NVIDIA 555.42.02 Linux Beta Brings Wayland Explicit Sync, GSP Firmware Used By Default

It's coming a week later than anticipated but the NVIDIA R555 Linux driver beta has been released! This is the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver update that brings Wayland explicit sync support along with a host of other important improvements.

The NVIDIA 555.42.02 beta driver released this morning adds Wayland explicit sync support with the linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for DRM synchronization objects. This jives nicely with the various Wayland compositors/desktops that have been rolling out explicit sync support and other ecosystem work around it. The NVIDIA driver supporting explicit sync should address a number of Wayland issues that had been plaguing users.

The NVIDIA R555 Linux driver also now uses the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware by default on all GPUs that support it, which is RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer.

Some of the other changes in the NVIDIA 555.42.02 Linux driver beta include dropping Base Mosaic support on GeForce GPUs, raising the base kernel version requirement from v3.10 to v4.15, adding immediate presentation mode support to the Vulkan Wayland WSI, enabling HDMI 10 bits per component support by default, support for using EGL instead of GLX as the OpenGL ICD for NvFBC, and many bug fixes.

Downloads and more details on the NVIDIA 555 Linux driver beta via NVIDIA.com. Fresh NVIDIA Linux benchmarks coming up soon on Phoronix.