Chapter 38. OpenGL and Vulkan on Xwayland
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## Chapter 38. OpenGL and Vulkan on Xwayland

### Overview

Xwayland is an X11 server implemented as a Wayland client, allowing one to run X11 applications on a Wayland desktop in a relatively seamless fashion. The NVIDIA driver is able to facilitate accelerated 3D rendering for such applications, but there are some particular considerations compared to a typical X11 configuration which are outlined in this chapter.

### Requirements

The following are necessary to enable accelerated rendering on Xwayland with the NVIDIA driver:

- DRM KMS must be enabled. See Chapter 35, Direct Rendering Manager Kernel Modesetting (DRM KMS) for details.

- The installed copy of Xwayland should be a build from the master branch of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver at least as recent as commit c468d34c. Note that if this requirement is not satisfied, the NVIDIA GPU can still be used for rendering, however it will fall back to a suboptimal path for presentation resulting in degraded performance.

- libxcb version 1.13 or later must be present.

- egl-wayland version 1.1.7 or later must be present (if installed separately from the the NVIDIA driver).

- If using the GNOME desktop environment, kms-modifiers must be enabled through gsettings. This can be done with the following command `gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features [\"kms-modifiers\"]`

### Limitations

Some NVIDIA driver features available on a typical X11 system are currently not supported on Xwayland. These include:

- The nvidia-settings configuration tool

- Hardware accelerated video decoding with VDPAU

- SLI and Multi-GPU

- Frame Lock and Genlock

- Front-buffer rendering for GLX applications

### Reporting Issues

The Wayland desktop relies on the close interaction of several components to function correctly. Because of this, it can be tricky to determine exactly which one is responsible for a suspected bug.

- If the issue only reproduces on NVIDIA hardware with the proprietary driver, see Chapter 42, NVIDIA Contact Info and Additional Resources for links to the appropriate channels to report the bug to us.

- If the issue only reproduces with a particular compositor, it can be reported on that project's bug tracker, for example:

  - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/ for GNOME

  - https://bugs.kde.org/ for KDE

- If the issue is specific to X11 applications running on Xwayland, it can be reported on the X.org xserver issue tracker https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues.

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