XDC2018 Will Have Many Interesting Talks On Vulkan, AR/VR, Wayland & More

Just over one month away is XDC2018 as the annual X.Org Developers' Conference where a variety of X.Org, Wayland, Mesa, Vulkan, and OpenGL talks will take place. This year's schedule is particularly packed and full of interesting information.

XDC2018 is being hosted in Spain and running from 26 to 28 September at the University of A Coruña. The proposal for talks at XDC2018 are now over and the proposed sessions can be found on this Wiki page. Below is a look at some of the interesting talks slated for this open-source graphics/driver conference next month.

- NVIDIA will talk about extending server-side GLXVND to support multiple GLX implementations on a single screen to effectively allow for GPU offloading with running the desktop and applications on one driver but to allow other applications on a secondary driver/GPU.

- Working on display stream compression and "a kernel feature under embargo." The display stream compression is coming to Intel graphics hardware with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.

- AR/VR support in open-source.

- State of AMDGPU and Clover for open-source OpenCL.

- The state of Mesa / open-source graphics for Android-x86.

- Making use of EGLDevice extensions for better GPU selection on systems with multiple GPUs.

- Improving the Vulkan ecosystem with HLSL.

- The state of the VKMS virtual kernel mode-setting code.

- The state of Chrome/Chromium on Wayland.

- Optimizing and the state of the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

- An interesting Vulkan talk that is still private. "Untitled Vulkan break-out kick-off. Topic still under NDA."

- The state of ARB_gl_spirv support for Mesa, which is still holding back the Mesa drivers from having OpenGL 4.6 compliance in mainline.

- Keith Packard will talk about improving frame timing accuracy for Mesa/DRM/X.

- The state of Linux apps on Chrome OS with Crostini graphics.

This year I will again be working on my coverage of the event remotely (thank you, ad-blockers). A lot of interesting talks this year especially on the Vulkan, AR/VR, and multi-device front. It's great to see participation as well from all the major organizations. More details on the event can be found at xdc2018.x.org.