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

[ix900]

Sorry to say but AMD has its own problems. Either way, Nvidia works quite well on Wayland today with a few issues. Most of the problems now are from Wayland breaking applications.

The only real issue is the Nvidia hater group. They can go fly a kite.

[mdedetrich]

I agree with you 100% on this.



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.

Its borderline physically impossible for NVidia to open source their current drivers, I think a lot of people don't realize this. NVidia's blob is fully of copyrighted code accumulated over 40 years (due to SG graphics). Ontop of this, NVidia's driver developers have worked on this copyrighted code, so its probably gotten to the point where its not realistically feasible to figure out what code is copyrighted and what isn't.

NVidia likely would have to do a clean room implementation with no copyrighted code, and for a graphics driver that is far from simple and they also get no money out of it (Linux CUDA users have no problem using Xorg)

Both NVidia and Linux are to blame here for the general situation, but if you want to blame someone for having hardware that "just works", you can blade Linux developers. There is very little NVidia can do here, almost all of the control is in Linux's court.

Also if you are using friendly user distros (like Manjaro) you can just click "install NVidia driver" and things just work. Of course it uses X11, but thats because the experience with Wayland needs work.

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.

And what about people who want to use the proprietary blob because they need CUDA, or due to the fact that NVidia graphics cards are much better than any other alternative (especially at the high end?).

You can't have your cake and eat it too, if you are arguing for freedom of choice for users then they should also be free to use the blob if they want. Freedom to only use FOSS software is an oxymoron.

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.

It probably has more to do with the fact that historically, NVidia graphics cards has been by far the best experience for gaming (including with Linux). We will see what Radeon does with big navi 2, but its unlikely this will change any time soon.

[aufkrawall]

Either way, Nvidia works quite well on Wayland today with a few issues.

Except that Wayland backends of Firefox or mpv just show a black window with Wayland eglstreams and XWayland Vulkan has no GPU acceleration at all, so forget about Wine gaming.
Edit: Not even GPU gamma ramps like nightlight work, no custom EDID support, no VRR support, no native hardware video decoding in any application...
You call that complete mess "few issues"? I'm always astounded how clueless and ignorant people in a so called Linux forum are on Linux topics, while they think their unqualified opinion would matter in any way...

[mdedetrich]

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.

You do realize that NVidia spent their own time getting their EGLStreams code merged into KDE's wayland backend, right (which means by definition they did spend their own money)?

They also spending their own time and money working on patches for X11/Xorg. Things are not as black and white as you put them out to be.

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

Bullshit, even nouveau developers have said this. NVidia's intention for adding firmware signing into their cards is because China was selling illegal Nvidia knockoff cards with hacked firmware during the crypto boom and the only way to prevent this is to add signed firmware onto the device. It had nothing to do with nouveau and even nouveau developers said this.

Its the exact same thing with secure boot, if you want people to stop tampering with firmware/loading of firmware you have to use encryption. Unfortunately this has knockoff effects, and this was one of them.

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.

Well Linux FOSS/desktop developers dug their own grave here, I can guarantee you that X11/Xorg aint going anywhere until they work constructively with NVidia.

[aufkrawall]

Keep on living in your dreamworld, fanboy.

[mdedetrich]

Keep on living in your dreamworld, fanboy.

Thanks for your typical constructive post demonstrating how mature you are, I am sorry reality hit you hard on the head!

[treba]

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...

This sounds like a bug somewhere in the setup to me - maybe some component making assumptions about X11 or so. In my understanding you should be able to use jack even without a display server at all. Using a Wayland session shouldn't stop you from using jack, alsa, oss or whatever for sound.

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.

Just to understand you correctly: did you compare Mutter on Wayland to Mutter on X11 or Mutter on Wayland to bare Xorg? Because in the former case I'd expect things to be similar slow in both cases (because of the slow llvmpipe rendering) while in the later case you'd compare composited vs uncomposited rendering - the later being faster when using cpu rendering, but with heavy disadvantages both for the visual result and for application/toolkit developers having to maintain fallback paths.

[aufkrawall]

Thanks for your typical constructive post demonstrating how mature you are, I am sorry reality hit you hard on the head!

Yes, it always baffles me how dumb people can be. A very inconvenient part of reality for sure.

[mdedetrich]

Yes, it always baffles me how dumb people can be. A very inconvenient part of reality for sure.

Let me know when mainstream distros that focus on usability will default to Wayland for NVidia (assuming they don't block NVidia for setups which also have an Intel discrete GPU).

I will be waiting (have been for a while).

[piotrj3]

Let me know when mainstream distros that focus on usability will default to Wayland for NVidia (assuming they don't block NVidia for setups which also have an Intel discrete GPU).

I will be waiting (have been for a while).

Honestly, right now from perspective of stable distro that aims to be usable and stable and aims to have as little bug reports as possible, I don't think Wayland should be enabled for anyone. You only get some advantage in stuff written nativly for Wayland and so far there is not many of those, while X.org still provides better performance for X stuff. Professionalists with CAD etc. and gamers should still use X.org and there is simply little need to move to Wayland even if you are AMD or Intel user.

My personal hate honestly is people who just say "blacklist nvidia" "block nvidia" etc. while Nvidia actually is willing to help with issues with their own blob and they do activly fix issues that only persist in for example KDE or Gnome or something. They even did some patches back then to adress issues with DXVK. Erik who implemented EGLstreams for KDE, when he found something wrong he not only fixed driver but also fixes something similar in Gnome although he was only assigned to help KDE.

Although I believe Nvidia with Xwayland etc. is kind of waiting game for Nvidia, until Nvidia's business decision finds that costs of maintaining Xwayland support is worth it (similar way KDE got support, it was delayed and delayed until they did that).