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⇱ SDL Merges Wayland Pointer Warp Support To Help Native Wayland Gaming - Phoronix


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SDL Merges Wayland Pointer Warp Support To Help Native Wayland Gaming

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 14 June 2025 at 09:28 AM EDT. 14 Comments
Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland.

Wayland's Pointer Warp protocol allows applications to request the pointer be moved to a position relative to a Wayland surface. This works nicely in combination with Wayland's pointer constraint and pointer lock protocols for better handling first person shooters and other games natively under Wayland.

First person shooter games, strategy games, and other clip-to-drag-map type games/software commonly rely on pointer warp behavior. Almost immediately after the Wayland Protocols 1.45 release with this staging protocol in place, SDL merged support for this Wayland Pointer Warp support.
"wayland: implement the pointer warp protocol

The pointer warp protocol allows us to warp the pointer to a different position on the surface, without any hacks like locking and unlocking the pointer"

More details in this pull request for those interested. A nice step forward for native Wayland gaming.

👁 SDL Pointer Warp

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.