Some Ugly Code Can Get NVIDIA's Linux Driver Working With Accelerated XWayland

[brad0]

shmerl There’s no viable alternative. Patent trolls always want to target Nvidia. Plus a lot of their stuff is licensed and can’t be disclosed. So it’s very unlikely to change.

That's a complete and utter load of bullshit.

[Bobby Bob]

I think there's a massive opportunity here.

Don't get it working perfectly. Just get it working.

If the solution is buggy and slower than it should be, then the user experience of using NVIDIA GPUs will become worse.

NVIDIA will have no choice but to change unless they want to allow AMD to offer a better user experience and higher performance than them.

I mean, this is definitely a nasty way of doing things. But it could be effective.

"It will shorten the war by 5 years and save millions of lives."

[skeevy420]

Nvidia leaves their proprietary stuff closed: But, but, but patent trolls.

Qt has their proprietary stuff open: But, but, but CLA.

I know, right.

[TheOne]

At some point I was happy about wayland and the promise to have better performance than X but after testing it on Single Board Computers I see how false that statement is. It is actually slower than running X on fbdev (you notice it when running on lower performance hardware), still lacks many features for an environment that lets you get your Job done (useful color picker doesnt works on wayland because it doesnt properly implements a permissions system, cant even use jack to properly record audio, pipewire jack backend, do it even works?), has higher ram footprint. So Im not sure what the benefits are anymore, only that it is designed to run on OpenGL ES which is the most supported driver on mobile devices. After so many years that desktop environments like KDE, Gnome and others have coded to implement a wayland backend I dont even believe it makes things easier than X....

[moreheadm]

What does that mean exactly? How does it reduce the footprint? If anything, it makes an argument that blob now can work in more cases.

I was also confused by that part of the merge request, but perhaps the dev is measuring footprint by "code that has to be maintained because of the proprietary drivers". My impression is that he means by encouraging proprietary driver users to switch to Wayland, they can ditch parts of X.org that are specially modified for Nvidia drivers earlier. But I don't have knowledge of the code involved here so I could be completely wrong. But I share similar wishes for Nvidia to be pressured out of their propriety approach rather than acquiesced to and subsidized, even if at the same time I'm tempted to the dark side (i.e. running Nvidia proprietary drivers on my system).

It's really sad that Nvidia won't just release the proper firmware for its cards so that Nouveau can gain decent performance. Their stance has made me more and more regretful I purchased an Nvidia card and wishful that I had understood this issue more back then. Hopefully RDNA 2 means that AMD hardware challenges Nvidia on high end performance and continues to supplant its market share. And hopefully Intel Xe will have competitive performance and good, open-source Linux drivers.

[moreheadm]

If the solution is buggy and slower than it should be

Nouveau is already slower than it should be (because of Nvidia, to be clear); there's no point of this if your goal is to make it so the Linux experience with Nvidia is working but suboptimal. If that's the goal, then just drop proprietary support like sway. But the companies that employ Linux devs and their customers make many millions (probably billions) from the Nvidia proprietary drivers, so maybe such companies want to maintain support but try to encourage Nvidia to change its ways.

[DanL]

Speculations.

Don't you know how to quit while you're behind and/or admit when you're wrong? Or do you always double down on your stupid nonsense?

[mdedetrich]

airlied Speculations.

Nope, NVidia's blob has a lot of copyrighted IP that goes way back to the days when they bought SG. Them doing open source would open themselves up to so much litigation it wouldn't be funny.

I think there's a massive opportunity here.

Don't get it working perfectly. Just get it working.

If the solution is buggy and slower than it should be, then the user experience of using NVIDIA GPUs will become worse.

NVIDIA will have no choice but to change unless they want to allow AMD to offer a better user experience and higher performance than them.

I mean, this is definitely a nasty way of doing things. But it could be effective.

"It will shorten the war by 5 years and save millions of lives."

You are deluded if you think this will force NVidia to do anything.

NVidia will continue doing what they are doing and in the worst case scenario they would just maintain XOrg. Our best chance is either NVidia helping with the encrypted firmware situation to unblock nouveau and/or NVidia putting more effort into getting their blob to work with Wayland (which actually means NVidia contributing to Gnome/KDE's wayland solution). This latter is already starting to happen, albeit very slowly.

[mlau]

I think there's a massive opportunity here.

Don't get it working perfectly. Just get it working.

If the solution is buggy and slower than it should be, then the user experience of using NVIDIA GPUs will become worse.

NVIDIA will have no choice but to change unless they want to allow AMD to offer a better user experience and higher performance than them.

I mean, this is definitely a nasty way of doing things. But it could be effective.

"It will shorten the war by 5 years and save millions of lives."

Nvidia's primary concern on Linux are workstation users, and as long as those expensive cad/etc applications run on Xorg, there's not much incentive for nvidia to invest heavily in wayland. And from their perspective, they *do* support the necessary infrastructure (EGLStreams, a Khronos standard, which is used e.g. on QNX as well) to get wayland working. It doesn't help that the popular compositors prefer mesa's own GBM to EGLStreams and then blast nvidia for not supporting gbm.
The whole ubridled nvidia hate here is not entirely warranted.

[mdedetrich]

Nvidia's primary concern on Linux are workstation users, and as long as those expensive cad/etc applications run on Xorg, there's not much incentive for nvidia to invest heavily in wayland. And from their perspective, they *do* support the necessary infrastructure (EGLStreams, a Khronos standard, which is used e.g. on QNX as well) to get wayland working. It doesn't help that the popular compositors prefer mesa's own GBM to EGLStreams and then blast nvidia for not supporting gbm.
The whole ubridled nvidia hate here is not entirely warranted.

The hilarious thing is that EGLStreams is an open standard that is part of the Chronos group where as GBM is a specific thing that only exists for Linux. NVidia has been trying to push EGLStreams as a solution for a while (and EGLStreams even predates Wayland) but the linux dev community ignored Nvidia cos "fuk nvidia". There are also technical advantages to EGLStreams which is not apparent for GBM (EGLStreams is asynchronous in nature so it can deliver better performance for specific implementations of graphics drivers, i.e. NVidia's one).

You then have actively hostile projects like Sway which actively refuse to implement EGLStreams (and even worse blacklist NVidias blob) even though there is no technical justification for doing so, its purely political and even the creator of Sway admitted this.