Collabora Looks To Add DMA-BUF Protocol To Wayland

Collabora developers are looking at adding a generic DMA-BUF protocol to Wayland, which could benefit media players and other applications.

Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne of Collabora on Friday proposed the generic DMA-BUF protocol for Wayland. This new protocol currently under a "request for comments" state allows clients to wrap a DMA-BUF object into a Wayland buffer (wl_buffer) and to then push that to the compositor for display. With this protocol, the compositor then relies upon Mesa's Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) to import the buffer as a buffer object for compositing via OpenGL or a direct scan-out via DRM.

This new protocol isn't likely to be merged in the immediate future given that the patches are in their first revision and Lous-Francis admits that the protocol design is far from complete with kernel developers still figuring out cross-device DMA-BUFs, etc. This extension would be used by video players and such with Collabora already showing off a patched version of GStreamer using this protocol.

More details via this mailing list post announcing this patch series.