I don't get it, why does Wayland require Nouveau? The closed-source NVidia drivers are feature-compatible with their closed-source Windows drivers, so why would Wayland (or MIR, for that matter) be limited by them? What more do Wayland or MIR need besides shaders and OpenCL?
Or is all of this just because the Wayland and MIR developers only want to use open-source drivers?
@c0un7d0wn below (somehow I can't reply directly?)
I didn't know that, makes sense. That said, Mesa appears to provide EGL on top of GLX, which probably isn't as efficient as a driver that directly provides an EGL interface, but likely 'good enough' for basic desktop rendering. So I still don't really understand why I would need Nouveau to use Wayland or Mir.
For me, using Nouveau would be a definite showstopper for whatever new display server becomes the default in Linux distro's. Not to talk down the efforts of the Nouveau developers, but I only have bad experiences with the driver, ranging from crashes, screen corruption, unbootable installations, terrible performance and loss of indispensible features such as proper multi-monitor support and hardware video decoding. One of the first steps in installing a new Linux system on Nvidia hardware is usually to remove, purge and blacklist Nouveau, and install the closed driver, because that just works (tm). I'd even use software rendering over llvmpipe before I'd consider Nouveau.
If the future of the Linux desktop on Nvidia hardware requires a reverse-engineered GPU driver that lacks all the features provided by the closed-source driver, we can postpone the 'year of the Linux desktop' for at least another decade.
Weston requires KMS, Wayland does not.
This is why Wayland isn't being actively pushed on non-Linux systems, since the reference compositor won't work with UMS drivers.
Or is all of this just because the Wayland and MIR developers only want to use open-source drivers?