Raspberry Pi Is Running Well On Wayland/Weston

The low-cost low-end Raspberry Pi ARM development boards are running quite happily now with Wayland and using its Weston compositor. The performance is better than with an X.Org Server and Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton has called it the future of Linux desktop graphics.

Wayland's Weston on the Raspberry Pi is not particularly new. I first was writing about activity concerning "the Pi" on Wayland going back to last year. The Raspberry Pi back-end for Weston was merged in Wayland/Weston 1.1 so that the low-cost ARM board would work with the compositor.

Since that point there's been a new Raspberry Pi renderer and other changes. It was also announced that eventually Wayland would replace an X.Org Server on the Raspberry Pi in the name of better performance.

At this week's LinuxCon event in New Orleans, the Raspberry Pi Foundation Founder & Executive Director, Eben Upton, was talking about and demonstrating Wayland on the Raspberry Pi. Eben called Wayland/Weston "the future of Linux desktop graphics" and showed it successfully running from the ARMv6 hardware during his presentation.

In the next few weeks the foundation is expected to release a preview of the Raspberry Pi software with Wayland while it will likely be shipping in a production capacity on new boards before the year is out. The Raspberry Pi Wayland development work was done in cooperation with Collabora.