A Wayland Developer Shares His Concerns About NVIDIA's EGLStreams Proposal

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Wayland Developer Shares His Concerns About NVIDIA's EGLStreams Proposal

Here is an elegant explanation by an upstream Wayland developer about what the consensus outside of NVIDIA mostly comes down to in the EGLStreams vs. GBM debate that's been occupying Wayland stakeholders the past month...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-Dev-NV-Thoughts

[SpyroRyder]

Leaving aside the the fact that everyone would have to rewrite things and the general hassel of that, what are the technical differences between the two and why would you pick one over the other? And if GBM is the best method why then does Nvidia want EGLStreams?

[bug77]

Damn real world telling developers for something that runs on about 3% of the desktops in this world what to do.

So far, we have Nvidia wanting to use EGL Streams because it apparently works better than GBM. And we have Wayland sticking to GBM because? What would be the downside of Wayland using EGL streams, too? I haven't seen that discussed at all.

[starshipeleven]

It's a bit of a delicate situation since Nvidia could just decide to do EGLStreams regardless of what the community wants because they know everyone would have to support it in order to keep up with user demands: they have very popular hardware and a significant marketshare for the desktop Linux world.

The plot thickens.

It's going to be slow though, years. Meanwhile AMD is getting better. Can backfire horribly.

[Scias]

Damn real world telling developers for something that runs on about 3% of the desktops in this world what to do.

So far, we have Nvidia wanting to use EGL Streams because it apparently works better than GBM. And we have Wayland sticking to GBM because? What would be the downside of Wayland using EGL streams, too? I haven't seen that discussed at all.

Having to rewrite a good chunk of every Wayland compositor (+Mir) and possibly every other GPU drivers should eglstreams become the standard instead of GBM as NVIDIA is wishing is a already a big downside to me.

[Scias]

Damn real world telling developers for something that runs on about 3% of the desktops in this world what to do.

So far, we have Nvidia wanting to use EGL Streams because it apparently works better than GBM. And we have Wayland sticking to GBM because? What would be the downside of Wayland using EGL streams, too? I haven't seen that discussed at all.

Of course I couldn't edit my post thanks to the "unapproved" posts bullshit so sorry for the double post.

Forgot to say that actually there's nothing EGLStreams can do that GBM can't. Of course some of those would need some improvements to GBM but the changes would be much less invasive and even possibly backwards compatible for drivers/compositors.
On the other side, EGLStreams poses a lot of new challenges especially about frame synchronisation and feedback, plus completely breaks the whole model that Wayland and every compositor/driver uses currently.

[starshipeleven]

So far, we have Nvidia wanting to use EGL Streams because it apparently works better than GBM.

EGL streams is their pet project, nothing runs on that so any "better performance" claim is bs.

And we have Wayland sticking to GBM because? What would be the downside of Wayland using EGL streams, too? I haven't seen that discussed at all.

non-trivial development effort. VERY non-trivial. Also unwarranted claims.

[raonlinux]

Damn real world telling developers for something that runs on about 3% of the desktops in this world what to do.

So far, we have Nvidia wanting to use EGL Streams because it apparently works better than GBM. And we have Wayland sticking to GBM because? What would be the downside of Wayland using EGL streams, too? I haven't seen that discussed at all.

In the article is explained what are the downside of using the way they are saying, looks like you are creating an api just the end to send info to GBM . And all the manufacter need to to do the nvidia way, also saying that doesn't bring not benefits it all and is not works better learn something, also developers need to care about GBm and EGL Streams so it will be double work.

[bug77]

Leaving aside the the fact that everyone would have to rewrite things and the general hassel of that, what are the technical differences between the two and why would you pick one over the other? And if GBM is the best method why then does Nvidia want EGLStreams?

GBM is the best method in a Mesa world (Linux+BSD) only. But if you factor in other platforms that don't have GBM/Mesa then the least common denominator becomes EGL.

[doom_Oo7]

Damn real world telling developers for something that runs on about 3% of the desktops in this world what to do.

And backed by Samsung for its smartphones and in-vehicle infotainment, which is at seven times the market capitalization of nvidia (137 billion vs 19 billion) and almost 40 times the number of employees (319000 vs 8000)