Hi all!

It may sound surprising, but this month again my main focus has been wlroots. The main highlight is the completion of the “renderer v6” refactoring! All of the internals have been adjusted. We can now slowly take advantage of its flexibility. For instance, the WIP Vulkan renderer requires exactly zero changes to the backends (I still need to take some time to push it forward!). As another example, the screen capture logic is getting simplified. The completion of renderer v6 will also help with output layers and libliftoff integration.

A big remaining chunk of work is to design better wlroots APIs to expose the new renderer v6 capabilities. As part of this effort, I’ve been reviving the work on the scene-graph API, which provides a higher-level API to compositors and will allow wlroots to better take advantage of the hardware. I’ve ported Cage to use the WIP scene-graph API, and the results are convincing! I’d like to try to plug damage tracking support as well, to see how the design holds up when adding new features.

In other Wayland news, we’ve finally finalized the DRM lease Wayland protocol (used for VR headsets), thanks to the hard work of Xaver Hugl and Simon Zeni. The wlroots and Xwayland patches are ready from my point-of-view. The last remaining piece is the Monado patch, but we’re close to the finish line!

I’ve continued working on gamescope for Valve. This gaming-focused Wayland compositor can now handle TTY switching properly, has basic output hotplug support and exposes a PipeWire stream for screen casting.

I’ve worked on smaller improvements on various other projects. ericonr has added an IPC to kanshi, allowing to reload the configuration file on the fly (and in the future to programmatically switch the current profile). I’ve submitted a new extended-monitor extension to IRCv3, to allow clients to get reliable away notifications when privately discussing with someone else. I’ve sent and reviewed a bunch of Mesa fixes for split render/display SoCs such as the one found on the PinePhone. This should allow wlroots to work better on these devices. columbarius has been pushing forward proper DMA-BUF support in PipeWire.

The new project of the month is blackbox. It’s a small utility which silently records debug logs of a program, and dumps the recorded logs on-demand. It’s useful when trying to obtain information about a bug which can’t be easily reproduced.

That’s all for now, see you soon!