Sway's wlroots Lands Initial Vulkan Renderer

The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged.

The wlroots library started to provide functionality for Sway in areas the Weston library hadn't filled and with time this library is now used by KWinFT, Taiwins, and other Wayland compositors for providing more shared code usage and functionality across compositors.

The newest addition to wlroots is an initial and early-stage Vulkan renderer.

The renderer was written by Simon Ser and Jan Beich. The commit explains, "This new renderer is implemented with the existing wlr_renderer API (which is known to be sub-optimal for some operations). It's not used by default, but users can opt-in by setting WLR_RENDERER=vulkan. The renderer depends on VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier and VK_EXT_physical_device_drm."

This Vulkan renderer for wlroots in its initial form is just under four thousand lines of code.