Hi all,

Today was released Xwayland 24.1.0, a new stable branch of Xwayland.

That version brings quite a few improvements, among which is support for explicit GPU synchronization.

This is required to enable explicit GPU synchronization with the next version of the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver on Wayland, meaning that rendering on Wayland and Xwayland with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver should be greatly improved eventually. See the merge request upstream [1] for more details.

However, that new version of Xwayland also dropped support for EGLStream [2], since that's not required anymore and and unused with recent versions of the NVIDIA proprietary driver, which means that anyone with a Kepler GPU who are stuck with the 470 legacy NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver won't have hardware acceleration with Xwayland 24.1.0.

For what it's worth, not too long ago EGLStream support was not working in GNOME Shell for quite some time [3] and that remained mostly unnoticed, as far as I know.

This message is meant as a heads up because I am considering upgrading Xwayland to version 24.1.0 in Fedora 40.
The package in rawhide has been updated already [4].

Cheers,
Olivier

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1386
[3] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2925
[4] https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2024-3ee22c0bfd