Hi!

Earlier this month I went to FOSDEM with the rest of the SourceHut staff! It was great meeting face-to-face all of the people I work with. I discussed with lots of folks involved in Wayland, IRC, SourceHut and many other interesting projects. This was my first post-pandemic offline conference

Last week we’ve released wlroots 0.16.2 and Sway 1.8.1. We’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to square away regressions, and I think we’ve addressed almost all of them. This doesn’t mean we haven’t made any progress on new features and improvements, quite the contrary. We’ve merged Kenny Levinsen’s patches for the new fractional-scaling-v1 protocol, which allows clients to render at fractional scales rather than being forced to use the next integer scale. I’ve continued working on the new wlr_renderer API, and I’ve started experimenting with Vulkan compute. I’m still not sure this is the right path forward, we’ll see where this takes us.

I’ve made a lot of progress on libliftoff integration in wlroots. I’ve extended the wlr_output_layer API to include a feedback mechanism so that clients can re-allocate their buffers on-the-fly to enable direct scan-out on overlay planes. I’ve wired this up to a new libliftoff API to query which planes would be good candidates for direct scan-out. I’ve fixed the remaining wlroots bugs, optimized libliftoff… What’s left is another testing and review round, but we’re getting close!

By the way, the wlroots IRC channel has moved. We were (ab)using #sway-devel up until now, but now wlroots has its own separate #wlroots channel. Make sure to join it if you’ve been idling in #sway-devel!

In other Wayland news, I’ve landed a patch to add two new wl_surface events to indicate the preferred scale and transform a client should use. No more guesswork via wl_output! I’ve also sent out the schedule for the next Wayland release, if all goes well we’ll ship it in two months.

libdisplay-info 0.1.0 has been released! After months of work, this initial release includes full support for EDID, partial support for CTA-861-H, and very basic support for DisplayID 1.3. Having a release out will allow us to leverage the library in more projects: it’s already used in DXVK and gamescope, I have a patch to use it in wlroots, and there are plans to use it in Mutter and Weston.

The NPotM is pixfmtdb. It’s a simple website which describes the in-memory layout of pixel formats from various graphics APIs. It also provides compatibility information: for each format, equivalent formats coming from other APIs are listed. This can be handy when wiring up multiple APIs together, for instance Cairo and Wayland, or Vulkan and KMS. Under the hood, the Khronos Data Format Specification is used to describe pixel formats in a standard way.

Recently delthas has been hard at work and has landed a lot of soju patches. The new user run BouncerServ command can be used to run a command as another user, which can be handy for administrators. soju now supports Unix admin sockets to run any BouncerServ command from the shell. And support for external authentication has been merged (right now, PAM and OAuth 2.0 are supported).

That’s all for now! See you next month.