# VK_KHR_wayland_surface(3) Manual Page

## Name

VK_KHR_wayland_surface - instance extension

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## Registered Extension Number

7

## Revision

6

## Ratification Status

Ratified

## Extension and Version Dependencies

VK_KHR_surface

## Contact

- Jesse Hall [GitHub]critsec

- Ian Elliott [GitHub]ianelliottus

## Other Extension Metadata

Last Modified Date

  2015-11-28

IP Status

  No known IP claims.

Contributors

  - Patrick Doane, Blizzard

  - Faith Ekstrand, Intel

  - Ian Elliott, LunarG

  - Courtney Goeltzenleuchter, LunarG

  - Jesse Hall, Google

  - James Jones, NVIDIA

  - Antoine Labour, Google

  - Jon Leech, Khronos

  - David Mao, AMD

  - Norbert Nopper, Freescale

  - Alon Or-bach, Samsung

  - Daniel Rakos, AMD

  - Graham Sellers, AMD

  - Ray Smith, ARM

  - Jeff Vigil, Qualcomm

  - Chia-I Wu, LunarG

## Description

The `VK_KHR_wayland_surface` extension is an instance extension. It provides a mechanism to create a VkSurfaceKHR object (defined by the `VK_KHR_surface` extension) that refers to a Wayland `wl_surface`, as well as a query to determine support for rendering to a Wayland compositor.

## New Commands

- vkCreateWaylandSurfaceKHR

- vkGetPhysicalDeviceWaylandPresentationSupportKHR

## New Structures

- VkWaylandSurfaceCreateInfoKHR

## New Bitmasks

- VkWaylandSurfaceCreateFlagsKHR

## New Enum Constants

- `VK_KHR_WAYLAND_SURFACE_EXTENSION_NAME`

- `VK_KHR_WAYLAND_SURFACE_SPEC_VERSION`

- Extending VkStructureType:

  - `VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_WAYLAND_SURFACE_CREATE_INFO_KHR`

## Issues

1) Does Wayland need a way to query for compatibility between a particular physical device and a specific Wayland display? This would be a more general query than vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceSupportKHR: if the Wayland-specific query returned `VK_TRUE` for a (VkPhysicalDevice, `struct wl_display*`) pair, then the physical device could be assumed to support presentation to any VkSurfaceKHR for surfaces on the display.

RESOLVED: Yes. vkGetPhysicalDeviceWaylandPresentationSupportKHR was added to address this issue.

2) Should we require surfaces created with vkCreateWaylandSurfaceKHR to support the `VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR` present mode?

RESOLVED: Yes. Wayland is an inherently mailbox window system and mailbox support is required for some Wayland compositor interactions to work as expected. While handling these interactions may be possible with `VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR`, it is much more difficult to do without deadlock and requiring all Wayland applications to be able to support implementations which only support `VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR` would be an onerous restriction on application developers.

## Version History

- Revision 1, 2015-09-23 (Jesse Hall)

  - Initial draft, based on the previous contents of VK_EXT_KHR_swapchain (later renamed VK_EXT_KHR_surface).

- Revision 2, 2015-10-02 (James Jones)

  - Added vkGetPhysicalDeviceWaylandPresentationSupportKHR() to resolve issue #1.

  - Adjusted wording of issue #1 to match the agreed-upon solution.

  - Renamed “window” parameters to “surface” to match Wayland conventions.

- Revision 3, 2015-10-26 (Ian Elliott)

  - Renamed from VK_EXT_KHR_wayland_surface to VK_KHR_wayland_surface.

- Revision 4, 2015-11-03 (Daniel Rakos)

  - Added allocation callbacks to vkCreateWaylandSurfaceKHR.

- Revision 5, 2015-11-28 (Daniel Rakos)

  - Updated the surface create function to take a pCreateInfo structure.

- Revision 6, 2017-02-08 (Faith Ekstrand)

  - Added the requirement that implementations support `VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR`.

  - Added wording about interactions between vkQueuePresentKHR and the Wayland requests sent to the compositor.

## See Also

No cross-references are available

## Document Notes

For more information, see the Vulkan Specification

This page is a generated document. Fixes and changes should be made to the generator scripts, not directly.

## Copyright

Copyright 2014-2025 The Khronos Group Inc.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0