XWayland 21.1.2 Released With NVIDIA Hardware Acceleration Support

XWayland 21.1.2 is out today and while it may seem like "just a point release", it's quite an exciting one at that since it does bring NVIDIA hardware acceleration for XWayland when paired with their new NVIDIA 470 series driver.

Rather than waiting for XWayland 21.2, Red Hat decided to pick it up for the 21.1.2 point release. the EGLStreams changes landed to allow hardware accelerated direct rendering with the NVIDIA driver, namely their proprietary driver with the 470 series or later. These EGLStreams changes shouldn't risk regressing XWayland users on the open-source drivers with the GBM back-end.

Aside from landing that NVIDIA accelerated XWayland support, there are various bug fixes found in v21.1.2. This NVIDIA XWayland support was already back-ported to Fedora for the NVIDIA 470 beta release while now it's nice seeing it appear quickly in a released version so should get picked up soon by other Linux distributions for allowing Linux games and other software to run well on the NVIDIA driver with XWayland.

The brief XWayland 21.1.2 release announcement can be read on the X.Org mailing list. These standalone XWayland releases continue to be derived from the upstream X.Org Server source tree.