It actually does have code to support XWayland, the analogue to XMir: <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/log/?h=xwayland&qt=grep&q=xwayla

It actually does have code to support XWayland, the analogue to XMir: <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/log/?h=xwayland&qt=grep&q=xwayland> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/log... This code is an optimization, not a strict requirement, as you're right that in theory XWayland or XMir could be supported in a hardware-agnostic manner. For XWayland this is the (formerly "wlshm") xf86-video-wayland X driver: <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-wayland/> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-wayland/>, but it is much slower than the hardware-specific options (which also exist for the radeon and nouveau X drivers). I don't know if there's an equivalent hardware-agnostic X driver for Mir, but in no case would a production-quality windowing server have that as its only method of compatibility for an important hardware segment--both Wayland and Mir developers expect X-dependent applications to stick around for quite some time, so they must perform as well as possible. For what it's worth, my hat is firmly in the Wayland camp; its design is simpler, its development more open, and its motivations more clear than those of Mir. Canonical does a bad job of software stewardship and I'd hate to see them in control of the dominant graphics solution for Linux.