XWayland 21.1.2 Nears With NVIDIA Hardware Acceleration

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment.

The standalone XWayland releases were started given the lack of momentum for new X.Org Server releases but XWayland code within there continuing to see a fair amount of code churn. These standalone releases were started by Red Hat with a focus on meeting Fedora's needs but Ubuntu and other distributions have also gotten onboard with this notion of separate releases.

While XWayland 21.1.2 is on its way as "just a point release", it's significant in that it has picked up the NVIDIA EGLStreams changes to support hardware accelerated direct rendering with the NVIDIA driver. Rather than waiting until the next XWayland 21.2 feature release, this EGLStreams work is being put into v21.1.2 so it can ship sooner and doesn't risk regressing other back-ends.

Besides needing the upcoming XWayland 21.1.2 release, the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver that recently entered public beta needs to be loaded for enjoying this accelerated NVIDIA XWayland support for gaming and other applications.

Today the Xwayland 21.1.2 release candidate is out while the official release will happen in the coming weeks. The NVIDIA XWayland support changes represent a bulk of the release but there is also other fixes, GLAMOR will now dump a backtrace on OpenGL errors, and other modifications. The list of changes in full can be found via the 21.1.1.901 announcement.