Vulkan Working To Drop Mir Surface Support

The Khronos working group responsible for Vulkan is working to drop Mir support, a.k.a. VK_KHR_mir_surface.

The Vulkan Mir surface support (VK_KHR_mir_surface) is for native Mir compatibility back when Canonical wasn't interested in supporting the Wayland protocol with the Mir display server. The usage of VK_KHR_mir_surface is quite limited and on the driver side was only ever carried by Ubuntu's patched Mesa builds.

But there have been various projects to at least write preliminary VK_KHR_mir_surface support including SDL, Vulkano, Vulkan Haskell bindings, GLFW, MoonVulkan, and other bindings/wrappers/WSI projects.

The Vulkan working group wants to eliminate the VK_KHR_mir_surface support since Mir users can just utilize the Wayland support that is also more widely adopted. But before they drop this extension officially, they are hoping all projects that made use of VK_KHR_mir_surface will drop using it... So once the extension is removed from the Vulkan headers, your software won't suddenly fail to compile.

So for end-users this doesn't mean much since everything should target Wayland for Mir support rather than the old Mir APIs. The Vulkan Wayland support is also more mature and widespread than the limited use of the Mir surface extension. But for developers making use of Vulkan, make sure you aren't accidentally supporting VK_KHR_mir_surface or your builds could soon break. Details in this issue tracker.