1 What is Wayland? 2 3 Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to 4 its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol. The 5 compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel 6 modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland 7 client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers 8 (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers. 9 10 The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and 11 buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards 12 them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders 13 into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The 14 protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and 15 other interactions that must go through the compositor. However, the 16 protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that 17 makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering 18 themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL. 19 20 The weston compositor is a reference implementation of a wayland 21 compositor and the weston repository also includes a few example 22 clients. 23 24 Building the wayland libraries is fairly simple, aside from libffi, 25 they don't have many dependencies: 26 27 $ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland 28 $ cd wayland 29 $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=PREFIX 30 $ make 31 $ make install 32 33 where PREFIX is where you want to install the libraries. See 34 http://wayland.freedesktop.org for more complete build instructions 35 for wayland, weston, xwayland and various toolkits. 36
