XWayland Gets Initial Support For EGLStreams To Support NVIDIA's Driver

[PackRat]

You did not read the article yourself?

"AMD is creating Radeon bundles in order to get Vega to actual users who wants to buy cards. Scott Herkelman Vice President & GM Radeon Gaming business unit, said that it created Radeon packs to ensure that cards will go to gamers. AMD also asked its etail partners to limit sales to one Vega per customer."

That's what they can do. Miners are still their customers, shafting them would be equally bad.

I don't care of "functioning". I want opensource on Linux. That's the whole point of it. If I just want "functioning" I would be on Windows, where all works fine and the sun always shines.

(And I actually have a Windows rig for gaming and one for retrogaming)

I've got nothing against NVIDIA per-se, I use/recommend them for Windows users depending on what they actually need.

Windows has rainbows and unicorns too. When Nvidia open sources on Linux I'll gift you a copy of Gears of War 4 from the windows 10 store. You can play it on amd with an xbox too.

[sa666666]

Nvidia Rule. Opensource graphic drivers will always suck.

If that's how you feel, why are you using Linux at all? You obviously don't have a problem with proprietary software having full control of your system, so you might as well use Windows.

[darkbasic]

I hope the patch gets rejected.

[DerCaveman]

They support wayland with an open KHRONOS standard called EGLStreams

No, they bet on the wrong horse by working on EGLStreams and they don't want to switch their own stuff to use GBM. So they search for ways to force EGLStreams and let all others do the work.
Like a parasite.

[cybertraveler]

I encourage Windows users/subjects to switch to GNU/Linux all the time. I always suggest to them that they buy hardware that is designed for GNU/Linux or is known to work well with it in order to get the best experience. As part of that, I always suggest they avoid Nvidia and go with Intel or AMD. My argument is very simple:

• Nvidia do not provide high quality open source graphics drivers for their consumer hardware. Intel and AMD do. As such:
  • if you choose Nvidia and their drivers are buggy; you are stuck with buggy drivers. With Intel and AMD, there are 100s of skilled and interested third parties who can contribute fixes to the drivers. Many of them do.
  • if you choose Nvidia and they don't support the distro you want to switch to; you're probably going to have to spend time figuring out how to get the proprietary drivers manually working using a hack (if you can get them working at all). Conversely: Intel and AMD largely "just works".
• Nvidia do not co-operative with developers that try to create Open Source drivers for their hardware. It's not just that they don't air-drop sufficient documentation, they don't even provide legal, signed, firmware/microcode for their graphics cards. As such:
  • the third-party, Open Source nvidia drivers are usually very slow and there are often delays in supporting new nvidia hardware.
• Nvidia have been followed the path above for a long time and there is no clear sign of them changing their behaviour.

So Neo...

Take the green pill: You get limited choice or dirty hacks for unsupported-distro compatibility, buggy drivers that are difficult/impossible to fix, proprietary code hooked deep into your system with potential security vulnerabilities or even back doors. To top it all off, to buy nvidia hardware is to play a small part in supporting a company that is a burden on the Open Source ecosystem and described by one developer as "one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers" -Linus T.

Take the red pill: You get AMD's first class integration with all popular desktop distros, relatively stable drivers that are being continuously examined and improved by many interested groups outside of AMD, Open Source code that you are free to inspect. Fast support for new hardware in their Open Source drivers. You are supporting a company that is going to great lengths to integrate with the Open Source ecosystem and create lasting value for all those in it.

... or take the blue pill and go with Intel. The blue pill is very similar to the red pill... just slower. OK my Matrix narrative is a bit broken :P I'm no Morpheus.

[rudregues]

cybertraveler the best comment in this thread. I already had choose the red and blue pill in the past, but never the green. Middle finger to Nvidia.

[polarathene]

> As such, there is these initial patches for decoupling GBM from GLAMOR and then adding a GLAMOR EGL back-end for EGLStreams along the XWayland code-path.

