Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Changes Default For NVIDIA Driver Back To Using X.Org Rather Than Wayland

[piotrj3]

Then why did nvidia request that this change be reverted for them and them only?

Because Wayland doesn't support basic functionality like screensharing for them, and lacking such functionality is deal breaking for tons of users. And they won't support it due to that wayland is totally Idiotically made in implicit sync way, when the driver is made in explicit sync way.

Basicly for Nvidia you have 2 choices :

- make some hacky memory fences to make them semi implicit but that adds fire to bugland,

- make somehow it correctly implicit, but then sufffer (like open source driver) with implementing Vulkan that is explicit only.

Not to mention that even if driver is implemented in way of "implicit sync" it will still be horrible to scale up in performance. That is why AMD engineer and also collabora engineer proposed to move towards explicit sync. and guess who was explicit sync : That is right EGLstreams!

[mppix]

Nvidia, fix your damn driver.

Their 510.x driver is seriously broken.
I would not be surprised if they depreciate their backend and opensource kernel portions just because they are incapable of releasing a functioning driver..

[Developer12]

Because Wayland doesn't support basic functionality like screensharing for them, and lacking such functionality is deal breaking for tons of users. And they won't support it due to that wayland is totally Idiotically made in implicit sync way, when the driver is made in explicit sync way.

Basicly for Nvidia you have 2 choices :

- make some hacky memory fences to make them semi implicit but that adds fire to bugland,

- make somehow it correctly implicit, but then sufffer (like open source driver) with implementing Vulkan that is explicit only.

Not to mention that even if driver is implemented in way of "implicit sync" it will still be horrible to scale up in performance. That is why AMD engineer and also collabora engineer proposed to move towards explicit sync. and guess who was explicit sync : That is right EGLstreams!

These all sound like problems of nvidia's own creation, considering that AMD and intel have been fine.

[Linuxxx]

These all sound like problems of nvidia's own creation, considering that AMD and intel have been fine.

Not really; here, read this:

## Chicken and egg problems Ok, this is where it starts getting depressing. I made the claim above that Wayland has an explicit synchronization protocol that's of questionable usefulness. I would claim that basically any bit of plumbing we do through window systems is currently of questionable usefulness. Why? From my perspective, as a Vulkan driver developer, I have to deal with the fact that Vulkan is an explicit sync API but Wayland and X11 aren't. Unfortunately, the Wayland extension solves zero problems for me because I can't really use it unless it's implemented in all of the compositors. Until every Wayland compositor I care about my users being able to use (which is basically all of them) supports the extension, I have to continue carry around my pile of hacks to keep implicit sync and Vulkan working nicely together. From the perspective of a Wayland compositor (I used to play in this space), they'd love to implement the new explicit sync extension but can't. Sure, they could wire up the extension, but the moment they go to flip a client buffer to the screen directly, they discover that KMS doesn't support any explicit sync APIs. So, yes, they can technically implement the extension assuming the EGL stack they're running on has the sync_file extensions but any client buffers which come in using the explicit sync Wayland extension have to be composited and can't be scanned out directly. As a 3D driver developer, I absolutely don't want compositors doing that because my users will complain about performance issues due to the extra blit. Ok, so let's say we get KMS wired up with implicit sync. That solves all our problems, right? It does, right up until someone decides that they wan to screen capture their Wayland session via some hardware media encoder that doesn't support explicit sync. Now we have to plumb it all the way through the media stack, gstreamer, etc. Great, so let's do that! Oh, but gstreamer won't want to plumb it through until they're guaranteed that they can use explicit sync when displaying on X11 or Wayland. Are you seeing the problem? To make matters worse, since most things are doing implicit synchronization today, it's really easy to get your explicit synchronization wrong and never notice. If you forget to pass a sync_file into one place (say you never notice KMS doesn't support them), it will probably work anyway thanks to all the implicit sync that's going on elsewhere. So, clearly, we all need to go write piles of code that we can't actually properly test until everyone else has written their piece and then we use explicit sync if and only if all components support it. Really? We're going to do multiple years of development and then just hope it works when we finally flip the switch? That doesn't sound like a good plan to me.

[F.Ultra]

Actually hardware is always the issue, and its up to the OS to support it, or accept that the market that uses that hardware wont be reachable. The world did NOT go the other way... in fact almost no one in the world went the other way. Wayland went the other way and quite frankly 99% of the world doesn't care. Linux on the desktop (aka the people who would use Wayland over X) accounts for less than 3% of the desktop market.

Its hard to find good stats for hardware usage by OS, the best I could readily find was the Steam Hardware Survey done in March (sourced from here). Downloading and parsing the data on the GPU stats specific to Linux users I get the following breakdown:

Row Labels	Sum of Percentage
AMD	26.20%
NVIDIA	37.63%
Other	36.17%
Grand Total	100.00%

As you can see the majority of Linux users who would be using a Linux desktop are actually still NVIDIA users, who clearly are putting their money where they feel its best. Nvidia actually has absolutely no need to court the Linux Wayland evangelists. The whole 100% above still only represents <3% of all sales in the market. Taken all together Nvidia has 77%+ market share in the desktop... so yah as much as Linus T. may throw the bird at Nvidia... they will just send him back to the corner for a time out and not care one bit, because honestly the onus is on the Linux community to support hardware (Nvidia included).

To me this just shows that the majority (62.37%) is not nVidia users?

[Spacefish]

I am happy that i have choosen an RDNA 1 AMD GPU.
Since the amdgpu driver was created, experience only got better.
I remember random black screens and GPU crashes / hangs in the beginning, but this affected the windows driver as well. This was fixed ~3 months later.
Over time performance got better, small gpu hang / ring timeout "crashes" where resolved and gpu reset was introduced.

Now i am running on Wayland with butter smooth 164Hz and really good gaming experience without any properitary driver, but the mainlined amdgpu driver + RADV for Vulkan. It just works. Even shader emulated Raytracing works

Wayland is the future and it works today for most GPUs, only NVIDIA is lacking good driver support from the big GPU vendors.

I am also looking forward to Deep Color / HDR Support in Wayland, the current proposals / protypes look very promising. If they are implemented the linux ecosystem will have one of the best color mangement / HDR implementations for display devices.
Once Software starts to use that (HDR in gaming for example) NVIDIA has another reason to move / fix their driver.

[zexelon]

To me this just shows that the majority (62.37%) is not nVidia users?

This is a very fair observation, but the discussion us about Nvidia specifically. Really the dominant GPU is Intel by quantity.

[ezst036]

Lol dude what are you smoking? Check the freedesktop issue tracker. There are hundreds of Intel/amdgpu bugs. Where can I buy this 100% bug free experience?

I'm not sure that bugs for Intel or AMD that prevents people from playing World of Warcraft on Proton is relevant to this discussion. So that's kind of off topic.

For Wayland and Intel and AMD, this is not an issue.(Or rather, it's not an issue that it's broken causing Canonical to reverse course)

[Developer12]

Not really; here, read this:

This sounds like nvidia need a world that is impossible to create.

[indepe]

From those explanations I don't understand why nvidia's driver works better with X11. To me it would sound like X11 would have the same problems as XWayland.