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+# Architecture
+
+This document describes the high-level design of wlroots. wlroots is modular:
+each module can be used mostly independently from the rest of wlroots. For
+instance, some wlroots-based compositors only use its backends, some only use
+its protocol implementations.
+
+## Backends
+
+Backends are responsible for exposing input devices and output devices.
+wlroots provides DRM and libinput backends to directly drive physical
+devices, Wayland and X11 backends to run nested inside another compositor,
+and a headless backend. A special "multi" backend is used to combine together
+multiple backends, for instance DRM and libinput. Compositors can also
+implement their own custom backends if they have special needs.
+
+Input devices such as pointers, keyboards, touch screens, tablets, switches
+are supported. They emit input events (e.g. a keyboard key is pressed) which
+compositors can handle and forward to Wayland clients.
+
+Output devices are tasked with presenting buffers to the user. They also
+provide feedback, for instance presentation timestamps. Some backends support
+more advanced functionality, such as displaying multiple buffers (e.g. for the
+cursor image) or basic 2D transformations (e.g. rotation, clipping, scaling).
+
+## Renderers
+
+Renderers provide utilities to import buffers submitted by Wayland clients,
+and a basic 2D drawing API suitable for simple compositors. wlroots provides
+renderer implementations based on OpenGL ES 2, Vulkan and Pixman. Just like
+backends, compositors can implement their own renderers, or use the graphics
+APIs directly.
+
+To draw an image onto a buffer, compositors will first need to create a
+texture, representing a source of pixels the renderer can sample from. This can
+be done either by uploading pixels from CPU memory, or by importing already
+existing GPU memory via DMA-BUFs. Compositors can then create a render pass
+and submit drawing operations. Once they are done drawing, compositors can
+submit the rendered buffer to an output.
+
+## Protocol implementations
+
+A number of Wayland interface implementations are provided.
+
+### Plumbing protocols
+
+wlroots ships unopinionated implementations of core plumbing interfaces, for
+instance:
+
+- `wl_compositor` and `wl_surface`
+- `wl_seat` and all input-related interfaces
+- Buffer factories such as `wl_shm` and linux-dmabuf
+- Additional protocols such as viewporter and presentation-time
+
+### Shells
+
+Shells give a meaning to surfaces. There are many kinds of surfaces:
+application windows, tooltips, right-click menus, desktop panels, wallpapers,
+lock screens, on-screen keyboards, and so on. Each of these use-cases is
+fulfilled with a shell. wlroots supports xdg-shell for regular windows and
+popups, Xwayland for interoperability with X11 applications, layer-shell for
+desktop UI elements, and more.
+
+### Other protocols
+
+Many other protocol implementations are included, for instance:
+
+- xdg-activation for raising application windows
+- idle-inhibit for preventing the screen from blanking when the user is
+  watching a video
+- ext-idle-notify for notifying when the user is idle
+
+## Helpers
+
+wlroots provides additional helpers which can make it easier for compositors to
+tie everything together:
+
+- `wlr_output_layout` organises output devices in the physical space
+- `wlr_cursor` stores the current position and image of the cursor
+- `wlr_scene` provides a declarative way to display surfaces
+
+## tinywl
+
+tinywl is a minimal wlroots compositor. It implements basic stacking window
+management and only supports xdg-shell. It's extensively commented and is a
+good learning resource for developers new to wlroots.