Ubuntu Working On GNOME Wayland Support For The AMD Xilinx Kria KR260

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt who is known for his work on enhancing the upstream GNOME desktop stack to improve the experience for Ubuntu has recently taken up interest in getting the AMD-Xilinx Kria KR260 working with the GNOME Wayland session. The Kria KR260 is for the recently-announced AMD/Xilinx Robotics Starter Kit.

Launched back in May was the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit utilizing the KR26 SoM. This alternative to the likes of the NVIDIA Jetson is designed for machine vision, robotics, and other use-cases while having four Arm Cortex-A53 cores with a Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+, 4GB of RAM, and 512Mbit QSPI flash memory. There are also four Gigabit Ethernet ports and even a SFP+ connector with 10GbE support.

AMD Xilinx Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit

This AMD Xilinx developer board has a DisplayPort 1.2a output and via the Zynq UltraScale+ EV SoC there is Arm Mali 400MP2 graphics available. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the default operating system for the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit and for enhancing that experience this is work in the direction of being able to run the Ubuntu Wayland-based desktop atop it.

Right now the GNOME X.Org session on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS can be used with this board while ideally for future-proofing it and security reasons it's worthwhile being able to run the GNOME Wayland session. Daniel van Vugt has begun plotting the plan for supporting the Xilinx Kria KR260 with Mali on GNOME's Mutter Wayland compositor. Disabling unsupported modifiers, automatic fallbacks to supported visuals, various desktop freezes to be debugged, and other items need to be sorted out to allow this developer board to run the GNOME Wayland session nicely on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

There's still much work to be accomplished, but at least there is a game plan now for getting this Robotics Starter Kit running on the GNOME Wayland session. It may still pan out in time with Xilinx.com still advertising this $349 USD starter kit as having a 20 week lead time for delivery.