Andy Ritger - Enabling Alternative Window Systems with a non-Mesa Graphics Driver Implementation

Alternates to the X Window System, such as Wayland and Mir, have evolved through novel use of the building blocks of the Mesa-, DRI-, and DRM-based Linux graphics driver stack.

We have been working to support alternative window systems in the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver through:

  • Refactoring our driver stack to more closely align to the organization assumed by these alternative window systems (e.g., by working to plug into DRM-KMS).
  • Proposing new EGL extensions that alternative window system implementations can use to enumerate GPUs, correlate objects between EGL and DRM-KMS, and present frames through EGL + DRM-KMS.

In this talk, I will describe the work NVIDIA has been doing to prepare to plug into DRM-KMS, present the EGL_EXT_device_* and EGL_EXT_output_* family of extensions:

and suggest an EGLStream-based mechanism to present frames to an EGLoutput

Slides Video