GNOME 51 Retires Legacy NVIDIA Driver Support With Removing EGLStreams

Source Domain: www.phoronix.com

EGLStreams was NVIDIA’s original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn’t end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter.

Jonas Ådahl has removed the EGLStreams/EGLDevice support from Mutter for the upcoming GNOME 51 release. This eliminates legacy NVIDIA driver support but allows for a cleaner codebase in focusing on just the well-tested and widely-used path.

“This removes the code that implements support for using Wayland EGLStreams for client EGL support on Wayland, and using EGLDevice + EGLStream to abstract away KMS page flipping. This has since a long time been replaced with the standard DMA buffer passing protocol in Wayland, and using GBM for buffer allocation and using KMS directly for interacting with the kernel.”

This merge hit Mutter Git today for sunsetting that EGLStreams code.

For those new around here, here is a 2014 article about NVIDIA’s Wayland route at the time. Thankfully, a lot has changed since their initial Wayland enablement.

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