Core Wayland window system code and protocol
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Manuel Stoeckl 290ce2a9c1 protocol: elaborate on drm_fourcc.h and wl_shm.format codes
Wayland clients should not assume the format list will not grow, or
assume the format descriptions in the Wayland protocol are complete.
(The latter fact is clear for descriptionless enum entries like
XRGB8888_A8; but, for example, the full XRGB16161616F format
description explicitly requires IEEE 754 binary16 floats instead
of bfloat16 or ARM's alternative half precision variant.)

Signed-off-by: Manuel Stoeckl <code@mstoeckl.com>
2026-02-28 20:17:00 -05:00
.gitlab/issue_templates gitlab: make issue template the default 2023-11-21 15:44:31 +00:00
cursor cursor: Free theme when size check fails to avoid memory leak 2025-08-03 11:36:34 +00:00
doc doc: fix cname-(suffix-)requirements 2026-02-24 13:16:52 +01:00
egl egl: Make wayland-egl symbols check depend on wayland_egl 2025-06-08 17:30:55 +00:00
protocol protocol: elaborate on drm_fourcc.h and wl_shm.format codes 2026-02-28 20:17:00 -05:00
src client: fix crash when creating proxies with no queue 2026-03-01 01:03:37 +00:00
tests tests: Add test for using a proxy with a destroyed queue as a factory 2026-03-01 01:03:37 +00:00
.editorconfig editorconfig: follow wayland-protocols XML style 2026-01-22 11:08:28 +02:00
.git-blame-ignore-revs fix .git-blame-ignore-revs revision 2026-02-02 14:00:28 +01:00
.gitignore build: drop autotools 2021-03-05 09:15:04 +00:00
.gitlab-ci.yml doc: add meson.build for book 2026-02-12 15:17:33 +01:00
.mailmap Add a .mailmap file 2023-03-25 11:17:32 -05:00
.triage-policies.yml Add a triage-policies file for bugbot 2023-07-07 21:18:08 +10:00
CONTRIBUTING.md CONTRIBUTING: fix typo "excercising" 2020-12-17 16:03:14 -05:00
COPYING COPYING: Update to MIT Expat License rather than MIT X License 2015-06-12 15:31:21 -07:00
git-blame-ignore-revs add .git-blame-ignore-revs file 2026-02-02 14:54:52 +02:00
meson.build doc: Refactor the build system for complete build dir docs 2025-11-27 17:39:11 +02:00
meson_options.txt doc: make DocBook validation optional 2026-02-04 15:12:04 +00:00
README.md readme: convert to Markdown 2023-02-13 19:57:15 +01:00
release.sh release.sh: Don't push *all* tags 2023-01-16 10:03:54 +00:00
releasing.txt Add release.sh 2022-07-14 08:04:43 +00:00
wayland-scanner.m4 build: check wayland-scanner version 2020-01-16 17:25:06 +01:00
wayland-scanner.mk Pass input/output files as arguments to wayland-scanner 2017-08-18 15:20:24 +03:00

Wayland

Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.

The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and other interactions that must go through the compositor. However, the protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL.

Building the wayland libraries is fairly simple, aside from libffi, they don't have many dependencies:

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland
$ cd wayland
$ meson build/ --prefix=PREFIX
$ ninja -C build/ install

where PREFIX is where you want to install the libraries.

See https://wayland.freedesktop.org for documentation.