The Linux DMA-BUF protocol for Wayland is widely used these days and supported by multiple compositors for negotiating optimal buffer allocation parameters between clients and compositors. The current fifth version of linux-dmabuf was marked as stable with it working out well and no need for any other changes before removing the “experimental” tag.
The new transient seat protocol for Wayland is for creating short-lived seats for remote users. These transient seats will be automatically removed as soon as the client disconnects. The transient seat protocol is intended for use with Wayland’s virtual input and virtual pointer protocols for remote desktop use.
DMA-BUF being marked as “unstable” for a decade was a fucking joke. It’s a protocol that’s required to get any kind of meaningful hardware accel going, which nearly every app does nowadays. Within Wayland circles, it’s been understood it’s not going to change for years, as doing so would break nearly every single existing app, yet all kinds of bikeshedding prevented it from being moved to stable.
Hopefully this marks a turning point for many other similarly important protocols stuck in unstable/staging hell too, like pointer constraints and text input. If devs can’t rely on basic functionality to be present and it takes more than say three years to commit to it, it’s time to admit that either the process or the protocol is broken.
ION was the only thing supported by hardware manufacturers for many of those years - I’d agree DMA-BUF is the better solution, but switching from ION to DMA-BUF has also broken lots of functionality
It’s good that we can finally use the same protocol from hardware to software