OpenWFD: Open-Source WiFi Displays For Linux

David Herrmann, the open-source Linux graphics developer of fame for working to kill CONFIG_VT via work on numerous projects and many other open-source contributions, has started a new open-source project. Herrmann's latest initiative is OpenWFD, an open-source implementation of the WiFi Display Standard / Miracast.

Development on OpenWFD just started less than two weeks ago and there haven't been any public announcements of the work yet, but Anzwix has already latched onto the interesting work. OpenWFD seeks to be an implementation of the WiFi Display Standard and Miracast technologies, which basically are a standard equivalent to "wireless HDMI cables."

So far in its few days of public development, David Herrmann has already introduced a owfd-p2pd user-space daemon for handling the WiFI peer-to-peer support and uses GDHCP from ConnMann to provide DHCP support for exchanging network addresses in an ad-hoc manner. Numerous other early steps have also been tackled.

Miracast is a peer-to-peer screencast standard formed by Wi-Fi Direct. Miracast is supported by many ARM-based mobile platforms and is similar in nature to Google's popular Chromecast HDMI adapter, but doesn't support Miracast itself. Apple also uses its own similar technology for AirPlay mirroring. More details on Miracast can be found from Wikipedia.

Those interested in checking out the current state of the OpenWFD project for open-source WiFi display support on Linux can visit the FreeDesktop.org Git repository.