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.