NVIDIA Continues Discussing Their Controversial Wayland Plans With Developers

[bug77]

So this method is vendor specific and wouldn't work with other hardware? That of course should be a no go for any compositor.

What about EGL exactly looks vendor specific to you?

[blackout23]

Is there any advantage to the way NVIDIA is doing it or is it merely preference?

Read the posts by Andy Ritger (NVIDIA).

[pal666]

nvidia wants to make linux less incompatible with their proprietary windows shit. lol

[CapsAdmin]

Reading the discussion it at least seems civil. Maybe I'm looking too much into it but Nvidia said they knew this would be controversial, so my guess is that they don't know how to do this properly so they just threw a patch at the mailing list in hope to have a discussion on how to best solve this problem on both sides.

[pal666]

And thats exactly the reason Valve wont be installed on my machine. 64bit.

if by valve you mean steam, it is a proprietary x86-only software. but so are most of steam games. if you don't plan to install steam games, you don't need steam.
btw, x86_64 systems are perfectly capable of running x86 code, they were designed with backwards compatibility in mind. but it seems you are using some broken distro and bragging about it.

[patstew]

Is there any advantage to the way NVIDIA is doing it or is it merely preference?

Nvidia need to pass extra information between the EGL/wayland client bit and the compositor bit so that things can be organised optimally in the graphics card, and they couldn't see how to do that in the current framework. It looks like they're having a reasonably productive discussion though, so hopefully it'll be sorted out.

[andre30correia]

nvidia wants to make linux less incompatible with their proprietary windows shit. lol

"linux" is generic, ubuntu will use mir and is linux, the xorg distro are linux, maybe wayland never happens

[pedrogabriel]

Could we see some benchmarks of bumblebee vs prime, since this version suports prime from default?

[computerquip]

Nvidia isn't implementing a design meant for nvidia. They simply don't like the current method of doing things.

We (NVIDIA) clearly think EGLStreams is a good direction for expressing buffer sharing semantics. In our ideal world, everyone would implement these extensions and Wayland compositors would migrate to using them as the generic vendor-neutral mechanism for buffer sharing

[rabcor]

Ehhem, what is wrong with using EGL? And if this won't be mainlined, wouldn't it be easy to implement an extension/plugin package named something like "wayland-nvidia" or "wayland-EGL" or something that simply adds support for Nvidia's chosen approach? Also wasn't open source software about more "developer and user freedom" to begin with? Nvidia clearly thinks this is the way to do things, who are we to tell them "No, you're not allowed to do it this way." when we constantly blather about "freedom" in Linux and the open source world? Are we hypocrites now?

Also whats wrong with having an alternative way of using EGL for buffer management rather than GBM? Couldn't it just simply perform faster when you are on hardware that supports it?

I don't see the problem, I just don't, I'm probably going to be buying AMD next because I generally don't like Nvidia's way of things over the past couple of years, but this is not one of the things I find "controversial" about them... I don't see any problem here... Unless there are some serious downsides to using EGL for buffer management, I think Nvidia should stand their ground.