Using Wayland

Wayland is a display server protocol that is intended to replace the X Window system and it is licensed under the MIT license. This recipe will provide an overview of Wayland, including some key differences with the X Window system, and will show how to make use of it in Yocto.

Getting ready

The Wayland protocol follows a client/server model in which clients are the graphical applications requesting the display of pixel buffers on the screen, and the server, or compositor, is the service provider that controls the display of these buffers.

The Wayland compositor can be a Linux display server, an X application, or a special Wayland client. Weston is the reference Wayland compositor in the Wayland project. It is written in C and works with the Linux kernel APIs. It relies on evdev for the handling of input events.

Wayland uses Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) in the Linux kernel and does not need something like an X server. The client renders the window contents to a buffer shared...