This is the main change/patch that many here feel shouldn't be merged? How is the decoupling a bad thing? The GLAMOR EGL back-end perhaps could perhaps be an external module that gets loaded in if that were your issue but the other stuff that allows this to be a possibility isn't a bad thing?

It's time for Linux users to start ditching Nvidia hardware.

Not always an option. Some software for compute work only supports CUDA, some of it is also proprietary software, thus users don't have much control of that software better supporting AMD ROCm, doesn't help when there isn't any better or even close to alternative for these kinds of software. In time though that'll probably change somewhat

I encourage Windows users/subjects to switch to GNU/Linux all the time. I always suggest to them that they buy hardware that is designed for GNU/Linux or is known to work well with it in order to get the best experience. As part of that, I always suggest they avoid Nvidia and go with Intel or AMD. My argument is very simple:

Hacks on what distro to get nvidia drivers? And are the users you're advising this to likely to be using one of those distros? Support is pretty good in all the mainstream ones, the users are most likely to go to Ubuntu or Manjaro distros which are user/newbie focused and good community support. Both of which to my understanding make nvidia driver support pretty easy. For other distros you just need to install the nvidia drivers package. It's only more of a headache with Optimus laptops, not sure how much better that is with AMD dGPU(you still have to run a command to have some apps use the dGPU while everything else runs on iGPU don't you?) I think that's a bit of a moot point?

Didn't it take quite a while for the vega GPUs upon release to even support video output on Linux? You don't get that with nvidia, what you can get is no nouveau support which some distros will try to use as the driver for their live image installers, even if there is a capable iGPU avaialble instead. On some distros this is worked around with a boot option of non-free/proprietary drivers, but at least it should work with nvidia. On AMD you'd have hardware that wouldn't output for months unless you yourself or a distro was supplying patched kernel(equivalent to your hacky workaround).

If the user wants to do compute work where CUDA is dominant, their software may not support AMD or Intel. Some do now like TensorFlow with AMD ROCm, however that's still requiring additional work to support, hack work around as you'd put it? Will still be the case until at least mid 2018 if I'm not mistaken, maybe longer.

Not sure how the above correlates to "first class integration with all popular distros"? AMD is still really good these days compared to when I started using Linux back in 2008 where nvidia was pretty much a no brainer to go with. Now provided the GPU works for most peoples use cases, I'd advise AMD as well, I just don't quite agree with your points against nvidia. Definitely can be buggy as I've noticed with KDE sometimes, but it's fairly solid/stable, tends to have better performance for games as well.

[PackRat]

I encourage Windows users/subjects to switch to GNU/Linux all the time. So Neo... OK my Matrix narrative is a bit broken :P I'm no Morpheus.

Matrix isn't working for me. They all died and One of the Wachowskii brothers got a sex change and bought a mac too :P Star wars rebel alliance against an evil empire would have worked here. uname -o GNU/Linux has no loyalty to Intel or Amd x86 we can see that they both are working together because of arm being a threat. That's why they are cooperating and trying to stay relevant. Watch the movie John Wick 2 they got far more secure computers and real bitcoins.

[cj.wijtmans]

> As such, there is these initial patches for decoupling GBM from GLAMOR and then adding a GLAMOR EGL back-end for EGLStreams along the XWayland code-path.

This is the main change/patch that many here feel shouldn't be merged? How is the decoupling a bad thing? The GLAMOR EGL back-end perhaps could perhaps be an external module that gets loaded in if that were your issue but the other stuff that allows this to be a possibility isn't a bad thing?

I had the same reaction. It should have been like that from the start.

[cybertraveler]

Hacks on what distro to get nvidia drivers?

I expect the setup experience is going to be messy and limiting for almost all the less popular distros, but even popular distros like Arch have special steps that users have to follow:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA

If I have Intel onboard graphics or an AMD RX 480 I need not take any special steps when setting up Arch. I'll get fast 3D acceleration out of the box.

