Since the cursor-channel work, every Linux virtual output was created in
metadata pointer mode — making ALL sessions depend on host-side cursor
compositing, including the ones that can never use the channel (Moonlight/
GameStream, legacy clients, capture-mode starts). Those sessions paid the
blend bring-up per session and, whenever a visible cursor was composited,
the loss of NVENC's stream-ordered submit — for a strictly worse cursor
than the compositor's own.
Mirror the Windows no-regression gate: the already-wired per-session
set_hw_cursor(cursor_forward) now drives the Linux backends too. A
cursor-channel session gets metadata (shapes forwarded, composite flip
blends host-side — today's validated path, unchanged); every other session
gets the pointer compositor-EMBEDDED at creation (KWin zkde pointer=2,
Mutter cursor-mode=1, wlroots/hyprland portal CursorMode::Embedded — their
pre-channel default; the portal pair also gains the Metadata arm for
channel sessions, wired but untested on-glass). SessionPlan.cursor_blend
narrows to cursor-forward sessions and rides into the direct-SDK NVENC
open, which skips the Vulkan slot-blend bring-up entirely when off —
embedded sessions ring on plain CUDA surfaces and pay zero cursor cost,
per-session or per-frame.
The keep-alive registry's reuse key grows the created pointer mode (new
VirtualDisplay::hw_cursor getter): a kept embedded display has no cursor
metadata for a channel session to forward, and a kept metadata display
would leave a channel-less session with no pointer in its frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehlerandClaude Fable 5
925130d1f9