A Wayland Developer Shares His Concerns About NVIDIA's EGLStreams Proposal

Here is an elegant explanation by an upstream Wayland developer about what the consensus outside of NVIDIA mostly comes down to in the EGLStreams vs. GBM debate that's been occupying Wayland stakeholders the past month.

There's no end in sight over the discussion of GBM (with the current approach of Wayland compositors) versus EGLStreams (the approach sought after by NVIDIA for their proprietary Linux driver). If you haven't been following it closely, here's a short summary about what Wayland/open-source developers are feeling, at least according to one. I received this in an email from a verified upstream developer who wishes to remain anonymous:

In essence, current Wayland developers are likely to be strongly opposed to everything related to EGLStreams because the premise for it makes zero sense and does nothing more than let Nvidia have their own API which everyone else then has to implement on top of GBM. One could say that this is something like the userspace equivalent of their kernel module, except they're now claiming that this approach is what all vendors should be using instead of what's currently being used, creating more work for everyone with no real benefits.

It's a bit of a delicate situation since Nvidia could just decide to do EGLStreams regardless of what the community wants because they know everyone would have to support it in order to keep up with user demands: they have very popular hardware and a significant marketshare for the desktop Linux world.

Hopefully the NVIDIA and Wayland developers will be able to reach an agreement soon that's beneficial to both sides.