Mir Continues Cleaning Up Their OpenGL Code, To Support Vulkan In Future

Since this summer we've known that Canonical developers have been looking at Vulkan in regards to supporting this forthcoming graphics API by Unity 8 and Mir. Since then we've seen work done in Mir to support renderers other than OpenGL with this Ubuntu display server. As another sign of working towards Vulkan, more of Mir's OpenGL code continues to be re-factored.

It was with the recent Mir 0.16 release that there was the "initial refactoring to support renderers other than GL." In the latest Bazaar code has been more changes in refactoring OpenGL with Vulkan likely coming up on their road-map.

There's been recent commits like moving around their OpenGL helper classes and functions and moving around other GL-specific code.

We do know that Vulkan will officially support Mir on Linux along with X11 and Wayland.

The Vulkan specification is expected to be released before the end of the calendar year while I've heard some rumors that we'd see it in November. Canonical joined Khronos last year and thus already has access to the Vulkan working group for ensuring this next-gen, low-level graphics API will play well on Ubuntu. Once the spec is released on the Linux desktop we can expect an initially closed-source AMD Vulkan driver, an open-source Intel driver, and a NVIDIA binary blob. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers to officially support Mir and Wayland. The NVIDIA binary driver appears close at least with the recent EGL+OpenGL support and Wayland signs within their 355 driver series.