NVIDIA To Meet With Wayland, Linux Kernel Developers To Discuss GBM vs. Streams

[gilboa]

In detriment on maintenance thus bringing unnecessary stress to the developers because a company avoid using existing implementation. EGLStream is very much like the old xorg-x11-drv-nv driver, obfuscation without access to the source and the inability to fix the real problem. History would repeat again which are the reason neither Gnome nor KDE nor other desktop environment developers want to relive again.

Not sure what xorg-x11-drv-nv has to do with it.
nVidia maintains a very large share of the Linux workstation market. Technical merits aside (I'm in no position to call which approach is better), RedHat and SLES both have a vested interest in using Wayland in say RHEL8 (or CentOS8) / SLES 13 which will *require* rock-solid nVidia support. As RedHat more-or-less controls GNOME, so 'mutter' will not be an issue. As for kwin, nVidia/RedHat can always hire Martin Gräßlin to add a second backend which will solves the 'kwin' problem.
Sure, Weston and Enlightenment compositors may never support EGLStreams, but neither one hold any meaningful workstation market share.

- Gilboa

[kazetsukai]

I think there's really two issues NVIDIA has with GBM-

1) We're likely going to duplicate the situation with libGL. When installing your graphics driver on X11 you have to choose the libGL implementation you want, same will happen for "libGBM".

Even using a pluggable GBM architecture, its still a bit of a nightmare- your linker shouldn't be deciding what driver code path to use. For example, on systems with multiple, heterogeneous graphics cards (like Intel+NVIDIA/bumblebee/etc) this is a huge issue. It isn't the linker's job to know what graphics card you're rendering to, therefore not the linker's job to figure out which implementation to use.

EGLStreams with producers and consumers fix this issue.

2) EGLStreams is an actual standard, GBM is not. Wayland's priorities are clearly with Linux whereas NVIDIA's priorities are all supported platforms.

We can all hate on NVIDIA all day about their asininity on a multitude of topics, but I don't think we can on this one... Open source developers can be obstinate and stupid too, just look at the last decade of famous DM's (Gnome, KDE) trying to "go mobile" fruitlessly while giving the middle finger to their desktop users.

What I haven't heard are the opposition's arguments against EGLStreams other than the compositors having to abandon GBM.