NVIDIA detail upcoming Linux driver features for Wayland and explain current support

NVIDIA have a new official forum post up detailing the the state of Wayland on their Linux drivers, along with plans for upcoming features. Really nice to see NVIDIA being more open on their communication.

Written up by NVIDIA dev Aaron Plattner it firstly goes over some features not supported on Wayland due to a lack of support by Wayland compositors or the Wayland protocol. Here's what simply will not be supported:

• Stereo rendering using GLX/EGL/Vulkan
• Implicit SLI Mosaic
  • This feature refers to when an application presents to a virtual display which is tiled across multiple physical displays.
  • Please see below for how “Explicit SLI” will be supported.
• nvidia-settings will not offer same level of configuration.
  • There is no cross-compositor method for configuration that would allow nvidia-settings to manage displays on Wayland as it does on X11. nvidia-settings will still provide details about the system and power usage.

Other features will be supported through Vulkan Direct to Display like:

• Stereo rendering
  • VK_KHR_multiview provides optimization for drawing multiple viewports.
• Vulkan Explicit SLI
  • Will be supported through VK_KHR_device_group
• Swap Groups
  • Supported by VK_NV_present_barrier
• Frame Lock and Genlock

Perhaps more exciting then, right now, is what NVIDIA plan to bring to their future driver releases. They've outlined this as well noting some of these are either already in progress, or at least planned to be implemented as the Wayland ecosystem continues to evolve. So you can look forward to:

• Multi-monitor VRR on Wayland will be in an upcoming release.
• nvidia-drm fbdev=1 parameter set by default
  • This helps fix invalid output with compositors when nvidia-drm and simpledrm have device nodes driving the same display
• nvidia-drm modeset=1 parameter set by default
• Display multiplexers (muxes) are typically used in laptops with both integrated and discrete GPUs to provide a direct connection between the discrete GPU and the built-in display (internal mux) or an external display (external mux). On X11, the display mux can be automatically switched when a full-screen application is running on the discrete GPU, enabling enhanced display features and improved performance, but no Wayland compositors currently support this functionality.
• Advanced display pipeline features including warp and blend, pixel shift, and the COLOR_ENCODING/COLOR_RANGE plane properties.
  • These features may be exposed through DRM properties to allow compositors to use them.
• Front-buffer rendering in GLX with Xwayland.
• nvidia-drm Presentation Timing information.
• VDPAU support on Wayland.
• vGPU support on Wayland.

See more in the forum post.