A few months ago, Vienna played host to the 2025 edition of XDC, the X.Org Developer’s Conference. This annual gathering brings together developers working across the Open Graphics stack, including the Linux kernel, Mesa, DRM, Wayland, X11, and more.

Hosted by TU Wien and co-organized by Snap, XDC 2025 was a resounding success, featuring over 60 talks, lightning talks and workshops, and drawing nearly 200 in-person attendees — a new record.

As an active member of the freedesktop community, Collabora was busy at XDC 2025. Our graphics team delivered five talks, helped out in two more sessions, and ran a workshop for newcomers. Now that all the recordings are live on the X.Org YouTube channel, here's a look back at the insights and highlights we shared.

1. Descriptors are Hard

Presented by Faith Ekstrand

"One of the chief challenges in modern graphics drivers is accessing resources that live outside the shader. While shader compilation is largely a well-understood problem, the interface between the shader and the rest of the API is still a challenge. OpenGL and Vulkan, and D3D12 all have vastly different approaches to solving this problem. In this talk, Faith will give an overview of resource mapping, both from an API and a hardware perspective, and talk about some of the ways that Vulkan has advanced in recent years to try and make the situation better."

2. Tyr: a new Rust GPU driver

Presented by Daniel Almeida

"This talk will cover the current state of Tyr, a new GPU kernel mode driver written in Rust for ARM Mali GPUs. We will discuss the status of the abstractions in the Rust-for-Linux ecosystem and lay out the roadmap to upstream the driver. We will touch upon its relationship to the current C implementation in the kernel (Panthor) and how we plan to have these two drivers co-exist for the foreseeable future."

3. Adding new YUV Formats to Mesa

Presented by Eric Smith

"There are a plethora of YUV formats found in the wild, and it seems like more are added every day. Adding a new format to Mesa requires several steps that may not always be obvious. In this talk we'll discuss how to add support for a new YUV texture format to OpenGL, and some of the recent infrastructure work that should make this easier. Our focus is on OpenGL and EGL, but if time permits we'll briefly discuss how things change for Vulkan."

4. PanVK: from PoC to Vulkan 1.4 in less than a year

Presented by Erik Faye-Lund & Lars-Ivar Simonsen

"PanVK has been improving quickly over the last year. This talk will go through the current status of PanVK, what happened over the last year, the challenges we've encountered along the road, and what tasks lays ahead!"

5. Nouveau/NVK update

Presented by Faith Ekstrand

"A lot has happened in Nouveau in the last year, including Vulkan 1.4 support in NVK; Vulkan conformance on Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, and Kepler; and the switch to Zink for OpenGL. Faith will talk about the advances made in NVK in the last year as well as plans going forward."

6. Lightning talk: Update on Imagination’s PowerVR Mesa effort

Presented by Frank Binns, Erik Faye-Lund & Ella Stanforth

"An update on Imagination’s PowerVR Mesa effort, including landing Vulkan support, and what's next."

7. Addressing Mesa CI pain points: what we've done, and where we are going

Presented by Martin Roukala, Eric Engestrom & Sergi Blanch Torné

"Mesa CI has one of the most complex CI pipelines. While this is great for test coverage, this also brings challenges in infrastructure, usability, and sustainability. In this talk, we will present what we think works, what needs improvement, and what is currently on our roadmap."

Workshop: Embedded Graphics Stack 101

In addition to these talks, Erik Faye-Lund also hosted an "Embedded Graphics Stack 101" workshop, breaking down the Linux embedded graphics stack for beginners. He guided attendees through the fundamentals, provided hands-on exercises with the Mesa Vulkan driver, and gave them a taste of compiling Mesa firsthand. While the workshop wasn’t recorded, you can still check out the slides here.

Beyond the talks and workshops, the real highlight of XDC 2025 was the opportunity to connect in person with the freedesktop community. Many thanks to the organizers at Snap, the speakers, fellow attendees, and sponsors who made XDC 2025 such a memorable experience.

We look forward to seeing everyone next year in Toronto, Canada!