Weston 16.0 released with major advances in HDR, color management, and Wayland protocol support.
After about five months of development, the Weston project has officially released Weston 16.0, the reference Wayland compositor. This version brings important improvements that will help desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, and Enlightenment achieve better and more complete Wayland support. It’s also great news for embedded and consumer device developers working on in-car infotainment systems, smart TVs, smartphones, and more.
Weston continues to serve as a high-quality reference implementation and a solid foundation for building modern display servers. The code remains available under the MIT license.
Let’s take a quick look at the key highlights.
Key Highlights in Weston 16.0
- Enhanced Debugging with Perfetto: Added support for debug annotations when using the Perfetto profiler. This makes it easier to identify rendering performance bottlenecks and visualize execution times of various operations.
- Continued HDR and Color Management Progress: Significant work on HDR support and color management using the Wayland color-representation protocol. This includes better handling in the DRM backend and various color transform improvements.
- New Shader for Layer Blending: A new shader has been added to the GL renderer for better layer blending.
- Compressed YUV Pixel Formats: Support for compressed YUV formats has been added, which should benefit video playback and media-heavy applications.
- Grayscale Output Effect: New support for a grayscale output effect in the compositor.
- Wayland Alpha-Modifier Protocol: Full support for the alpha-modifier protocol. Clients can now dynamically change surface transparency, and the compositor can offload these operations efficiently to the hardware (e.g., via KMS).
- Improved DRM Backend Features:
- Support for the
background colorparameter on display controllers that allow it. blend modefor hardware-accelerated alpha blending of layers.color formatselection (RGB, YUV) for monitor output.- libweston API Enhancements: New API to get a list of touch devices.
- Cleanup and Deprecations: Removed duplicate or outdated functionality including the screenshooter, VA-API recording backend, screenshare frontend, and fullscreen-shell. Several components like non-atomic KMS, xdg-shell-v6, pipewire, and remoting plugins have been deprecated or removed to streamline the codebase.
Additionally, the Vulkan renderer received multiple bug fixes, explicit synchronization support with the DRM backend, and improvements for non-axis-aligned rotations.
Download Weston 16.0
You can grab the source from the official release:
- Tarball: weston-16.0.0.tar.xz
- Checksums and signature are available on the release page.
Build instructions and full details are in the repository.
If you are using Arch Linux, you can install it using the following commands:
pacman -S weston
As of publishing this , its yet to arrive in extra repo in Arch, should arrive within a few days from now.
Wrapping up
Weston 16.0 is another solid step toward a more mature Wayland ecosystem. These updates push Wayland forward, especially in modern display features like HDR and efficient hardware offloading. For desktop users, this means smoother integration in major environments and better performance. For developers and embedded projects, Weston remains an excellent starting point for building reliable, performant compositors.
Cheers.
