XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend

[furtadopires]

I wonder how much advanced Wayland would be today, had Nvidia and Cannonical not jeopardized the progress back then.

Fortunately I'm very satisfied with how Wayland is it today (specially once wine finally completes it's implementation) and hope we won't need another replacement in this scale too soon.

[bug77]

In turn this lightens up the XWayland code by around 1.5k lines of code with the patches merged today.

Really, this is what all the drama was about? 1.5k lines of code? The OSS community is in a bad, bad place...

[r1348]

Really, this is what all the drama was about? 1.5k lines of code? The OSS community is in a bad, bad place...

1.5k of unnecessary code to support a half-assed and undebuggable proprietary implementation. Kill it with fire.

[carewolf]

Still haven't managed to get gbm to work on Nvidia hardware in our project. Still seems mostly broken to me

[caligula]

I never made Wayland to work on my old GT 610 (Fermi) through official Nvidia's drivers, it was throwing some EGLStreams-related errors, both with GNOME and patched Weston, like there was no Wayland support for this card in drivers, though it technically supported it. I blame this EGLStreams trash. If they would've choose GBM, I think it would work fine.

I have Geforce 1080 on one system. I've installed Arch & Gnome. Also use early KMS for nvidia. Tested that early KMS is in use. Don't see wayland as an option in GDM. I even edited WaylandEnable=true in /etc/gdm/custom.conf. The env xdg session says it's X11. I don't think it supports Wayland yet.

[bug77]

1.5k of unnecessary code to support a half-assed and undebuggable proprietary implementation. Kill it with fire.

They're all "half-assed", none of the options is without its faults: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API

Judging by the discussions around it, I thought EGL Streams support was a matter of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lines of code. Turns out the effort of talking about it was easily an order of magnitude higher than the effort to actually sit down and implement said support. I've had projects in college that were probably longer than 1.5k lines of code...

[spicfoo]

They're all "half-assed", none of the options is without its faults: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC2016-Device-Memory-API

Judging by the discussions around it, I thought EGL Streams support was a matter of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lines of code. Turns out the effort of talking about it was easily an order of magnitude higher than the effort to actually sit down and implement said support. I've had projects in college that were probably longer than 1.5k lines of code...

EGL Streams is more than 1.5k lines of code obviously. What is referred to in the article is just the XWayland backend. You are missing the count on the driver code, compositors like Mutter etc. Go ahead and count those. Your typical college project doesn't stand a chance in terms of complexity of the low level code.

[MorrisS.]

I literally sold my Nvidia GPU so I could switch to wayland. I have no intention to look back now.

Just when Wayland is going to be powered by Nvidia. What an irony!

[MorrisS.]

I never made Wayland to work on my old GT 610 (Fermi) through official Nvidia's drivers, it was throwing some EGLStreams-related errors, both with GNOME and patched Weston, like there was no Wayland support for this card in drivers, though it technically supported it. I blame this EGLStreams trash. If they would've choose GBM, I think it would work fine.

Mesa doesn't adopt EGLstream or shouldn't. You can join Wayland by Mesa drivers unlike Nvidia proprietary drivers by your gt 610 card. However Wayland has been introduced very recently, so its environment is in work in progress. I assume that it will be possible to join Wayland session properly by the end of this year or in 2025.

[Daktyl198]

I wonder how much advanced Wayland would be today, had Nvidia and Cannonical not jeopardized the progress back then.

Fortunately I'm very satisfied with how Wayland is it today (specially once wine finally completes it's implementation) and hope we won't need another replacement in this scale too soon.

1. Canonical didn't jeopardize anything. Nobody seriously considered their Mir option from the start, and Mir is actually a pretty cool project these days as a Wayland server.
2. NVidia also technically didn't jeopardize anything. They had a serious technical look and considered EGLStreams to be a better option.

I think many people don't realize that to this day, EGLStreams ARE the better option. The only issue is that everybody in the FOSS community had already settled on GBM since it's a part of MESA and had written a bunch of code before NVidia could argue their case. Nobody wanted to rewrite all of that code and slow down adoption of Wayland (which is hilarious looking back on it now) so they argued against NVidia. I don't like NVidia as a company, but in this particular instance I still say they were right and we spent more manpower arguing against them than it would have taken to adopt their idea.

As for "how advanced wayland would be", the VAST amount of issues with wayland are with missing protocols to do things. Nothing about GBM vs EGLStreams would have changed that. The problem is the crazy amount of bureaucracy that goes into each and every protocol added to the Wayland spec, even just "extensions" and no additions to the core spec.