GNOME Lands Mainline NVIDIA Wayland Support Using EGLStreams

While waiting for a new API that can succeed GBM and is agreed upon by both NVIDIA and the open-source community, GNOME developers have gone ahead and merged support for using EGLStreams into their Mutter compositor so that the current proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver will work with GNOME on Wayland.

Red Hat for Fedora 25 had come up with GNOME patches to support NVIDIA's EGLStreams implementation for Wayland and that work has now been mainlined for the GNOME 3.24 development cycle.

Jonas Ådahl pushed many commits this morning for being able to support EGLStreams while retaining the GBM API compatibility.

This bug report has been tracking EGLDevice/EGLStreams support for GNOME to support the NVIDIA binary driver on Wayland. So now with the latest Git code, it should be possible in conjunction with relatively new NVIDIA 370/375 series drivers.

This support is obviously limited to GNOME on Wayland. NVIDIA's patches for supporting EGLStreams with the Weston compositor haven't been accepted upstream. KDE developers have also said they don't intend to support EGLStreams / no more than one API for their Wayland compositor. Work on the new device memory allocation API by NVIDIA and the community continues, but don't expect any big changes in the near-term.