Radeon EGL Patches For Mesa, Wayland

Yesterday we reported on the state of Wayland with the project's founder, Kristian Høgsberg, showing the initial GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit running under this interesting display server. Besides the lack of tool-kits being fully ported over to run under Wayland, another stumbling block for advancing Wayland's development and usage has been the relatively high barrier to entry for simply getting Wayland to run. Fortunately, that barrier is slowly being lowered.

Back in 2008 when we first reported on Wayland, getting Wayland running required running Kristian's own branches of the Linux kernel for kernel mode-setting, Mesa for various EGL extensions, libdrm, and then Eagle, which was a short-lived EGL project of Kristian's but is no longer needed. Over the past two years much of the needed code to run Wayland has been merged into the mainline code-bases of the respective projects, but the last area where you still need to check-out separate code is with Mesa.

Wayland currently depends upon some extensions that are not yet supported in mainline Mesa like EGL_MESA_no_surface and the GL_OES_EGL_image extension. In Kristian's branch he has just focused upon providing initial support for Intel GMA graphics hardware, but now an independent developer has written a set of patches that provide the Mesa support necessary to run Wayland on ATI Radeon graphics hardware.

For the Radeon Mesa driver these patches implement the EGL_MESA_no_surface extension, starts to add the R600 PCI IDs to the EGL DRI2 driver, adds a __DRI2__FLUSH stub function, implements __DRI_IMAGE and EGL_MESA_image_drm, and lastly offers up GL_OES_EGL_image. This is all for the classic Radeon Mesa DRI driver and not for the newer Gallium3D architecture.

Eventually the Radeon support patches plus Kristian's branched work will be merged into mainline Mesa, which will make it easier and quicker for many people to begin running Wayland assuming you are also running with a kernel mode-setting driver -- another Wayland requirement. This is good as Ubuntu developers are also wanting to make it easier to setup Wayland.

The discussion surrounding these Radeon DRI patches can currently be found on the Wayland mailing list while soon the discussion will likely move to the Mesa development list.