Steelrat goes Wayland

Summer vacations came and went, with blog not being updated for a while, but rest assured: Steelrat is progressing nicely :-)

We are moving from the venerable X11 based graphics stack to a cutting-edge and more lightweight system. Our tests indicated that all our application UIs have radically better performance when X11 is eliminated and Steelrat UX layer is run on top of Wayland. Latest MeeGo compliance drafts do not appear to require X.org as a mandatory component any more, opening the door to higher performance while still staying compliant.

As of now, Steelrat has its own compositor and window manager, which support both Wayland and X11 as plugins, without having an effect on the actual Qt applications. This is achieved with the use of QPA - Qt Platform Abstraction. Wayland is used natively (EGL/GLESv2, with no libGL needed). Multiprocess support works, and windowing is done in compositor.

For Qt version, we are currently using Qt 4.8 snapshot with Qt Lighthouse and Qt Quick 2.0, but as the next target we're making the stack work with the latest Qt 5 development snapshots as well (We're almost there already!).

With the legacy-free software stack, our application UIs had quite a consistent 60fps performance on a commodity tablet with a typical screen resolution. Same hardware was struggling with less than 20fps with exactly the same applications running on top of X.org.