NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors

At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Wayland-Roadmap-2024

[shmerl]

Looking forward to kwin switching to Vulkan. At least developers are looking into it.

[ahrs]

enabling the FBDEV and modeset kernel module parameter options for their driver by default

Finally! Every other graphics driver in the kernel has been doing modesetting by default (you need nomodeset to disable this) for years and years and years now (I actually don't know when modesetting was first added to the kernel, it's that old!). Having to configure this manually is the biggest source of user-error for "Nvidia doesn't work with Wayland".

[Quackdoc]

"Use vulkan" Is nice in theory, but gl wont die any time soon, and depending on vulkan impl, some devices wont even work anyways.

[ahrs]

"Use vulkan" Is nice in theory, but gl wont die any time soon, and depending on vulkan impl, some devices wont even work anyways.

Anything modern will. I think it's fine to support Vulkan as long as compositors don't abandon their OpenGL codepath (I know for a fact the old laptop I'm typing this on doesn't support Vulkan except via Lavapipe/Lllvmpipe but OpenGL works fine via Crocus). It's not realistic to do that. They can probably probe the Vulkan driver and enable it by default for anything other than Lavapipe.

[brad0]

But those who know the Linux kernel well cannot write good drivers for NVIDIA hardware.

They can't when NVidia does not release documentation. NVidia always is and will be the problem.

[Beryesa]

Vulkan might be the almighty cross-vendor API, but it's nice to see Nvidia finally caring about Wayland this year. The next RHEL and Ubuntu LTS are scary enough huh?

[ahrs]

They can't when NVidia does not release documentation. NVidia always is and will be the problem.

• Learn reverse engineering
• Become the Nouveau maintainer
• Get poached by Nvidia because you were too good at your job
• Rinse and repeat

[brad0]

• Learn reverse engineering
• Become the Nouveau maintainer
• Get poached by Nvidia because you were too good at your job
• Rinse and repeat

That's really dumb and doesn't resolve anything.

[Quackdoc]

Anything modern will. I think it's fine to support Vulkan as long as compositors don't abandon their OpenGL codepath (I know for a fact the old laptop I'm typing this on doesn't support Vulkan except via Lavapipe/Lllvmpipe but OpenGL works fine via Crocus). It's not realistic to do that. They can probably probe the Vulkan driver and enable it by default for anything other than Lavapipe.

last I checked rx580 still can't run wlroots vulkan, this may have changed, but I haven't seen an email on any of the related issues. But agreed, I still use some devices on crocus too. recently picked out an old android box and started playing with that, good old lima driver.