Hi!

After months of bikeshedding finishing touches we’ve finally merged ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 in wayland-protocols! These two new protocols supersede the old wlr-screencopy-v1 protocol. They unlock some nice features such as toplevel and cursor capture, as well as improved damage tracking. Thanks a lot to Andri Yngvason! He’s written a blog post about the new protocols with more details. The wlroots MR doesn’t have toplevel capture implemented yet, but that’s next on the TODO list.

In other Wayland news, we’ve merged full support for explicit synchronization in wlroots. This generally results in a better system architecture than implicit synchronization, reduces over-synchronization for complicated pipelines, and makes wlroots work correctly with drivers lacking implicit synchronization support (e.g. NVIDIA).

Alexander has implemented automatic X11 surface restacking in wlroots’ scene-graph. That way, all scene-graph compositors get proper X11 stack handling for free (Sway’s implementation was buggy). This should fix issues where the X11 server and the compositor don’t have the same idea of the relative ordering of surfaces, resulting in clicks going “through” windows or reaching invisible windows.

Ricardo Steijn has contributed Sway support for tearing-control-v1. This allows users to opt-in to immediate page-flips which don’t wait for the vertical sync point (VSync) to program new frames into the hardware. For tearing to be enabled, two conditions need to be fulfilled: tearing needs to be enabled per-output via the output allow_tearing command, and tearing needs to be enabled per-application either via the tearing-control-v1 Wayland protocol or manually via the window allow_tearing command. I’ve also pushed kernel patches from André Almeida and me to fix a few bugs around tearing page-flips with the atomic KMS API, so once these land forcing the legacy KMS API shouldn’t be necessary anymore.

drm_info v2.7.0 has been released with a few new features and cleanups. Support for DRM_CLIENT_CAP_CURSOR_PLANE_HOTSPOT and DRM_CAP_ATOMIC_ASYNC_PAGE_FLIP has been added, and a new flag has been introduced to display information from a JSON dump.

Last, I’ve released a new version of go-maildir with a brand new API. Instead of referring to messages by their Maildir key and phishing back their full filename on each operation, the API exposes a Message type. It should be much nicer to use than the previous one.

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