Mir Will Support NVIDIA's EGL Streams Approach

For those wondering about the NVIDIA binary driver support for Ubuntu's Mir display server, Mir appears to be planning its own support for using NVIDIA's EGL Streams implementation that has been criticized by Wayland developers while they continue hoping for a new API that's yet to materialize.

Mir has begun refactoring their server platform into rendering and display components. In the comments to that commit they mention the platforms they intend on supporting or have already implemented:

The outputs we currently have, or intend to have are: {kms, x11, hwc, nested, offscreen}

The rendering system we currently have, or intend to have are: { cpu, gbm/mesa, eglstreams/nvidia, ANWB/android }

Basically everything you would expect, including Android graphics driver support given their continuing mobile ambitions. And NVIDIA's EGL Streams implementation is part of that list. Mir isn't limiting itself to just one or two rendering systems given their desire to run it everywhere.

GNOME has begun some basic EGL Stream support in Mutter but other Wayland compositors including Weston and KDE Plasma have been against the EGL Streams approach with only wanting one buffer API to have to deal with in the Wayland space, for which they are focused on Mesa's GBM (Generic Buffer Manager). NVIDIA in step with the open-source community have been working on a new API to address the concerns by all the involved developers, but so far it's yet to materialize and thus is likely months at least from seeing any real support in drivers or compositor implementations. In fact, it's been a while since hearing anything substantive about the new API efforts, but hopefully we'll see more work soon in this direction.