Ubuntu's Mir Working On Replaceable Renderer, Hybrid Graphics Driver Support

Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support.

Among the Mir projects they want to pursue but not necessarily to be completed in the very near future include:

- Splitting out the rendering and display code to be more modular and better handling cases like DisplayLink USB display hardware that doesn't have any integrated rendering support.

- As part of the platform refactoring, the ability for Mir to support multiple graphics platforms simultaneously. Right now Mir doesn't work with multiple driver stacks at once, namely not allowing the NVIDIA driver to work with the Mesa support loaded. So hybrid graphics laptops for NVIDIA+Intel and the like do not work right now with Mir but the goal would be to allow supporting multiple graphics platforms simultaneously. This is also needed for Mir remote desktop support.

- Replaceable renderer and scene-graph support as well as building a GNOME SceneGraph Kit (GSK) back-end for helping with the likes of GNOME Shell or Unity 8 running atop Mir.

- Hot reloading of Mir and better crash resilience without taking down any of the running applications.

These hopeful ideas for Mir can be found on Ubuntu Discourse.