Stepping Towards Better VR Headset Support On Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 12 August 2019 at 06:58 AM EDT. 5 Comments
WAYLAND
Sway and WLROOTS creator Drew DeVault on top of his several open-source projects has also been working on improving the VR infrastructure support on Wayland as part of contract work for Status.im. The secure communication company is looking to build a Wayland-driven VR workspace but for that the VR headset support on Wayland needs to be improved.

One of the areas DeVault has been focusing on improving/implementing has been around DRM leasing support on Wayland, similar to the DRM leasing work done by Keith Packard a few years back when initially plumbing better VR head-mounted display support on the X.Org side for Valve. Drew recently proposed a new Vulkan extension for acquiring a Wayland display, similar to the existing Xlib display extension.

Besides that Vulkan extension he's also been working on the appropriate DRM leasing protocol extension for Wayland, working on the driver-side support within Mesa, and also getting the Vulkan code running within the likes of WLROOTS and Sway. He also has plans for extending the support through to XWayland.

Those interested in learning more about the prospects for the eventual better VR headset support on Wayland can find out about Drew's current work on his blog.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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