFC 2119 wording. In addition to what has been mentioned so far, this version also comes with the
usual clarifications, improved annotations and other minor fixes.
In this newly released version, it is highlighted that the single pixel buffer protocol has been added to the “staging” category, allowing the creation of single pixel buffers that include four 32-bit RGBA values. Using the display protocol, composite servers can scale single pixel buffers to create uniformly colored surfaces of arbitrary size.
Another change that stands out in this new version is then the xdg_shell protocol, which provides an interface to interact with surfaces as windows, which allows you to move surfaces around the screen, minimize, maximize, resize, etc, in this added support for composite servers which implement only part of the window management operations offered by xdg_shell.
On the other hand, it is also highlighted that the event is proposed wm_capabilities to convey information about the capabilities available on the composite server.
In addition to that, it is also mentioned that the text input protocol rewrote the language which led to an ambiguous interpretation and added clarifications about the intended behavior.
And it is also worth mentioning that from this new version of wayland-protocols the use of the terminology defined in RFC 2119 is mandatory.
Finally if you are iInterested in learning more about it about this new version, you can check the details In the following link.
As for those interested in knowing more about wayland-protocols, they can consult the following link