Wayland is a graphical server protocol which provides a method for window composition managers to communicate directly with video hardware and applications. Wayland allows to run X11 applications through an X server, optionally without root privileges, having compatibility with these.
Mutter is a window composition manager and Wayland composer and is used in Gnome Shell which replaces Metacity.
It can be used as a standalone window manager on desktops like Gnome and the like. It is extensible with plugins and has support for various visual effects.
Mutter will have changes to improve his work at Wayland
For Gnome version 3.34 and as part of its development cycle Mutter includes some changes that serve to automate the launch of XWayland when trying to run an application based on the X11 protocol in a graphical environment based on the Wayland protocol.
The difference with the behavior of Gnome 3.32 and earlier versions is that, Until now, the XWayland component ran continuously and required a pre-release explicit (started when the Gnome session was initialized) that will now run dynamically when the need for X11 support arises.
It is important to remember that to ensure the performance of X11 applications conventional In a Wayland-based environment, the XWayland DDW component is used (X device-dependent), which is developed as part of the main X.Org code base.
In terms of how XWayland works, it resembles Xwin and Xquartz for Win32 and OS X platforms and includes components to run X.Org Server on top of Wayland.
The change made to Mutter will allow the launch of the X server only when necessaryWhich has a positive effect on resource consumption on systems that do not use X11 applications in the Wayland environment (the process with the X server generally takes more than one hundred megabytes of RAM).
Meanwhile Hans de Goede presented two reports listing the problems encountered in Gnome's work with Wayland, what is planned to correct as part of the recently launched initiative to eliminate problems specific to Wayland for Gnome.
Hans received over 40 problem reports and tried to structure them. Many issues are related to keyboard input support and the layout change, as well as drag and drop not always working.
Wayland still has several problems to solve
Besides that por else XWayland does not have normal HiDPI support, mouse cursor hangs for Wayland apps, window minimization is not done with a middle button click in the header, among other issues.
Also the analysis of two problems has been presented separatelys arising from the launch of the games: reduced visible area with a black frame when using full screen mode and poor performance in full screen mode.
On the other hand, a GLX processor based on the EGL software interface has been added to XWayland to access the rendering functions in Wayland.
The changes will be included in the X.Org Server 1.21 release. Using EGL to configure GLX will eliminate the use of the rasterizer swrast software.
The use of swrast resulted in problems launching games in X11 that require the Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) setting, information about which is not provided in llvmpipe.
The proposed change enables GLX client information to be generated about the capabilities of the GL stack based on EGL data, including access to MSAA configurations for games running on XWayland, such as Hearts of Iron IV, Stellaris, and Europa Universalis IV. .
The change will also remove the DRI driver loader functionality from the X server.
Finally Gnome 3.34 is scheduled for release on September 11, 2019.