Intel Posts Experimental Patches For Wayland/Weston/Mesa HDR

While NVIDIA has been working on HDR display support for the X.Org Server environment via a new "DeepColor" extension, Intel developers have begun working on High Dynamic Range support for Wayland/Weston and the associated changes needed to Mesa.

Intel's work on HDR display support shouldn't come as too much of a surprise considering all of their other open-source contributions and earlier in 2017 they began with HDR changes for their DRM kernel driver. Now they are onto the user-space plumbing for a HDR Linux desktop.

This current user-space code is considered just proof-of-concept for supporting HDR in Wayland, a Wayland protocol addition for color space information, support in the Weston reference compositor, and the Mesa HDR changes. The HDR changes in Mesa are for EGL changes, exposing the EXT_gl_colorspace extensions, supporting some EGL Wayland EXT_surface extensions, adding VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support to the ANV Vulkan driver, and other alterations.

More technical information on this experimental Mesa/Wayland HDR support can be found via this mailing list post by Intel OTC's Ville Syrjälä.