Several days ago the release of the new version of the server was announced XWayland 21.1 and in this new version highlights the acceleration of the RENDER extension formats, as well as the support for the NV12 format and also the support for scaling applications to full screen.
For those unaware of X Wayland, they should know that it's an X server running under Wayland and provides backward compatibility for legacy X11 applications that provides startup organization for X.Org server performance X11 applications in Wayland-based environments.
As many of you will know, Wayland is a complete window system unto itself. For his part the Xorg server can be modified to use wayland input devices for input and forward the root window or individual top-level windows as wayland surfaces.
XWayland support merged into the main branch of X.Org eOn April 4, 2014, it was first released with xserver 1.16. Separate X.Org video DDXs are no longer needed, plus the server continues to run the same 2D driver with the same acceleration code as when running natively and the main difference is that wayland handles the display of windows instead of KMS.
The component is being developed as part of the main X.Org codebase and it was previously released together with the X.Org server, but due to X.Org server stalling and the uncertainty with the release of 1.21 in the context of XWayland's continued active development, it was decided to separate XWayland and publish the accumulated changes in the form of a separate package.
XWayland 21.1 Main New Features
This new version of XWayland 21.1 was released and listed as the first standalone version which came after breaking apart the rest of the X.Org server code base that has been in the works for a long time with new features for the elusive X.Org Server version 1.21.
On the Phoronix website mention that:
Red Hat's Michel Dänzer managed this standalone release of XWayland with Fedora 34 planning to make use of this standalone package to provide the latest XWayland support without having the baggage of having to send a Git snapshot of the X.Org server or allocate resources to version 1. 21 release.
Additionally, it is mentioned that Ubuntu developers have also expressed interest in possibly using this standalone XWayland package as well, this assuming X.Org Server 1.21 doesn't magically appear this year with no organization managing the release, we '
Regarding the novelties presented in this new version of XWayland 21.1, it is highlighted that the implementation of XVideo provides support for the NV12 format.
Besides that added the ability to speed up RENDER extension formats using the Glamor 2D acceleration architecture, which use OpenGL to speed up 2D operations.
It is also noted that it was added support for Wayland wp_viewport protocol to scale full screen applications, as well as improved support for clients using relative mouse movement and keyboard grip.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version of XWayland:
- Interlaced provided with multiple buffers for all Wayland surfaces.
- The GLX provider has been moved to use EGL instead of the Mesa project's swrast_dri.so.
- The memfd_create call is used to create shared buffers with the Wayland composite server when Glamor-based acceleration is disabled.
- Added command line options "-listenfd", "-version" and "-verbose".
- The build toolkit is limited to supporting the meson build system.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new version of XWayland, you can check the details by going to to the following link.
As for those who are interested in being able to install this X server on their system, they can follow the instructions that are detailed in this link.