Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans for Wayland and Xorg server

Hi everyone, I’m part of the Engineering and Product group focused on graphical display and GPUs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and I want to communicate a product and engineering decision we’ve recently made. I want to provide you with the context, and explain the efforts we made in coming to this decision.

The transition from the now 30+ year old X Window System to the newer Wayland-based stack has been happening for the past 15 or so years, and Red Hat has been involved from the start. Over time, it became clear that the X11 protocol and the Xorg server had fundamental issues that needed to be addressed, and Wayland was the solution. Today, Wayland has been recognized as the de-facto windowing and display infrastructure solution. 

Through this transition, Red Hat has been supporting both the X.org and Wayland stacks. This splits the time we and the upstream community have available to support new features, and for fixing bugs. 

That being said, the community has been building new features and addressing gaps in Wayland, while new development in the Xorg server and X11 infrastructure have been winding down. While it is great that Wayland has been greatly enhanced, it does mean there’s an increased maintenance burden in both stacks, with lots of new work to maintain in Wayland and lots of older, legacy work to maintain in X.org. This has become a difficult situation to sustain. 

As Wayland has advanced and become more capable, we’ve worked upstream and internally with multiple hardware vendors, software vendors, customers, the visual effects (VFX) industry and upstream projects to understand and develop the necessary projects to close the feature gap and even expand on the Wayland stack. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done, this includes efforts such as:

• Leading parts of the effort to support High Dynamic Range (HDR)/color management 
• Leading Xwayland as the cornerstone for backwards compatibility with X11 clients
• Developing infrastructure to support modern remote desktop solutions
• Review and development for explicit sync support in the Wayland protocol and relevant projects
• Created Libei to provide a solution for input emulation and capture
• Co-led the Wakefield initiative to make OpenJDK work with (X)Wayland
• And dozens of other initiatives from the past and newer ones that are coming in the near future 

We want to recognize the significant effort all these organizations and individuals have made, especially the rest of the upstream community, without whom this project would never be so mature. This effort gave us the confidence to first make Wayland default for most use cases in RHEL 8, followed up with the deprecating of Xorg server in RHEL 9, with the intention of its removal in a future release. Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.

With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.

While we recognize the energy behind some distributions and Fedora spins moving towards a similar future, this decision is limited to RHEL 10—we recognize other Linux distributions have different needs and decision structures, and additionally we are not aware of plans for similar efforts in Fedora, nor are we involved in similar efforts besides sharing our knowledge.

We have been working on gathering feedback, but we know we can’t reach out to everyone directly. If you have thoughts or questions about this, we invite you to join the discussion we’ve set up in the customer portal. 

This decision will allow us to focus our efforts starting from RHEL 10 solely on a modern stack and ecosystem. This means we will be able to tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on. We are confident that Wayland will provide a solid platform and we’re excited to work with the community and all of our partners and customers on building the future for Linux.