Weston Ships 15.0.2, Fixing the Video Regression 15.0.1 Caused
The second bug-fix release in the Weston 15 line bundles a dozen commits, headlined by a shader repair and a finally-working lua-shell.
Weston 15.0.2 is out, and its headline fix repairs damage the previous release caused. The second bug-fix release in the 15 feature line undoes a shader change from 15.0.1 that had broken YUV video rendering on certain GPU drivers.
Marius Vlad of Collabora announced it on the Wayland developers' mailing list. The release packs roughly a dozen commits, mixing correctness fixes, driver repairs, and small performance bumps. It's the kind of update you'd only be grateful for once a format had quietly stopped working.
"Users of Weston 15.0.1 are encouraged to switch to 15.0.2 given the bug-fixes, and overall performance and functionality improvements."
If you're keeping score, that's 18 patches from seven contributors. Daniel Stone of Red Hat did the most, with six commits aimed mostly at the experimental Vulkan renderer. Robert Mader, also of Red Hat, landed the headline YUV fix plus one more on keyboard focus.
A shader cleanup that went sideways
The core issue began as a legitimate cleanup. 15.0.1 dropped a set of asserts that depended on shader-compiler behavior, which is sound advice since assuming how a driver compiles shaders tends to backfire eventually. But it came with a side effect nobody called for.
YUV is the brightness-plus-color format most video is stored in, and the renderer has to convert it to RGB on the fly. After the cleanup, that content started being treated as an ordinary texture instead of the external texture target Weston expects. On stricter drivers, specifically Imagination PowerVR and Vivante, both common in embedded and mobile chips, the conversion failed. Video stopped rendering.
Mader's patch allows the correct shader variant for the YUV-to-RGB conversion, restoring the external texture path.
It's a small fix for what could have been a show-stopping one. Though it only touches a couple of GPU vendors, that still covers a fair chunk of embedded hardware. It's also a textbook case of why the reference compositor matters, since every fix here ripples across Mesa, AMDGPU, Intel, NVIDIA, and the KMS/DRM code in the kernel. A broken video format isn't just a Weston bug.
The lua-shell finally works
Weston 15.0 also shipped the lua-shell, a shell you can program in Lua rather than rewriting C. The appeal is real: "the flexibility to make your window management completely configurable, without having to maintain whole piles of C," as Vlad put it.
It just couldn't load external modules, which made the shell barely useful past the stock example. Two fixes clear that up. Sjoerd Simons of Intel and freedesktop.org now loads modules into the global namespace, and Leandro Ribeiro of Collabora handles a NULL focus view that used to crash the shell while handing focus back to the main surface.
You can still run the bundled tiling example with weston --shell=lua. Now you can actually build on top of it.
What to know before you update
This work is all bolt-on for a line launched back in February. Weston 15.0 brought the lua-shell, an experimental Vulkan renderer, frame-pacing protocols that smooth media playback, HDR and color-management infrastructure, and a new requirement to build against libdisplay-info. 15.0.2 folds follow-up fixes into those features rather than adding anything new, which is precisely what a point release exists for.
Since February, the 15 line has already been overtaken by the 16 cycle. 16.0 landed mid-year and 16.0.1 by October. So this update mostly serves people still pinned to 15.
One honest caveat: the announcement carries no date stamp, and the GitLab releases page sits behind bot protection, so scraping the exact timestamp takes a bit of digging. The release follows 15.0.1, which landed April 24, 2026. Anyone chasing the precise moment should confirm it against the mailing-list post or the GitLab tag before printing a dateline.
Whether you should bother depends on your stack. If you run Weston 15 on hardware from those GPU vendors, the fix is worth the install. If you've already moved on to 16, the patch is moot.
Head here to the release notes and download.
