Protocol for sharing video textures?

[Jean-Michaël Celerier]

Hello,

In the windows and macOS world, the operating system / graphics driver
tandem provides a feature that may be irrelevant for most desktop use
cases, but quite important for artistic creators: zero-copy texture sharing
across processes.

At a low level, the macOS feature is called IOSurface:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iosurface
On MS Windows, texture could be shared for a long time using DirectX:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb219800(v=vs.85).aspx#Sharing_Resources

There are two main libraries that abstract it quite a bit (for instance by
doing copies if zero-copy mechanism isn't available on the hardware or
sending the textures through the network); both pages also feature a
showcase of applications that leverage this:
On windows: http://spout.zeal.co/
On macOS: http://syphon.v002.info/

Do you think that such a feature could be a wayland protocol extension ?
What "building blocks" are missing to get this to work reliably on Linux ?
It would greatly simplify and improve the performance of artistic
applications, such as video mapping, etc...

Best regards,

Jean-Michaël Celerier
http://www.jcelerier.name
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