Server-Side GLVND Being Hacked On, Could Help PRIME Laptops & More

Adam Jackson of Red Hat has been developing a "server-side GLVND" implementation to allow multiple OpenGL driver stacks to co-exist within the X.Org Server space.

For clients there has been the maturing GLVND -- the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library originally developed by NVIDIA -- and Jackson's work is now doing a similar approach from the X.Org Server perspective.

Of the impact, Adam Jackson commented, "the above is enough in a Zaphod Xorg configuration to have heterogeneous GLX providers on different ScreenRecs. It would also make it easy, in a single ScreenRec case, to determine the GLX provider based on the DDX driver in use (e.g., I updated my kernel but not my NVIDIA driver, nouveau wants Xorg's GLX not NVIDIA's). For homogeneous Xinerama-enabled GLX this should not lose any functionality, since the backend can simply be the same for all objects."

Off server-side GLVND, Jackson doesn't think there would be much needed for at least direct contexts in the realm of multi-GPU PRIME laptops. This work could also provide some underlying work towards improvements in the XWayland space.

More details on this new work via xorg-devel. NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has already replied to this post by saying they have been working on something similar, but didn't reveal any other details yet.