With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path.

Erico Nunes of Red Hat led the work on this Vulkan renderer for Weston that was based on the existing OpenGL renderer. This renderer targets the basic Vulkan 1.0 specification so that it can work on as many Vulkan implementations as possible. The renderer was merged a few months back and will be part of the upcoming Weston 15.0 release.

Erico Nunes presented at the recent XDC2025 conference in Vienna around the state of this Vulkan renderer. Still to implement moving forward though is color management support, YUV formats, and other features. The use-cases in mind for this Vulkan renderer are for Vulkan-only platforms (no legacy OpenGL), development/testing of Vulkan drivers, Vulkan driver continuous integration (CI), and possible embeddded/kiosk purposes. It’s also possible the Vulkan renderer has less overhead than the OpenGL renderer but not yet fully proven/quantified.

Those wanting to learn more can see Nunes’ XDC2025 presentation embedded above along with the slide deck.