NVIDIA To Meet With Wayland, Linux Kernel Developers To Discuss GBM vs. Streams

It doesn't look like the NVIDIA Wayland support will be worked out in the immediate future for having an upstream approach that's agreed upon by all developers. However, in September the various stakeholders will meet in person.

NVIDIA's Wayland support plans have long centered around EGLStreams and that goes against the design by current Wayland compositors of making use of GBM. When NVIDIA added support to their proprietary driver earlier this year for their EGLStreams driver approach, it set off a lot of controversy in the open-source Wayland camp.

If you somehow missed the many Phoronix articles about this topic, read A Wayland Developer Shares His Concerns About NVIDIA's EGLStreams Proposal and Streams vs. GBM: The Fight Continues Over NVIDIA's Proposed Wayland Route.

The discussion has been rather quiet the past few weeks with being in the middle of summer, but it looks like developers on both sides have now agreed to meet at this year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) to debate the matter further. On the mailing list this week James Jones at NVIDIA confirmed they'll participate in XDC 2016, which is taking place in September in Helsinki. NVIDIA hopes to see some Chrome OS and Android developers also participate in this discussion.

So hopefully that event will be fruitful and they'll be able to come to a consensus so there's a proper solution for better Wayland support by all drivers. Stay tuned.