Mir Working On A Mir-On-Wayland Nested Compositor Path, Broadcom DispmanX API Support

In addition to Mir's other road-map items around replaceable renderers and hybrid graphics driver support, it also turns out the Canonical developers involved are working on expanding the graphics platform support.

Longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical wrote a post on Tuesday about the graphics platform support. To date Mir has released support for the KMS/Mesa drivers, Mir-on-X11 as a development target, eglstream-kms platform coverage for NVIDIA's proprietary driver, and an Android target with libhybris going back to the original Ubuntu Touch / Mir days.

It also turns out they are developing a new platform for interfacing with Broadcom's DispmanX API as well as a Wayland platform target for Mir-on-Wayland, similar to their existing Mir-on-X11 code. The Mir-on-Wayland code could be used for nested compositors and other development use-cases.

It's interesting that Canonical is working on a Broadcom DispmanX API for Mir, which presumably is out of enterprise customer interest. There had been indications before DispmanX was deprecated and the most notable Broadcom SoC case for Linux users is in the form of Raspberry Pi boards where there is good Mesa/KMS coverage these days thus working with Mir's other platform support. Alan indicates this Broadcom proprietary stack has the potential for potentially higher performance as well as supporting OpenMAX for video handling.

More details as to the current state on Ubuntu Discourse.