NVIDIA Outlines Current Wayland Limitations & Upcoming Driver Features

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland.

Plattner outlined some of the driver features currently not possible under Wayland/XWayland for workstation users due to the lack of support by Wayland compositors and/or the existing Wayland protocols. As such, there are currently no plans to support them for (X)Wayland use. Among those features not planned include:

- Stereo rendering using GLX / EGL / Vulkan.

- Implicit SLI Mosaic mode.

- The nvidia-settings utility with the same level of configuration support under X11. This comes down to the lack of cross-compositor display configuration support.

But via Vulkan Direct to Display code there are plans for stereo rendering with Vulkan, Vulkan explicit SLI via the VK_KHR_device_group extension, swap groups via VK_NV_present_barrier, and frame lock and genlock support.

Some of the other features planned for future NVIDIA driver releases with Wayland support include:

- Multi-monitor VRR.

- nvidia-drm fbdev=1 by default.

- nvidia-drm modeset=1 by default.

- Display muxes for laptops.

- Advanced display pipeline features.

- Front-buffer rendering in GLX with XWayland.

- NVIDIA DRM Presentation Timing.

- VDPAU support on Wayland.

- vGPU support on Wayland.

See this developer.nvidia.com post for more details on the current Wayland implementations and upcoming NVIDIA driver plans.