NVIDIA Outs New 334 Linux Driver With New Features, Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Outs New 334 Linux Driver With New Features, Fixes

The NVIDIA 334.21 Linux graphics driver was released this morning and its change-log is quite lengthy...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYxOTc

[[Knuckles]]

With EGL and OpenGL ES support in the driver, what's missing until we can have Wayland or Mir using the proprietary nvidia driver, does anyone know?

[_artem_]

What about optimus? Still no native support which just works?

[AnAkIn]

Looks like they finally added some support for linux 3.13/3.14. Some stuff might still be missing though, as it doesn't compile on 3.14-rc5.

[Gusar]

With EGL and OpenGL ES support in the driver, what's missing until we can have Wayland or Mir using the proprietary nvidia driver, does anyone know?

It's probably not the only thing, but a standard interface for modesetting is needed. Weston uses KMS. Don't know what KDE and Gnome use, probably KMS too. Nvidia wants to have some sort of modesetting API in EGL. Until there's a standard, every compositor would need to explicitly target Nvidia's modesetting in addition to KMS. Not very elegant.

What about optimus? Still no native support which just works?

As I said last time when someone asked this, native Optimus support will not be possible until Nvidia finishes their vendor-neutral opengl library. This library will allow having multiple opengl stacks simultaneously. Right now this is not possible, all you have right now is putting the different stacks in non-standard locations and then playing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD or similar hacks. Not very elegant.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, so 331.49 is only available on 3.11.6 for openSUSE, and not 3.11.10, which is the currently available kernel version... That is really odd, because this forces people to stay on an old buggy kernel. Unless there are issues with 331.49 on 3.11.10? Well, either way, I hope 334 gets packaged for 3.11.10...

[blackout23]

With EGL and OpenGL ES support in the driver, what's missing until we can have Wayland or Mir using the proprietary nvidia driver, does anyone know?

You can already use Wayland with the proprietary driver. http://pastebin.com/ZfNy0zTQ

This is weston with the x11-backend.so in which case weston is a client ontop of X. You can see that it uses the NVIDIA EGL implementation. With the old NVIDIA drivers it would fallback to using llvmpipe instead and the performance was slow as balls. Now the compositor is very fast and you can launch wayland clients inside of it. You can't start it from a tty, because that would require a backend that can handle the modesetting and currently weston needs KMS with the drm-backend.so. For the Raspberry Pi somone from Collabora implemented an extra rpi-backend.so to use the proprietary API of the Pi GPU.

So from my knowledge it needs a way to do modesetting, video acceleration without X and ideally the EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display extension.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/specs/WL_bind_wayland_display.spec

I hope Canonical backports this driver. I have seen lots of threads from people who bought a 750 and couldn't get it to run with the old drivers their distros ship.

EDIT: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.de/2012/03...and-stack.html

Read the summary.

[AnAkIn]

You can already use Wayland with the proprietary driver. http://pastebin.com/ZfNy0zTQ

This is weston with the x11-backend.so in which case weston is a client ontop of X. You can see that it uses the NVIDIA EGL implementation. With the old NVIDIA drivers it would fallback to using llvmpipe instead and the performance was slow as balls. Now the compositor is very fast and you can launch wayland clients inside of it. You can't start it from a tty, because that would require a backend that can handle the modesetting and currently weston needs KMS with the drm-backend.so. For the Raspberry Pi somone from Collabora implemented an extra rpi-backend.so to use the proprietary API of the Pi GPU.

So from my knowledge it needs a way to do modesetting, video acceleration without X and ideally the EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display extension.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/specs/WL_bind_wayland_display.spec

EDIT: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.de/2012/03...and-stack.html

Read the summary.

I doubt that works correctly. I've tried launching a SDL game with SDL_BACKEND=wayland inside weston, and it ended up crashing inside a X11 nvidia binary.

[blackout23]

I doubt that works correctly. I've tried launching a SDL game with SDL_BACKEND=wayland inside weston, and it ended up crashing inside a X11 nvidia binary.

That's probably, because 3d acceleration is still bound to X11 like the blog says. You can run mpv with --vo=wayland and it will work, same with GDK_BACKEND=wayland and start gnome-calculator.

[deanjo]

Hmm, so 331.49 is only available on 3.11.6 for openSUSE, and not 3.11.10, which is the currently available kernel version... That is really odd, because this forces people to stay on an old buggy kernel. Unless there are issues with 331.49 on 3.11.10? Well, either way, I hope 334 gets packaged for 3.11.10...

Install it the "hard way" (I haven't bothered using the RPM's in years since the "hard way" is so damn simple to do). It usually takes a while for Stefan to update the RPM's and usually a bug report is required to be filed in Novell's bugzilla to do so.