Weston on Android - First light

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:00:18 +0800
Alex Wu <zhiwen.wu at linux.intel.com> wrote:

> 于 2012/4/27 20:56, Pekka Paalanen 写道:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am happy to announce the first step towards a Wayland stack on
> > Android: simple-shm runs with Weston on a Galaxy Nexus!
> >
> > The whole story, a picture, and a video:
> > http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2012/04/first-light-from-weston-on-android.html
> 
> That is so cool.
> Is it possible to make a wayland backend for Android window
> system?

Not without a serious effort in rewriting the relevant Android components.
Android's window system is fairly similar to X in that it has several
concurrent components (threads/processes) that are linked to each other
in complex ways. Unlike Android, X has ICCCM and EWMH docs...
I believe the Android stuff is not designed to be replaced, piecewise or
whole. Then there is also Binder, which is a very different IPC mechanism
to any traditional Unix ones, and Android components seem to use that
practically exclusively.


On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:16:48 +0200
Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> wrote:

> That's severely cool. Awesome job :)

Thanks. :-)


On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:12:35 -0400
Kristian Hoegsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very cool work, congrats Pekka!

Thank you :-)


On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:44:00 -0700 (PDT)
yan.wang at linux.intel.com wrote:

> Very cool. Is it native app? In the future, will it support JAVA
> app?

It is native, but it is not buildable by the NDK. I build it
as part of the system image, so I guess that makes it a
platform development kit (PDK) app.

By Java you probably mean Android Java apps, and I think that
would require implementing the whole Android UI stack on top
of Wayland, pretty much what I answered to Alex Wu.

It is still a long way to support even Wayland GL apps, let's
concentrate on that first. And even before that, I need to finish
the Android backend.


Thanks,
pq