Hi!

Once again my focus has been Wayland-related projects this month. A steady stream of improvements made it into wlroots: Xyene made the X11 clipboard code a lot more robust, bl4ckbone has made good progress on the upcoming Pixman-based software renderer, and incremental patches slowly align the wlroots API with renderer v6. Kenny Levinsen has improved Sway’s transaction infrastructure, so interactive move and resize operations should feel smoother and glitch-free.

I’ve worked on new Wayland protocols as well. I’ve added documentation to my linux-dmabuf hints patch, including guidelines for client and compositor implementations. I’ve submitted a security-context proposal (finally!), but it’ll probably take some effort to make everybody happy. I’ve worked on a wlroots implementation of the xdg-activation protocol by Aleix Pol, used to transfer focus from one client to another (e.g. when clicking on a link in an IM client).

As part of my contract with Valve, I’ve continued improving gamescope. Bas Nieuwenhuizen has added support for format modifiers when importing client buffers, fixing scrambled textures with some GPUs and removing some Mesa-specific hacks we were using. I’ve written a small program that uses VA-API to decode a video and display it directly via Wayland or via KMS without involving the 3D engine (it’s actually not that complicated!).

In the process, I’ve sent some Mesa patches to improve interactions between VA-API and Wayland/KMS, and amdgpu patches to fix issues related to the cursor plane. After debugging some Nouveau failures on wlroots, I also sent a patch to gracefully error out instead of ending up with a black screen.

This month xdg-desktop-portal-wlr 0.2.0 has been released. xdg-desktop-portal-wlr provides interoperability with xdg-desktop-portal applications for wlroots compositors. This is used for instance by web browsers for screen sharing. The new release brings various fixes, support for basu for systemd-less setups and a --replace flag to ease bug reporting and debugging. columbarius has been working hard on adding support for config files and selecting which output to share, hopefully this can be merged soon.

I’ve continued work on the soju IRC bouncer. delthas has a work-in-progress patch to allow clients to synchronize read receipts, so reading a message on one device also marks it as read on all other devices. taiite has a work-in-progress patch to handle case-mapping properly, fixing some long-standing issues leading to inconsistent state. I have a work-in-progress patch to save delivery receipts to the database, so that chat history isn’t lost when restarting the bouncer. There are some non-trivial questions for each of these patches, but we’re not too far away from a solution. tl;dr lots of activity behind the scenes!

To wrap things up, I’ve created a new project: tentative. It’s a small tool to try out arbitrary KMS configurations. It’s handy to check whether a kernel driver supports a feature, for instance scaling and rotating buffers. KMS drivers often expose a feature but don’t necessarily support it in all cases because of hardware limitations.

That’s all for now, see you next month!