GNOME's Mutter Sees More Cleaning That Ultimately Could Help Foster Vulkan Support

A Cogl driver API clean-up within GNOME's Mutter code-base was merged this week after being open for two months. This cleanup could ultimately help if/when Mutter decides to add a Vulkan back-end.

Red Hat's Adam Jackson performed this Mutter/Cogl clean-up earlier this year that hit Git master on Thursday. The cleanup moves more of the OpenGL code into GL-specific paths and outside of the Cogl core. No functional changes are made as part of this clean-up but obviously isolating the OpenGL code is important if Mutter is ultimately to see Vulkan support or other non-OpenGL back-end.

This isn't the first time Adam Jackson has been trying to clean-up the OpenGL code within Mutter. Months earlier was another MR that landed for fixing back-end abstraction leakage for code calling OpenGL directly. Jackson reaffirmed there, "This would make a non-GL backend (like say Vulkan) more difficult than necessary."

Once GTK 4.0 ships with its Vulkan support, we'll see if there is any emphasis from the GNOME team on offering a Vulkan-powered desktop experience.