XWayland Gets Initial Support For EGLStreams To Support NVIDIA's Driver

With the NVIDIA proprietary driver continuing to only support EGLStreams for their Wayland support until the new "Unix device memory allocator" project pans out, one of the big limitations has been no XWayland support for running X11 applications. Fortunately, that's now changing.

Besides needing a Wayland compositor patched with EGLStreams support in order to work with the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver, there hasn't been XWayland support with this approach. But Red Hat's Lyude Paul today published initial support for using XWayland with EGLStreams.

Lyude wrote, "Unfortunately, nvidia makes up a huge amount of consumer machine's GPUs so until they get proper wayland support, we have to support this in X." As such, there is these initial patches for decoupling GBM from GLAMOR and then adding a GLAMOR EGL back-end for EGLStreams along the XWayland code-path.

At the moment this allows for X11 drawing on Wayland with NVIDIA/EGLStreams, but no hardware acceleration yet. That hardware acceleration will be possible when server-side GLVND lands, a.k.a. GLXVND. Fortunately, GLXVND should be landing soon.

Long story short this means we should have XWayland support for NVIDIA's binary blob with the X.Org Server 1.20 release. But when that X.Org Server 1.20 release occurs is a tough guess as it's already been more than one year since the xorg-server 1.19 debut and well past the original 1.20 release schedule and the code has yet to hit a feature freeze / branching. It should be at some point in the months ahead but already too late for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and potentially even too late for Fedora 28, but we'll see. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more information on the evolution of these patches and the subsequent benchmarking.