NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors

At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.

Austin Shafer and James Jones of the NVIDIA Linux/Unix team presented at XDC 2024 on some of their recent Wayland driver features -- namely explicit sync support -- as well as going on to cover some future NVIDIA Linux driver plans.

They shared NVIDIA has been ramping up their internal Wayland testing and among the future items they plan to pursue are supporting the upstream high dynamic range (HDR) color pipeline user-space API. They are also looking at internal display muxing on Wayland, enabling the FBDEV and modeset kernel module parameter options for their driver by default, and nvidia-settings utility under Wayland being read-only settings.

They have hit some additional pain points in Wayland support that they are exploring.

Those wishing to learn more can see this slide deck and the XDC 2024 video recording below.

NVIDIA's Austin Shafer also presented on Vulkan for Wayland compositors. He encourages OpenGL no longer being the "default" API used for compositor development but Vulkan being a much better fit.

In particular, Vulkan's explicit design makes it much better for Wayland compositors, better multi-device awareness, and other features.

The Vulkan Wayland compositor encouragement slides for those interested via this PDF.