OMAP3 SGX EGL Drivers Add Wayland Support

Just in case anyone was wondering this is a pretty big deal. Imagination Technologies, whose 3D graphics cores drive most mobile displays, has announced support for the EGL_KHR_Image_Pixmap extensions used by the Wayland display server protocol.

For those who haven't been following, Wayland has gained a lot of momentum as a non-X-based window compositor for Linux-based operating systems. Wayland facilitates client-side rendering, similar to the Quartz compositor used in Mac OS X. It has since been adopted by Meego and Ubuntu as their preferred compositing backend.

The stated goal of Wayland is to provide a user experience where "every frame is perfect". This is a rather necessary and long overdue improvement since traditional Linux desktops based on the aging X11 display server tended to suffer from artifacts such as tearing, visible redrawing, and flickering. However, Wayland retains the capabilities to encapsulate the traditional rootless X server for legacy applications. Wayland rendering targets already exist for popular toolkits such as GTK+ and QT among others.

Check out the video below for a (slightly older) demo.

Today, Wayland support exists for graphics chipsets from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA (nouveau) and SGX (OMAP3) platforms. OMAP4 support probably isn't far off.

I guess it's time to fire up the old BeagleBoard ;-) Incidentally, happy birthday!