NVIDIA Working On An EGLStreams Back-End For KDE On Wayland

With no recent activity on the NVIDIA-led Unix device memory allocation work that all developer communities could get behind to supersede GBM and EGLStreams for use by Wayland compositors, NVIDIA is working on an EGLStreams back-end for KDE's KWin compositor.

Similar to the work done on an EGLStreams back-end for GNOME and other EGLStreams work by the smaller Wayland compositors, a NVIDIA engineer is now officially working on an EGLStreams back-end for KWin so that the NVIDIA proprietary driver would play well with KDE on Wayland. Up to now KWin has only supported the Mesa GBM interfaces. KDE developers have said they wouldn't invest in developing an EGLStreams back-end, but that they wouldn't be opposed if say NVIDIA would contribute and maintain the code -- that's what is happening now.

Erik Kurzinger is a member of the NVIDIA Linux graphics team and he is working on KWin Wayland compositor support with EGLDevice, EGLOutput, and EGLStream extensions. This will work alongside the current GBM code so that all existing KDE Wayland users are not affected while now also allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver users to enjoy the maturing KDE Wayland experience.

NVIDIA has initial proof-of-concept code working and they intend to publish the initial KWin patches soon. They relied this initial work on the KWin mailing list. KWin developers so far have volleyed questions about possible multi-GPU support, whether NVIDIA is still working on a cross-vendor solution, if NVIDIA will be maintaining the EGLStreams code, testing coverage, etc. We'll see where this heads in the days/weeks to come.