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NVIDIA Developer Posts Auto PRIME Detection, Mesa USB Loader Support

NVIDIA Linux developer Thierry Reding has posted some Mesa patches this Christmas weekend.

Reding started with a Mesa loader change to add support for USB devices. He explained with the patch, "Allow USB devices to be used as output slaves for PRIME. Note that this currently doesn't work on the X.Org server's built-in modesetting driver because it requires glamor in order to expose the necessary capabilities through RandR. It should be possible to use this in order to accelerate Wayland clients on the GPU, though it's questionable how useful that is without having a compositor that gets accelerated."

Then related to the PRIME work was this patch for automatic PRIME detection in the Mesa loader code. He explained there, "If a device doesn't support rendering and support for PRIME isn't enabled via the DRI_PRIME environment variable or dri.conf, attempt to find a render node which can be used to offload rendering. Along with platform and host1x bus support in the loader, this is the final piece of the puzzle to automatically allow split scanout/render devices to work with Wayland compositors and the X.Org server. Note that this requires that the Wayland compositor and X.Org server are accelerated with a DRI driver to make sure that the default file descriptor is properly set up."