NVIDIA Driver Soon Likely To Support EGL, Mir

With NVIDIA entering the GPU IP licensing business, the need to support EGL by their binary display driver -- and with that the Ubuntu Mir display server and Wayland -- has become more pressing.

While there hasn't been any official communication out of NVIDIA yet, it's likely that their binary display driver will soon be bearing EGL support to complement their GLX windowing system support. The EGL interface is for sitting between OpenGL and the windowing system. EGL is used by Google's Android operating system for mobile devices. Beyond that, both the Mir Display Server and Wayland/Weston are using EGL rather than the GLX windowing system API.

With NVIDIA entering the GPU licensing business so ARM SoC vendors could incorporate a Kepler graphics core onto their own chips, NVIDIA has already ported their proprietary graphics driver to ARM. With these SoCs generally appearing in mobile devices and generally running Android, the EGL support is now mandated.

Since last September we have known that NVIDIA's Linux engineers have been working on EGL support for their GeForce Linux driver while their Tegra graphics driver obviously already handles GLX/EGL. Then again in March there was talk of a unified NVIDIA EGL driver.

Now with NVIDIA officially being in the GPU licensing business, EGL support is absolutely necessary as the NVIDIA GeForce driver will need to work with Android.

Canonical's Mir display server uses EGL and it supports using the Android driver model, which means once NVIDIA supports Android with their GeForce GPU driver, it should work under Mir using the NVIDIA GeForce Android graphics driver. With the EGL support, the Wayland support isn't too far off, especially as Wayland has already shown promise and use in the mobile world where NVIDIA is now tossing its weight.