wlroots
Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a
Wayland compositor; or about 50,000 lines of
code you were going to write anyway.
- wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input
hardware, including KMS/DRM, libinput, Wayland, X11, and headless backends,
plus any custom backends you choose to write, which can all be created or
destroyed at runtime and used in concert with each other. - wlroots provides unopinionated, mostly standalone implementations of many
Wayland interfaces, both from wayland.xml and various protocol extensions.
We also promote the standardization of portable extensions across
many compositors. - wlroots provides several powerful, standalone, and optional tools that
implement components common to many compositors, such as the arrangement of
outputs in physical space. - wlroots provides an Xwayland abstraction that allows you to have excellent
Xwayland support without worrying about writing your own X11 window manager
on top of writing your compositor. - wlroots provides a renderer abstraction that simple compositors can use to
avoid writing GL code directly, but which steps out of the way when your
needs demand custom rendering code.
wlroots implements a huge variety of Wayland compositor features and implements
them right, so you can focus on the features that make your compositor
unique. By using wlroots, you get high performance, excellent hardware
compatibility, broad support for many wayland interfaces, and comfortable
development tools - or any subset of these features you like, because all of
them work independently of one another and freely compose with anything you want
to implement yourself.
Check out our wiki to
get started with wlroots.
wlroots is developed under the direction of the
sway project. A variety of wrapper libraries
are available for using it with your favorite
programming language.
Building
Install dependencies:
- meson
- wayland
- wayland-protocols
- EGL
- GLESv2
- libdrm
- GBM
- libinput
- xkbcommon
- udev
- pixman
- systemd (optional, for logind support)
- elogind (optional, for logind support on systems without systemd)
- libcap (optional, for capability support)
If you choose to enable X11 support:
- xcb
- xcb-composite
- xcb-xfixes
- xcb-xinput
- xcb-image
- xcb-render
- x11-xcb
- xcb-errors (optional, for improved error reporting)
- x11-icccm (optional, for improved Xwayland introspection)
Run these commands:
meson build
ninja -C build
Install like so:
sudo ninja -C build install
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md.