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XWayland gets DRM leasing support for helping VR on Linux

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A big improvement has been merged into XWayland called DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) Leasing, which should allow good VR support under Wayland. Something we've been waiting on!

From the commit message:

This commit allows X11 clients running through Xwayland to lease non-desktop connectors from the Wayland compositor by implementing support for drm-lease-v1. In order to not deadlock with the Wayland compositor if its response to a lease request is delayed, the new interface in _rrScrPriv introduced in the last commit is used, which makes it possible to block the X11 client while a response is pending. Leasing normal outputs is not yet supported, all connectors offered for lease will be advertised as non-desktop.

Want to learn more about it? Developer Drew DeVault wrote about a bunch of the work involved and some explainers back in 2019. The gist of it is that this was all needed for the hand-off between your PC and the VR headset, so you can actually get everything to display correctly.

Thanks to this work being hooked up, it means VR games that don't support Wayland directly that need to be run through X11/XWayland should hopefully work well. Support should land in XWayland version 22 sometime next year. Just another tick in the box towards Linux distributions and Linux gaming going all-in with Wayland.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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6 comments

AsciiWolf Dec 8, 2021
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Great! Now if only HDR displays were supported on Linux (I know that Red Hat is working on it, but we are not there yet).
rcrit Dec 8, 2021
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Speaking of Wayland, Fedora 36 has a proposal to enable Wayland sessions by default in GDM even with the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Thread: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/OTGKP27GD7BWWCSBDSJAFUAHFTN7NWNB/
Zac2211 Dec 9, 2021
At first I saw the title and thought it meant Digital Rights Management, lol
slaapliedje Dec 9, 2021
Quoting: Zac2211At first I saw the title and thought it meant Digital Rights Management, lol
Yeah, when you see DRM support in the Kernel you have to cringe. But it is the good DRM, not the bad one.
Ardje Dec 10, 2021
And here I am, waiting for wayland support on my second seat. I don't care about my first, because I use that one for my DJ equipment.
slaapliedje Dec 12, 2021
Quoting: ArdjeAnd here I am, waiting for wayland support on my second seat. I don't care about my first, because I use that one for my DJ equipment.
I was going to try out Wayland with the new drivers, but can't figure out how to get the option to pop back up in gdm on Debian Sid, it used to be there. Oh well. It'd probably be like when I test out KDE and it decides my icons and mouse cursor should be changed to KDE's when I go back to Gnome...
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