NVIDIA Prepares XWayland OpenGL/Vulkan Acceleration Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Prepares XWayland OpenGL/Vulkan Acceleration Support

NVIDIA's Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-GL-VLK-XWayland

[zexelon]

This is awesome news! I have yet to try to boot my 3090 in Linux but I am excited to do so. I am happy that Nvidia is bowing to the community pressure and finally supporting the common interface for Wayland. To be honest in day to day use I dont really get the huge move to Wayland, but innovation must always continue and its nice to see team green supporting it!

[You-]

I wonder how they will get past the DMA buf restrictions

[aufkrawall]

Things Nvidia is still partially or even entirely missing on Wayland (apart from GBM):
-custom EDID support
-VRR
-manual fan controls
-overclocking/undervolting
-color/gamma adjustment
-VAAPI in Firefox
...

-> Might be usable in ten years or so.

[kpedersen]

but innovation must always continue and its nice to see team green supporting it!

Gosh it only seems like yesterday Apple was showing off Carbon as the innovation above "old" tech like X11. Carbon is long since dead ironically enough.

I also remember an MSDN article about how Microsoft's DWM composition was vastly superior to what X11 could do. Interestingly Microsoft's desktop hasn't really improved since they had it. It just feels more heavy and the effects slow down workflows without people realising.

I'm sure Gnome and Sway's fragmented interpretations of a WL protocol will be "actual" innovation though... Then we can all just fall back to XWayland and get this mess over with.

[mdedetrich]

I also remember an MSDN article about how Microsoft's DWM composition was vastly superior to what X11 could do. Interestingly Microsoft's desktop hasn't really improved since they had it. It just feels more heavy and the effects slow down workflows without people realising.

Microsoft's WDDM is far ahead of anything that Linux has ever offered, the fact that they were able to continuously add new features without breaking ABI's with drivers is a testament to that (where as in Linux land we are still arguing over basic features like triple buffering when they have been out for years in Windows).

[kokoko3k]

Too late nvidia, i finally switched from gtx1060 to rx5600xt and no regrets so far.

[kokoko3k]

Microsoft's WDDM is far ahead of anything that Linux has ever offered, the fact that they were able to continuously add new features without breaking ABI's with drivers is a testament to that

Windows HAVE to mantain compatibility, Linux don't.
If drivers are mainlined in the Linux tree, ABI change are not a problem and kernel devs have no interest on mantain ABI compatibility for out of tree drivers (nvidia).
If nvidia have no interest in mainlining his driver, then they will have to deal with the problem, their choice.
I would not say windows is "far ahead", quite the opposite!

[aufkrawall]

amdgpu kernel driver supports all kind of stuff like HDCP, HDR etc. It's not Linux as a whole that lags behind, it's mainly userspace. And Nvidia is one reason of this problem, not a solution.

[Cotyso]

Nice! It would be awesome if Fedora 34 would switch to wayland by default on nvidia proprietary drivers, assuming that these changes land in stable soon.