14 DAY TRIAL // Wayland 1.5, a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol, which can be used as a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, has advanced to version 1.5.
A new stable version has been launched for this display server, meant to eventually replace the old and still aging X server that's extensively used in the Linux ecosystem. The development of Wayland has picked up a little after the announcement made by Canonical, whose devs are working on their own software, called Mir.
There's been some friction between the two projects, and even other companies have started to take sides in this matter. Intel, for example, has said that it will refuse patches for its drivers that would enable operating systems to run Mir with this type of hardware.
Just like Mir, the Wayland project suffers from the same major problem. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD provides support through their drivers for these display servers, and only the more limited open source drivers work with them.
“In retrospect, this release was pretty quiet. We ended up not merging a whole lot of features, but we did fix a lot of bugs and at one point the bug count [1] hit 14, the lowest in a long time. I think that's a pretty good feature in itself.”
“Going forward, for master, I'd like to change the work flow a bit. The biggest problem with how we work today is me being a bottleneck at best or flat out dropping patches. So I'd like to open up commit access to some of the key contributors,” said Intel's Kristian Høgsberg, a Wayland developer.
According to the changelog, Wayland now uses non-recursive Makefiles, an internal event queue is now being used for wl_display events, more work has been done on xdg-shell (still far from complete), the Weston input stack has been split out as a new library (libinput), Weston now uses the new Xwayland server, window closing is now animated, and the fullscreen shell now provides a mechanism for a single client to provide a fullscreen surface.
The first Linux distribution that will try to implement Wayland as the default display manager might be Fedora 21, but this measure hasn't been decided yet.
A detailed list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download Wayland 1.5 right now from the official links.