Hi!

Yesterday I’ve finally finished up and merged push notification support for the soju IRC bouncer and the goguma Android client! Highlights & PM notifications should now be delivered much more quickly, and power consumption should go down. Additionally, the IRC extension isn’t tied to a proprietary platform (like Google or Apple) and the push notification payloads are end-to-end encrypted. If you want to read more about the technical details, have a look at the IRCv3 draft.

In the Wayland world, we’re working hard to get ready for the next wlroots release. We’ve merged numerous improvements for the scene-graph API, xdg-shell v3 and v4 support has been added (to allow xdg-popups to change their position), and a ton of other miscellaneous patches have been merged. Special thanks to Kirill Primak, Alexander Orzechowski and Isaac Freund!

I’ve also been working on various Wayland protocol bits. The single-pixel-buffer extension allows clients to easily create buffers with a single color instead of having to go through wl_shm. The security-context extension will make it possible for compositors to reliably detect sandboxed clients and apply special policies accordingly (e.g. limit access to screen capture protocols). Thanks for xdg-shell capabilities clients will be able to hide their maximize/minimize/fullscreen buttons when these actions are not supported by the compositor. Xaver Hugl’s content-type extension will enable rules based on the type of the content being displayed (e.g. enable adaptive sync when a game is displayed, or make all video player windows float). Last, I’ve been working on some smaller changes to the core protocol: a new wl_surface.configure event to atomically apply a surface configuration, and a new wl_surface.buffer_scale event to make the compositor send the preferred scale factor instead of letting the clients pick it.

I’ve tried to help Jason “I’m literally writing an NVIDIA compiler as I read Mike Blumenkrantz’s blog” Ekstrand with his explicit synchronization work. I’ve written a kernel patch to make it easier for user-space to check whether Jason’s new shiny IOCTLs are available. Unfortunately Greg K-H didn’t like the idea of using sysfs for IOCTL advertisement, and we didn’t find any other good solution, so I’ve merged Jason’s patches as-is and user-space needs to perform a kernel version check. At least I’ve learned how to add sysfs entries! If you want to learn more about Jason’s work, he’s written a blog post about it.

Progress is steady on the libdisplay-info front. I like taking a break from the complicated Linux graphics issues by writing a small patch to parse a new section of the EDID data structure. Don’t get me wrong, EDID is a total mess, but at least I don’t need to think too much when writing a parser. Pekka and Sebastian have been providing very good feedback. Sometimes I complain about their reviews being too nitpicky, but I’m sure I wouldn’t do better should the roles be reversed.

The NPotM is wlspeech, a small Wayland input method to write text using your voice. It leverages Mozilla’s DeepSpeech library for the voice recognition logic. It’s very basic at the moment: it just listens for 2 seconds, and then types the text it’s recognized. It would be nice to switch to ALSA’s non-blocking API, to add a hotkey to trigger the recording, give feedback about the currently recognized word via pre-edit text. Let me know if you’re interested in working on this.

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