On supporting Wayland GL clients and proprietary embedded platforms

How would one start implementing support for graphics hardware accelerated Wayland clients on an embedded platform that only has proprietary drivers?

This is a question I have answered more than once recently. Presumably you already have some ways to implement a Wayland compositor, some APIs you can use to composite and get images on screen. You may have wl_shm based clients already working, and now you want hardware rendered clients to work. Where to start?

Wayland on Android: upgrade to 4.0.4 and new build integration

We at Collabora have been working on a new Android build system integration with autotools projects, still based on Androgenizer (git). Now we have our own repo manifest repository, and a tool called anagrman for managing optional feature packages (aggregates). Wayland on Android is one feature package, and the first to become available. We also upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwhich 4.0.4_r2.1. Instead of a snapshot release, this particular announcement is about live branches.

Wayland on Android snapshot release: input

It is time to announce the android-4.0.1_r1.2-b snapshot release of the Wayland on Android project at Collabora! We give you: input support in Weston and a finger-painting demo!

Collabora will have people at GUADEC demoing this on real devices, though not me personally.

Click to see the video!

Forwarding evdev devices to Android

I'm working on adding input support for Weston's Android backend, and to test a normal keyboard and a mouse, I needed a way to get those as evdev devices on Android. I don't have any Bluetooth devices here, so I started hacking up evdev forwarding from a laptop PC. I could not find much information on anyone doing this before.

Wayland on Android: intermediate report

We at Collabora had an internal meeting, where I presented the Wayland on Android project and its current state. You can find the slides by clicking the picture below.

Note: epdfview may get the colors wrong, at least Evince shows it right.

Some links related to the slides:

• Wayland
• Androgenizer
• Android at Collabora

Weston on Android: desktop-shell

Last week I got weston-desktop-shell working on Android, along with some toytoolkit clients. This means I have Cairo androgenized, and it can even render text. I did have trouble with Cairo's configure script, so the build lacks all thread-safety. For the curious, all sources can be found via my wayland-aggregate. Right now I'm working on Android's libEGL, trying to add Wayland support.

Galaxy Nexus sideways on a table, running Weston and desktop-shell.

Wayland anti-FUD

I was replying to an email, and got side-tracked into writing some Wayland anti-FUD. There are lots of myths about Wayland out there, so I thought to better make it into a blog post.

This post is about the very small overhead of a Wayland (system) compositor, and why Wayland over network will be much better than X-over-ssh.

I predict that on desktops and other systems that may have accounts for more than one person, there will actually be two Wayland compositors stacked. There is a system compositor at the bottom, handling fast user switching, replacing VT switching, etc., and then a session compositor that actually provides the desktop environment. This is not my idea, it has been written in the Wayland FAQ under "Is Wayland replacing the X server?" for a long time.

My point is: Wayland compositors will not make 3D games suck because of compositing. While explaining why, I also continue to explaining why network transparency will not suck either. Now, do not mix up these things, I am not claiming that remoting 3D games over network will magically become feasible.

First light from Weston on Android

A couple of months ago, Collabora assigned me first to research and then make a proof of concept port of Wayland on Android. I had never even seen an Android before. Yesterday, Weston on Android achieved first light!

Galaxy Nexus running Weston and simple-shm.

Improved appearance for the simplest Wayland client

Of the Wayland demo clients in the Weston repository, simple-shm is the simplest. All the related code is in that one file, and it interfaces directly with libwayland. It does not use GL or EGL, so it can be ran on systems where the EGL stack does not support the Wayland platform nor extensions. However, what it renders, is surprising:

The original simple-shm client on a Weston desktop.

What does EGL do in the Wayland stack

Recently I drew some diagrams of how an EGL library relates to the Wayland stack. Here I am presenting the Mesa EGL version of them with the details explained.

Mesa EGL with Wayland, and simplified X as comparison.

Wayland R&D at Collabora

While being contracted by Collabora, I started a Wayland R&D project in October 2011 with the primary goal of getting to know Wayland, and strengthening Wayland expertise in Collabora. During the four months I started the wl_shell_surface protocol for desktops, added screen locking, ported an X screensaver to Wayland with new protocol, and most recently implemented surface transformations in Weston (the reference compositor, originally the wayland-demos compositor). All this sponsored by Collabora.

Nokia N9 Music Player and Album Cover Art

I recently got a Nokia N9 phone. One of the first things I did was copy my music collection into it. Since the player shows also album cover images, if such are stored, I started adding them -- not by embedding them into ID3v2 tags but as separate files, to avoid useless copies of images.

Usually it is as simple as putting a cover.jpg file into a directory, that contains a single album. Sometimes and in some cases, though, that does not work. I found out, that the N9's default music player is supposed to follow Media Art Storage specification. That gave me hints.