XDC 2026 Will Feature Many Interesting Talks: Vulkan Gallium, OpenCL On CUDA & More

The annual X.Org Developer's Conference "XDC 2026" is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments. XDC 2026 is running from 28 to 30 September in Toronto at Daniels Spectrum. Ahead of the event, the XDC 2026 schedule was presented and there is quite a number of interesting talks this year. Below is a look at some of the most interesting talks planned for XDC 2026. I'll be providing remote coverage as usual of the X.Org Developer's Conference on Phoronix. Karol Herbst will be presenting at XDC 2026 on NOCL as OpenCL-on-CUDA. NOCL is an open-source OpenCL implementation on top of CUDA and implemented as a Gallium3D driver for use with Rusticl. Faith Ekstrand will be presenting on whether a "Vulkan Gallium" is now needed for Vulkan API drivers moving forward. While Vulkan drivers started off simple, there are now hundreds of different Vulkan API extensions and a lot more complexities today that it may be worth pursuing a "Vulkan Gallium" similar to how Gallium3D in Mesa improved OpenGL drivers with greater code sharing and more. Separately, Karol is presenting a status update on Rusticl. Also on the Gallium3D side, Erik Faye-Lund will present on potentially getting rid of TGSI as what was Gallium3D's de facto intermediate representation (IR). These days though most drivers are targeting the superior NIR. Alyssa Rosenzweig will be presenting her latest work on the Intel Jay compiler that's under development and SSA-based register allocation. XDC 2026 will also feature a status update on the latest Apple M3 GPU reverse engineering process for bring-up under Asahi Linux. There will also be a status update on the Qualcomm MSM graphics driver. Additionally, a status update on NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver will also be presented, among the work on the various other smaller Mesa drivers. A workshop is also planned for XDC 2026 for working on a formal governance model for Mesa given the lack of one albeit working out fairly well most of the time. Naveen Kumar of Intel will also be presenting their proposal on Wayland Content Frame Rate "wp-content-frame-rate-v1" as a new Wayland protocol for media players to communicate their content frame-rate to the compositor. A full listing of all the XDC 2026 talks can be found via the XDC schedule.