Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Originally posted by iniside View Post
    I have an questin. I hope people in intrest still readind this thread and will be able to give me straight anwswer.

    Why does Weston, require KMS/GEM drivers ? Why does other Wayland compositors are made in a way they need KMS/GEM drivers ? Wayland doesn't need such drivers to work (as far as I know, just compisters that are it's client).

    It seems like huge overlook and reason that Wayland will have very slow adoption. NVIDIA and AMD doesn't want to make drivers that are using GEM (and rightfully so, they have their own optimized memory managers that are deisgned with their hardware in mind, which are far more efficient and faster, than generic apprach like GEM ever be).

    So why enforce such drivers ? Why not allow binary GPU drivers ?

    To be frank, looking at it now, Wayland might as well as not exist for me. Without binary drivers from NVIDIA or AMD there is nothing to look after. And those two won't make binary drivers for Wayland, unless Wayland changes something to do not enforce KMS/GEM.
    I'm sorry, but you don't really know what you're talking about. Unfortunately, that's par for the course when it comes to people discussing Wayland.

    Weston needs to be able to do modesetting, because it's taking the place of X which used to do that work.

    Modesetting means banging directly on the hardware bits and is highly hardware dependent. Which means each GPU driver needs to provide the code to do that.

    X used to work with userspace code modesetting (in the DDX X.org drivers) but that was a messy hack. New OSS drivers all provide their driver code directly in the kernel. Because that's the only sane place for this code, the nvidia and amd proprietary drivers also place their modesetting code inside the kernel. (in their proprietary kernel modules)

    Weston gets rid of the nasty hack that no one was really using anymore anyway (x drivers) and requires kernel based modesetting, which everyone already has on linux. INCLUDING THE PROPRIETARY DRIVERS! It may indeed be a problem on BSDs/Solaris/etc. where the OSS drivers are too old, though.

    Weston only supports the OSS KMS api currently, because that's the only one that they can. The proprietary drivers install their own support into X. Similarly, they need to do the exact same thing in Weston. They already have kernel modesetting capabilities, they just need to wire up everything correctly. Note: they had to do the exact same thing to X. That's why whenever X updates to a new version you have to download a new proprietary driver to work with it. The exact same situation will be necessary with Weston, only it should be simpler for the proprietary drivers than before because there's none of the messy stuff that X brought into the situation to deal with.

    In short - Weston absolutely allows for proprietary drivers to run, and it won't be difficult for them to support. However, it is something they will have to support themselves, unless they plan on opening up the specs to their hardware so that the open source coders know which hardware bits to bang on. Exactly the same as X. We're just still waiting on the proprietary drivers to actually support it, which is fair enough since there still aren't any distros trying to use it, which means their customers still don't need that support yet. When they do need it, Nvidia and AMD should be able to provide it easily.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by Ericg View Post
      They either need to have KMS / GEM support (unlikely), use a wrapper library that was discussed by the Wayland developers that allows them to say "We have KMS / GEM support" when they actually don't, but are in reality handling KMS / GEM style functions within the driver so it doesn't matter.

      Also the only reason no-binary-drivers should be a "killer" for you is if you only have Nvidia hardware... Intel OSS driver is your only option for them, Radeon is right up there with Fglrx at this point if you have Kernel 3.11 and Mesa 9.2 (which you will by the time youre using Wayland), even if you have GCN you should be fine by then.
      Well, I'm not sure if the open source drivers will be good enough if I want play games or work with Maya/Modo. And yes, I have GCN (Radeon HD7850).

      I'm sorry, but you don't really know what you're talking about.
      Of course I don't. That's why I asked.

      I'm curious about other things. What about other Wayland Compositors ? Like KWin or Mutter or anything else that might popup in future. Does NVIDIA and AMD had to adapt their drivers on per compositor basis ? Or I have misunderstrand something here ? Or meant Wayland not Weston ?

      Comment


      • Originally posted by iniside View Post
        I'm curious about other things. What about other Wayland Compositors ? Like KWin or Mutter or anything else that might popup in future. Does NVIDIA and AMD had to adapt their drivers on per compositor basis ? Or I have misunderstrand something here ? Or meant Wayland not Weston ?
        Course not. Do drivers need to support individual compositors under X?

        Sure, other compositors may expose driver bugs. But once you support the Wayland Protocol and all its required dependencies (EGL-- the same as Mir-- and one extra OpenGL extension) you should be fine


        As far as Radeon + future performance... Games you should be pretty good on, honestly. Maya / Modo, maybe maybe not. I really don't know for that one.
        All opinions are my own not those of my employer if you know who they are.

        Comment


        • "Wayland's main goal is that no matter the system load, no matter what is going on, it will be flicker free, tear free, and flash free."

          I'm looking forward for Wayland and newly added AMD GPU fan-profiles!

          Comment


          • Have NVIDIA solved this?

            A past discussion where NVIDIA James Jones alerts Kristian about DDX on xwayland and xwayland becoming its own DDX (i huge problem since the NVIDIA way of doing that would be from the kernel module)

            Then in 3.46 nvidia landed EGL extensions but could not yet solve KMS (no kms no wayland support on most DE's), So, will NVIDIA have HW accelerated xwayland? how can they solve that?

            Comment

            Working...
            X