The codebase for XWayland, the DDX (Device-Dependent X) component that runs the X.Org Server to run X11 applications in Wayland-based environments, has received changes to enable hardware-accelerated rendering on systems with proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers.
Judging by the tests conducted by the developers, after the inclusion of these patches, the performance of OpenGL and Vulkan in X applications launched using XWayland is almost no different from running under a regular X server. Changes prepared by an NVIDIA employee. In the NVIDIA driver itself, support for the components required to use acceleration in Xwayland will appear in one of the next releases, it is supposed to be in the 470.x branch.
Additionally, there are several other developments related to the Linux graphics stack:
- Wayland developers plan to rename the master branch in all their repositories from "master" to "main", as the word "master" is considered politically incorrect lately, reminiscent of slavery and is perceived as offensive by some community members. In turn, the freedesktop.org community has decided to use the 'main' repository instead of 'master' by default for new projects.
Interestingly, there were also opponents of this idea. In particular, Jan Engelhardt, maintainer of more than 500 openSUSE packages, called the GitHub and SFC arguments for replacing "master" with "main" as hypocrisy and double standards. He suggested leaving things as they are and focusing on continuing development rather than making a mess with name changes. According to Jan, for those who can't put up with the term "master", you can simply ensure that two branches with identical commit states are running, and not break the established way.
- The lavapipe Mesa driver, designed for software rendering and using LLVM for code generation, supports the Vulkan 1.1 graphics API and certain features from the Vulkan 1.2 specification (previously only OpenGL was fully supported in lavapipe). It is noted that the driver successfully passes all tests covering the new features of Vulkan 1.1, but so far fails the same tests for Vulkan 1.0, which prevents its official certification for Vulkan support.
- The Vgpu_unlock toolkit has been published, which allows you to activate vGPU support on some NVIDIA Geforce and Quadro consumer video cards that do not officially support vGPU, but are based on the same chip as more expensive Tesla cards (virtual GPU functionality is limited by software).
- An initial implementation of a new open-source PanVk driver has been presented, providing support for the Vulkan graphics API for ARM Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs. PanVk is developed by Collabora employees and is positioned as a continuation of the development of the Panfrost project, which provides support for OpenGL.
- The release of the xf86-input-libinput 1.0.0 driver has been published, providing a binding over Libinput, a unified stack for working with input devices. In X server-based environments, the xf86-input-libinput driver can be used instead of the separate evdev and synaptics drivers. The key change in version 1.0.0 is the switch to the MIT license.
Source: opennet.ru