Weston 16: HDR-ready, improved debugging, and DRM backend features
-->
-->
-->
About
Who we are
Our expertise
Our work
Open Source
Our ecosystem
Services
Guide
Train
Build
Integrate
Optimize
Maintain
Industries
Automotive
Digital TV
Silicon
OEM
VR/AR
News & Blog
Careers
Contact
About
Services
Industries
News & Blog
Careers
Contact
-->
+44 (0)1223 362967
+1 514 667 2499
contact@collabora.com
-->
Home "
News & Blog "<br>News & Events "
-->
Home<br>News & Blog<br>News
Weston 16: HDR-ready, improved debugging, and DRM backend features
-->
16/07/2026<br>-->
Posted on 16/07/2026 by Marius Vlad
-->
Weston 16: HDR-ready, improved debugging, and DRM backend features
Posted on 16/07/2026 by Marius Vlad<br>--><br>Marius Vlad<br>July 16, 2026
Share this post:
-->
Reading time:
Earlier this week, Weston 16.0 was released. It brought many improvements, expanding and refining features introduced in Weston 15.
Highlights
HDR and color management
Since the previous release, we have implemented more color management and HDR support features. This includes better performance, more test coverage, and support for many new use cases. Now it's finally possible to turn HDR mode on. HDR support remains experimental due to the lack of tone mapping, and we need more experience with picture quality.
We have added interoperability between parametric and ICC profiles. This is essential for fully supporting the color-management protocol and enabling a wide range of color-aware applications. Displays that use ICC profiles can now work with HDR clients, and clients using ICC profiles can be displayed on HDR displays.
For now only colorimetric rendering intents are fully supported in transformations that involve parametric image descriptions. We are working to add a tone and color gamut mapping for perceptual and saturation rendering intents.
We changed Weston's default sRGB profile from ICC to parametric, making surfaces from color-unaware clients use the parametric image description. ICC profiles can still be set on surfaces through the color-management protocol and configured as the output profile in weston.ini.
HDR displays are automatically set up to use a parametric image description. With this change, enabling HDR displays and displaying HDR content should be simple by configuring just colorimetry-mode and eotf-mode for the output.
In Weston's GL-renderer, we have added support for in-shader blending. This is useful for saving bandwidth and memory when color-management is enabled. Also, it allows us to support color-management on more devices.
Another useful addition is support for the newest kernel Mode Setting (KMS) uAPI to offload per-plane color transformations. Weston is now able to offload pre-blend color transformations using this. A new KMS uAPI to offload post-blend color transformations is currently a work-in-progress, and we are already experimenting with that in Weston.
Perfetto debug annotations
This Weston release builds on top of the previously added Perfetto instrumentation, further expanding the debug information you can get out of Weston. You can now see all the GL-renderer optimizations, buffer information, and input events on the ingress side (from libinput), and equality on the egress side, when input events are being delivered to Wayland clients.
Example of Perfetto right after opening the trace file, riddled with debug annotations:
Example of Perfetto tracking a pointer motion event:
Example of Perfetto showing GL debug annotations:
Further work is now in progress to improve debugging on the native DRM backend, and expand additional debug annotations at call sites where it makes sense to have them.
Lots of new features and optimizations for the DRM backend
DRM properties support
This release adds support for two new DRM properties BACKGROUND_COLOR, a CRTC property, and COLOR_FORMAT, a DRM connector property.
While Weston gained the ability to offload a solid background color with Weston 15, we couldn't do the same with arbitrary colors. This new CRTC background color property rectifies that, allowing us to now offload a custom solid background color using KMS.
The other DRM property gives users the possibility to choose between saving bandwidth or preserving fidelity. For instance, for better bandwidth usage, one would set up the same color-format for a particular connector as the content, while for preserving fidelity you'd stick to non-sampled RGB. By default Weston would set this property to AUTO, letting the driver pick whatever it decides as being default. Depending on the hardware, possible other options are YUV 4:2:2, YUV 4:4:4, YUV 4:2:0, and of course, RGB.
With this new release the DRM backend can now set underscan properties, which gives users the possibility to tweak out Weston's output edges in order to compensate for display overscan - a case where the frame buffer content is spilled off the edges of the display, a handy tweak which can be used...