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Concept
Wayland (protocol)
Summary
Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.
Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a modern, secure, and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software licence.
As part of its efforts, the Wayland project also develops a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.
The Wayland Display Server project was started by Red Hat developer Kristian Høgsberg in 2008.
Beginning around 2010, Linux desktop graphics have moved from having "a pile of rendering interfaces... all talking to the X server, which is at the center of the universe" towards putting the Linux kernel and its components (i.e. Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), Direct Rendering Manager (DRM)) "in the middle", with "window systems like X and Wayland ... off in the corner". This will be "a much-simplified graphics system offering more flexibility and better performance".
Høgsberg could have added an extension to X as many recent projects have done, but preferred to "[push] X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware" for reasons explained in the project's FAQ:
What’s different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango, etc.), and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process. ... [An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this.
Official source
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