XWayland Lands DRM Leasing Support To Handle VR Headsets

Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!

XWayland now has mainline support for the DRM leasing (drm-lease-v1) protocol for allowing X11 clients running through XWayland to lease non-desktop connectors/outputs from the underlying Wayland compositor. This is particularly useful and designed around the needs of virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays.

There has been a lot of Linux infrastructure work the past few years getting the code in place for better supporting VR HMDs under Linux both under X11 and Wayland. Now with the latest code, XWayland can now deal with X11 clients wanting DRM leasing usage. The patch merged is based on a former XWayland patch that had been floating around out-of-tree since 2019 when the Wayland protocol support was in development. It was only this summer that the DRM lease protocol was merged to the wayland-protocols code.

This goes along with other updates today for updating XWayland to require Wayland Protocols 1.22, a new interface for RandR to allow delaying lease responses, and then the actual DRM lease support. The RandR interface to allow delaying lease responses is what previously was a blocker for the XWayland DRM lease handling.

This is good news for those wanting to enjoy VR games running off a Wayland desktop but the actual game or VR application needing X11/XWayland. This will be found in XWayland 22 stable next year.