Qt-Lighthouse - Wayland and Qt-Compositor. A gentle introduction

Qt-Lighthouse is the Window System Agnostic port of Qt. This means that Qt doesn't know what windowing system it runs on, but pushes this logic into plugins. In practical terms, this means that libQtGui will not link against xlib or any xcb libraries. It is the plugins that link against the window system client libraries. This has several advantages, including having a toolkit library which doesn't enforce applications to link against the underlying windowing system.

Also one of the key aspects of Qt-Lighthouse is that there will be no performance regressions to the Qt-Native platform ports. In fact it will be much easier to specialise Qt to take advantages of the underlying platform that could give a performance increase compared to today’s Qt-Versions.

Wayland is the window system communication protocol that is hoped to some day replace today’s X11 stack. The protocol is developed independently of Qt. In Wayland, the server side of the protocol is referred to as the compositor.

The Qt-Compositor project has as a goal to make it as easy as possible for developers to create a Wayland compositor that is tailor made for a specific purpose/form factor. Also by using Qt it makes it possible to use new technology as the qml scenegraph in the compositor.

This talk will give an introduction to the underlying technologies and why they are relevant for MeeGo. It will also show how to create new Wayland compositors using Qt-Compositor.