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

[treba]

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....

Erm...what does jack have to do with Wayland? Anyhow, your complains sound like they are about a Wayland compositor, i.e. an implementation, not the protocol. Concerning the protocol: my personal experience is that people often only start to understand the pros and cons of Wayland and X11 when they actually write code using them.

[Hibbelharry]

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.

It is warranted. See for example this article:

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to-eglstream-or-not/

[aufkrawall]

its purely political

Nvidia Wayland eglstreams is unusable on Gnome and Plasma, no need to focus just on Sway to depict Nvidia as a victim.
Though their approach is right. Not just Nvidia is the problem, but also their users who expect FOSS devs to bend to Nvidia's crap. So keep it clean and just lock out both entirely. I hope this MR goes nowhere.

[TheOne]

Erm...what does jack have to do with Wayland? Anyhow, your complains sound like they are about a Wayland compositor, i.e. an implementation, not the protocol. Concerning the protocol: my personal experience is that people often only start to understand the pros and cons of Wayland and X11 when they actually write code using them.

1. Tried running jack on a wayland session to record with a DAW and it didnt worked, on X worked perfectly. Maybe had to properly setup pipewire or I did something wrong but ahh what a hassle, it should just work on Xwayland but nope...

2. Tried several compositors: mutter/gnome, wlroots/sway, weston. Videos ran better with proper acceleration but everything else was better on x11 fbdev than accelerated wayland... Try running wayland without gpu drivers on a low power computer and see how bad it performs in comparison to x11. And the issue seems to be present on all popular compositors. maybe because all of them need llvmpipe.

3. So if the culprit isnt the wayland protocol then something is wrong with all the compositors I tested, not to even mention kwin which was crawling under wayland but performed nicely on x11 on the low power computer.

[curfew]

Erm...what does jack have to do with Wayland? Anyhow, your complains sound like they are about a Wayland compositor, i.e. an implementation, not the protocol. Concerning the protocol: my personal experience is that people often only start to understand the pros and cons of Wayland and X11 when they actually write code using them.

Fuck off with this "Wayland is just a protocol" bullshit. The hugest issues with Wayland is, yes, that it is "just a protocol". Every single compositor i.e. desktop environment has to separately implement every god damn feature or the users will simply be left out with no way to have them. My understanding is that there are also DE-specific "protocol extensions" to hack around whatever the standard protocols are missing so far, leading to compatibility issues and fragmentation among Linux desktop environments.

Wayland will remain a technological demo for the curious hackers as long as it lacks a standard implementation that is shared by the major DEs and that provides a single centralized platform. Wasn't this what Canonical attempted to do with Mir (alas without Wayland)?

[bug77]

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 think helping the blob in any way is not a good thing. It only encourages Nvidia to act with impunity and drag their trash blob approach along.

The guy spelled it out for you:

I want the xfree86 code out of my life, and this approach seems like it'll eliminate a large class of reasons why you might need to use Xorg and NVIDIA's driver.

It doesn't reduce the number of installs for the blob, if that's what you were hoping for. It just reduces the footprint of X in developers' life.

[mdedetrich]

Nvidia Wayland eglstreams is unusable on Gnome and Plasma, no need to focus just on Sway to depict Nvidia as a victim.

So was GBM on Wayland a few years ago until people started using it and bugs got fixed and it became more stable (welcome to software development). Linux has been trying to get Wayland + GBM stable for like 6 years? EGLStreams was only put into Gnome and KDE Wayland literally a year ago and distros deliberately make it more difficult to use Wayland + EGLStreams making the problem worse.

Though their approach is right. Not just Nvidia is the problem, but also their users who expect FOSS devs to bend to Nvidia's crap. So keep it clean and just lock out both entirely. I hope this MR goes nowhere.

Users who want FLOSS can use nouveau. Most linux users however want a working system and its certain Linux developers that have an immature/irrational/unreasonable attitude that is causing Linux users to suffer one way or another (without any real changes to this attitude X11/Xorg will never be deprecated considering that NVidia is the biggest graphics card manufacturer and no one is going to use Linux distro that doesn't work).

[Jabberwocky]

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.

I agree with you 100% on this.

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.

Most people including myself (before I bought my first Nvidia Optimus laptop) do not know about these problems and find out after buying their hardware. I can completely understand hate against nvidia when people find out the expensive hardware that they bought cannot run basic software merely because restrictions that have purposefully been placed by the manufacturer. Logically people expect to own hardware that they buy and if it's capable of running software is should be able to do just that. Unfortunately that logic is considered unreasonable. Nvidia knows the implications of locking down their hardware and making things almost impossible for nouveau developers. If people were able to return the hardware based on these restrictions I would say the hate is not warranted.

I personally love Linux because you are free to do things the way you like. It's not a matter of EGL vs GBM, which is better or worse, or which one was first. It's about the freedom of choice. Nvidia used it's cunning marketing to get where they are today. Apple got burned by getting in bed with Nvidia. Similarly I have stopped buying computers with Nvidia components because they go out of their way to prevent me from running software the way that I want to.

I still recommend Nvidia to my gamer friends because, just like 99% of Nvidia's customers, these topics and philosophies are irrelevant to them... well at least until Nvidia's monopoly causes the industry to stagnate to a point where consoles become the only form of viable gaming.

[Alexmitter]

its purely political and even the creator of Sway admitted this.

The creator of Sway is strange. He also has a hate on Gnome for not implementing some over time grown pseudo standard instead of the Freedesktop standard.
He is insanely good in what he is doing, wlroots is a perfect basement for things like Phosh/Phoc and may be the future for most wayland desktops, but his attitude and his entitlement towards the actual standardized free desktop organisations freedesktop org and gnome is something very unpleasant and a danger to the free desktop as a whole.

[aufkrawall]

So was GBM on Wayland a few years ago until people started using it and bugs got fixed and it became more stable (welcome to software development). Linux has been trying to get Wayland + GBM stable for like 6 years? EGLStreams was only put into Gnome and KDE literally a year ago and distros deliberately make it more difficult to use Wayland + EGLStreams making the problem worse.

And why bother putting additional testing and fixing efforts into eglstreams implementations? Nvidia does not pay FOSS devs to do so. If at all, this would be the only acceptable way.
Oh, btw: No mentioning of running XWayland Vulkan accelerated on Nvidia anywhere.

Users who want FLOSS can use nouveau.

No, they can't. It's useless because it gets actively sabotaged by Nvidia.

Most linux users however want a working system and its certain Linux developers that have an immature/irrational/unreasonable attitude that is causing Linux users to suffer one way or another (without any real changes to this attitude X11/Xorg will never be deprecated considering that NVidia is the biggest graphics card manufacturer and no one is going to use Linux distro that doesn't work).

And yet Linux desktop market share is inexistent, despite of Nvidia supporting Xorg for decades (in a shitty way, but well). Sometimes you need to cut weight to make something vital for the future.