The Android Runtime On Chrome OS Makes Use Of Wayland

With Google's Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) it turns out that this technology for letting Android apps run on Chrome OS is making use of the Wayland protocol and could open up other Wayland clients to running on Chrome OS.

Readers in the

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pointed out that the ARC++ runtime makes use of Wayland, per a session description for this month's XDC2016 conference in Helsinki.

David Reveman of Google will be talking about ARC++ and the description reads:

ARC++ provides existing and future Chromebooks with the ability to run applications from the Google Play Store. The performance and seamless integration into ChromeOS achieved by ARC++ is in large part a result of a carefully designed graphics stack. Rendering, compositing and window management has been designed to fit together in a way that makes no compromise on performance or resource usage.

This talk will give an overview of the pieces that make up the ARC++ graphics stack, describe how Wayland is used as a compositor protocol and explain how we achieve the goal of running Android applications on ChromeOS with native graphics performance and window management capabilities expected from an application running on a Chromebook. It will also provide some basic pointers for running Wayland clients on ChromeOS, and future direction.

I haven't been following ARC too closely, but don't believe it's well known they are making use of Wayland. Android or Chrome OS itself otherwise hasn't relied upon Wayland up to this point.

This talk should be interesting and will happen in Helsinki with XDC2016 running from 21 to 23 September.

For those of you who don't recognize the name, David Reveman has long been involved in the open-source graphics scene but there hasn't been much from him in the past few years. Among his past accomplishments was leading the XGL/Compiz work in the early days at Novell, GPU acceleration for Mono's Moonlight, and more during his Novell tenure before joining Google a number of years ago.

Stay tuned for XDC2016 remote coverage on Phoronix later this month.

Read the full article here by Phoronix