[1]EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter.

Jonas Ådahl has removed the EGLStreams/EGLDevice support from Mutter for the upcoming GNOME 51 release. This eliminates legacy NVIDIA driver support but allows for a cleaner codebase in focusing on just the well-tested and widely-used path.

"This removes the code that implements support for using Wayland EGLStreams for client EGL support on Wayland, and using EGLDevice + EGLStream to abstract away KMS page flipping. This has since a long time been replaced with the standard DMA buffer passing protocol in Wayland, and using GBM for buffer allocation and using KMS directly for interacting with the kernel."

[2]This merge hit Mutter Git today for sunsetting that EGLStreams code.

For those new around here, here is [3]a 2014 article about NVIDIA's Wayland route at the time. Thankfully, a lot has changed since their initial Wayland enablement.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/EGLStreams

[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/5079

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgxMDE