Surface Suspension Protocol Proposed For Wayland

Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK (formerly D9VK) and related Steam Play / Proton graphics related efforts has submitted a proposal for a Wayland Surface-Suspension protocol.

The proposed "surface-suspension" protocol is about being able to know if/when a surface has been fully occluded/hidden. This is important with some Wayland compositors suspending the client's windows' buffers under such conditions.

With games/applications potentially hanging if the buffers are suspended when hidden from view, the Wayland Surface Suspension protocol can be quite practical. The proposal would allow for providing events when a surface buffer is suspended and then restored. In turn the windowing system integration and graphics APIs can handle these surface suspension events to take proper action. Knowing this information could also allow for possible efficiency gains around memory management and the like when being able to reliably know if a surface's buffer is suspended.

The new Wayland protocol proposal is currently being discussed with various free software developers planning possible patches around it for Vulkan WSI and EGL handling, complementing some early work done by Joshua for Mesa and WLROOTS/Sway supporting of the newly proposed protocol.