NVIDIA Publishes Patches For Its Driver To Work With Wayland's Weston

Following NVIDIA publishing a new Linux driver that supports Wayland and Mir alongside X11, a NVIDIA engineer followed through and posted patches of the EGL support changes needed by Wayland's Weston compositor to support the new driver.

NVIDIA's Miguel Angel Vico posted the patches today that in turn allow the Wayland Weston compositor to run with NVIDIA's new 364 Linux driver series. He explained of the changes needed to support NVIDIA's binary driver on Wayland:

EGLDevice provides means to enumerate native devices, and then create an EGL display connection from them.

Similarly, EGLOutput will provide means to access different portions of display control hardware associated with an EGLDevice.

For instance, EGLOutputLayer represents a portion of display control hardware that accepts an image as input and processes it for presentation on a display device.

EGLStream implements a mechanism to communicate frame producers and frame consumers. By attaching an EGLOutputLayer consumer to a stream, a producer will be able to present frames on a display device.

Thus, a compositor could produce frames and feed them to an EGLOutputLayer through an EGLStream for presentation on a display device.

In a similar way, by attaching a GLTexture consumer to a stream, a producer (wayland client) could feed frames to a texture, which in turn can be used by a compositor to prepare the final frame to be presented.

Whenever EGL_EXT_device_drm extension is present, EGLDevice can be used to enumerate and access DRM KMS devices, and EGLOutputLayer to enumerate and access DRM KMS crtcs and planes.

By using EGLStreams and attaching an EGLOutputLayer consumer (representing a DRM KMS crtc or plane) to it, compositor-drm can produce final composition frames and present them on a DRM device.

More details can be found via this patch series.