New Progress Being Made On Deep Color Support For GNOME Wayland Sessions

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made.

Ubuntu desktop engineer Daniel van Vugt at Canonical has made some progress in the past week on deep color support for Wayland sessions. Most notably, he figured out the cause of a DisplayLink issue that had been blocking the deep color effort for the past five months. With a DisplayLink external adapter there were issues encountered around display format mismatches, but now that's been sorted out.

With that headache out of the way, Daniel van Vugt has updated the patches to the GNOME Wayland deep color series for opening up the 30-bit color usage rather than 24-bit. This has been successfully tested on the Intel driver among other configurations. Compositing of native Wayland OpenGL clients is slightly more efficient with this deep color support since XR30/AR30 formats are already used when possible but for legacy XWayland clients and shared memory clients where 24-bit color is still being used may see higher memory bandwidth use with the switch to 30-bit.

For now the merge request is still marked as a "draft" while we'll see what else comes up with this work in the near-term and whether the Wayland deep color support will finally be ready for GNOME 43 in the autumn.