Fedora 25's Hybrid Graphics Improvements, To Support NVIDIA Wayland EGLStreams

When Fedora 25 ships in (hopefully) two weeks it will contain much better support for hybrid graphics / Optimus systems thanks to improvements led by Red Hat.

Christian Schaller of Red Hat has written a lengthy blog post today about the hybrid graphics improvements to be showcased in Fedora Workstation 25. Some of the work includes the ongoing DRI_PRIME improvements, libglvnd as the GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library, MST support in Nouveau, xf86-video-modesetting / PRIME fixes/improvements, the GNOME option for being able to launch applications from the alternative GPU, and also a third-party repository packaging the NVIDIA proprietary driver to play nicely with F25.

Schaller also pointed out that they are working on patches so Fedora Workstation 25 with GNOME Wayland can run on the NVIDIA proprietary driver's EGLStreams implementation over GBM. He wrote, "Fifth step has been Jonas Ådahls work on enabling the binary NVidia driver for Wayland. He has put together a set of patches to be able to support NVidias EGLStreams interface, which means that starting from Fedora Workstation 25 you will be able to use Wayland also with NVidias binary driver. You can see his work in progress patches here." Somehow I hadn't noticed that happening before, but is interesting to see, at least until NVIDIA and the open-source community come up with their new Unix device memory API.

The GNOME Mutter on Wayland support making use of EGLStreams can be found on GitHub.

Read Christian's blog post about these Fedora 25 hybrid graphics improvements here. Thanks to Red Hat's upstream work, this code will end up being found in other Linux distributions in the months ahead.

If you do have a Optimus / multi-GPU system, this Thursday is a F25 test day for relevant systems if you want to help testing out the near-final Fedora Workstation 25 state.