Working with the new Mir “graphics platform” APIs

I wrote recently about reworking Mir “graphics platform” APIs. Since then we’ve been fixing the various cases that didn’t work and have now removed the “feature flag” that disabled them by default.

We have a few issues (mostly naming things better) to resolve, but we have features ready for release later this month.

A new “virtual display” platform

We have incorporated a new “virtual display” platform that allows Mir to render a “display” without a physical output. One possible use for this is sharing the virtual display to a tablet. In the first iteration of this feature the virtual outputs are configured when Mir starts, but we plan to remove that restriction in the near future.

Another scenario for using the virtual display platform that works right now is to run a Mir based server in a virtual machine that lacks any graphics support. You might wonder why that would be useful, it can provide a simple test environment.

Miriway - bringing Wayland to your desktop

At the Ubuntu Summit I gave a presentation on Miriway and showed that it is possible to integrate components from a variety of desktop environment with Mir. The last part of this presentation used Multipass to set a VM for testing (using the virtual environment mentioned above).

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