NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux

As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company's plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgxMDE

[Attent?ter]

So Nvidia Wayland support is coming soon nice

[mmrezaie]

I still hoped they would offer some sort of integration with nouveau like what ATI team is doing with their open source radeon driver.

[Attent?ter]

Looks like Mir will be the `second-class citizen` here

[nanonyme]

Looks like Mir will be the `second-class citizen` here

Is that a good or a bad thing?

[bakgwailo]

Looks like Mir will be the `second-class citizen` here

It is pretty much everywhere - Intel is not going to directly support it, nor will QT/GTK.

[ssokolow]

NVIDIA's binary blob isn't using the KMS API

I hope that, despite this, they'll take ths opportunity to reduce the likelihood of "Your kernel module and GL library are out of sync. You won't have acceleration until you reboot" incidents.

It's a pain in the ass to have to wind down my piles of in-progress stuff and reboot every time nVidia updates their driver. I've been considering whipping up a solution where APT holds the nVidia driver at the current version and a forced upgrade is triggered on reboot so it only gets upgraded when kernel modules are being reloaded anyway.

[Morpheus]

I hope the weston patches with the "generic" methods won't hurt performance on open source drivers, either with radeon or nouveau (is intel concerned by that or do they work only on android side these days ? )

[tipho]

Looks like Mir will be the `second-class citizen` here

Not sure about that. The proposed EGL extensions used in those Weston patches are cowritten by Canonical. I think it's fair to assume the Mir side of things is probably already taken care of.

[blackout23]

Looks like Mir will be the `second-class citizen` here

I think they'll simply work on everything to get Wayland going first, since it is currently usable either through weston (as lightweight desktop) or Gnome. Most of the work to get there will probably the same as for Mir. After that they can focus on the probably small part to get Mir working, too. Doesn't make sense to work on both at the same time.