Developing Wayland Color Management and High Dynamic Range

(This post was first published with Collabora on Nov 19, 2020.) (Fixed a broken link on Jan 28, 2021.)

Wayland (the protocol and architecture) is still lacking proper consideration for color management. Wayland also lacks support for high dynamic range (HDR) imagery which has been around in movie and broadcasting industry for a while now (e.g. Netflix HDR UI).

While there are well established tools and workflows for how to do color management on X11, even X11 has not gained support for HDR. There were plans for it (Alex Goins, DeepColor Visuals), but as far as I know nothing really materialized from them.  Right now, the only way to watch HDR content on a HDR monitor in Linux is to use the DRM KMS API directly, in other words, not use any window system, which means not using any desktop environment. Kodi is one of the very few applications that can do this at all.

This is a story about starting the efforts to fix the situation on Wayland.

Waltham: a generic Wayland-style IPC over network

I have recently been occupied with a new project (and being with a cold all this week), so I have not been much present in the Wayland community. Now I can finally say what I and Emilio have been up to: Waltham! For more information, please see our annoucement.

Wayland protocol design: object lifespan

Now that we have a few years of experience with the Wayland protocol, I thought I would put some of my observations in writing. This, what will hopefully become a series rather than just one post, considers how to design Wayland protocol extensions the right way.

This first post considers protocol object lifespan and the related races between the compositor/server and the client. I assume that the reader is already aware of the Wayland protocol basics. If not, I suggest reading Chapter 4. Wayland Protocol and Model of Operation.