3D-Accelerated Remote Wayland Displays Are Being Discussed Again

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 18 December 2016 at 09:18 AM EST. 14 Comments
WAYLAND
The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL.

VirtualGL is one of the open-source projects working on remote Linux display support with the ability to run OpenGL applications with full 3D hardware acceleration via a GLX interposer and a high-speed X proxy. The lead developer of VirtualGL is wanting to go beyond just supporting X11 but also to handling Wayland/Weston.

Toward the beginning of this week he volleyed this mailing list thread that started a discussion among Wayland developers. Of course, the Waltham project by Collabora was quick to be pointed out as a Wayland-style network IPC as well as Weston having an RDP back-end but needing 3D acceleration with the RDP code.

For the VirtualGL developer it's looking like he will either need to write a headless Wayland compositor or modify Weston's RDP back-end to support real hardware acceleration than just using the Pixman renderer. Details on that plus some related work that may happen to benefit RDP/headless with hardware acceleration can be found via this mailing list post by Pekka Paalanen.

It will be interesting to see where this work ends up. As always, when there are any new and exciting patches for Wayland/Weston published, you can expect to read about them on Phoronix.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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