If I have nvidia hardware the wiki page above immediately points out a few things I must consider:

• If I just use the out-of-box experience, unlike with Intel and AMD I'll have the slow nouveau drivers.
• If I then go to the official NVIDIA site to get the fast proprietary drivers, I've already failed as the wiki states: "Avoid installing the NVIDIA driver through the package provided from the NVIDIA website."
• The wiki states that i must start out with a fact finding process to determine the exact card I have and thus which specific proprietary driver I should try. I added emphasis to the word "try", because the wiki states: "If these packages do not work, nvidia-beta^AUR may have a newer driver version that offers support.". So there is a trial and error aspect to the proprietary driver setup. Hacky.
• Do you have a GeForce 7 series card? Well "Nvidia no longer supports drivers for your card. This means that these drivers do not support the current Xorg version." So guess what: your options are now:
  • resort to the slow nouveau, or...
  • downgrade XOrg (you will get an inferior XOrg with potential bugs, missing features and potential dependency issues in other packages) and install the "unsupported" (again, probably buggy) nvidia drivers. Nasty.
• Are you using a custom kernel in Arch? Well you have special steps for nvidia including the need to run "mkinitcpio every time there is a nvidia driver update" (it can be automated). Not exactly hacky, but it's still an extra step that AMD and Intel Open Source users don't have to do.
• Are you running an unreleased kernel version because you want early access to a new feature? With Intel and AMD there's a good chance that you'll have no problems. With nvidia, if the new kernel version has changed the ABI, there's a good chance that you're going to get issues.

These points are all just for Arch and Arch is a very popular distro.

I used the word "hacky" in my original post. Perhaps it's not quite right, because not all the issues with running the nvidia proprietary drivers on less popular distros can be described as "hacky". I suppose the issues include: error prone, hacky, time consuming, limiting, trade-offs, work-arounds, gotchas.

And are the users you're advising this to likely to be using one of those distros? Support is pretty good in all the mainstream ones, the users are most likely to go to Ubuntu or Manjaro distros which are user/newbie focused and good community support. Both of which to my understanding make nvidia driver support pretty easy. For other distros you just need to install the nvidia drivers package.

I agree that proprietary driver support is pretty good for the mainstream distros (eg Ubuntu). This doesn't nullify my points though. Many new GNU/Linux users start out with an "easy" & popular distro (Mandrake, back in the day, Ubuntu these days) and many of them as they become more expert will start exploring alternative, more advanced and less popular distros. This is a path I took. If these users have nvidia hardware, there will be more friction, troubleshooting and restrictions imposed upon them if/when they decide to switch to an alternative distro. Further to my previous points, there is no guarantee that Nvidia will continue to release new drivers for new kernels, so they may not even be able to upgrade to a newer version of a popular distro let-alone switch to a less popular distro. Obviously there is no guarantee that Open Source drivers will be updated for newer kernels/mesas, but it's far more likely that they will be compared to nvidia. Once a driver ends up in Mesa or the kernel, they seem to get dragged along with new releases until the time that the hardware is very old and is becoming obscure.

So I'm not just considering the short term immediate needs of a new GNU/Linux user. I want to set them on a path which will likely give them good results now and for years to come.

Didn't it take quite a while for the vega GPUs upon release to even support video output on Linux?

You have a point here. I left this out of my post to try and keep it a bit more concise. AMD didn't have working, stable, out-of-box support for their hardware with their Open Source drivers. The situation was far from dire though:
* They did have working, stable, out-of-box support for their hardware with the proprietary drivers (IIRC) which puts them at least on a level playing field with nvidia here.
* Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will almost certainly have this out-of-box Vega support (as will all desktop distro versions that are released around the same time).
* For practical purposes I would advise new Windows to GNU/Linux converts to still go with AMD or Intel. I'd just say that if they go with AMD something like the RX 580. No big deal.

If the user wants to do compute work where CUDA is dominant,

This isn't relevant to 99% of desktop computer users and it isn't relevant to 100% of the people I've encouraged to switch.