Features, Performance Work Still To Come To Mir

During the final day of this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, upcoming plans for the Mir Display Server were shared as it pertains to performance optimizations and yet-to-be-implemented features.

Features talked about that still have to come natively to Mir include a:

- VESA/FBDEV back-end for those drivers without EGL and DRM/KMS support. This would be similar to Wayland's FBDEV back-end its Pixman renderer.

- Suspend support so Mir properly can handle suspend-and-resume.

- Remote desktop and hardware accelerated screen capture support. (Wayland's Weston right now has an RDP back-end and interest from RealVNC. There's also hardware-accelerated screen capture using VA-API.)

- Display settings as you would find via various utilities on an X.Org environment through RandR. Similarly, having a driver control panel for Mir.

- Hardware specific features like implementing DRI PRIME rendering offload support under Mir.

- A Mir back-end for SDL for games. (SDL 2.0.1 should have Wayland support while SDL3 is already in planning.)

- Multi-seat support.

- Output scaling support.

- Color management support. (Again, a feature already supported by Wayland.)

- Input methods support. (It's also already been worked on for Wayland.)

- OpenGL vs. OpenGL ES support.

With the feature freeze for Ubuntu 13.10 happening this week, these features to be implemented for Mir are not likely to come until Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or at least as backports to Ubuntu 13.10. The video for this Mir feature session is embedded below.

Embedded below is also a video about Mir's performance and upcoming work there, but it's not particularly exciting for those that stay up to date with Phoronix content -- particularly the Mir composite bypass support that landed this morning.