20 ms·

“We currently have no plans to support Xwayland”

181 points by ollien 9y ago

asaka 9y ago
https://url.leanapp.cn/linus-fuck-nvidia https://url.leanapp.cn/linus-fuck-nvidia
reikonomusha 9y ago
Note that this is not equivalent to saying "we plan to not/we will not support Xwayland." It just means it's not currently in the pipeline (and may or may not be in the future).
- dpark 9y ago
  There's no meaningful difference between these. Not planning support is equivalent to planning no support.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    I mean, that depends, doesn't it? nVidia also refused to support KMS for a long time but they finally added it as it became a harder and harder requirement. KMS was a big overhaul and pre-requisite for modern stacks like Wayland. If that can get added, I'm reasonably confident that Wayland support will show up somewhere along the way (assuming that Wayland continues on its track to widespread adoption).
    - dpark 9y ago
      No, it doesn't depend. The two statements are equivalent. NVidia could certainly change their plans, but the particular way they phrase "no support" is irrelevant. It's not as if "we have no plans for support" could result in accidentally having support.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Wayland will be supported by nvidia. XWayland will not be. XWayland is a transition layer than runs X11 applications under Wayland. Generally speaking, most users will not need to do this.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Exactly. 95% of Linux users use X11 and 1% use Xwayland. Reverse those numbers and you'll hear a different story.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    You sure about these numbers? What's the share of Fedora users? (Genuine question.)
    - curt15 9y ago
      Here's one source: "Speaking of the Linuxes, Ubuntu is tops among them with 12.3% of the entire OS market for developers. Fedora, Mint, and Debian accounted for 1.4%, 1.7%, and 1.9% of all responses, respectively." https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016
dragonne 9y ago
I guess I have no plans to buy another Nvidia card, then. Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that. No they don't. I have had 3 different nVIdia configs, and presently 2 for gaming, and through my experience hopping from one distro to the next I find that the problem is actually unrelated to nVIdia drivers - but the compositor. For example, in Mint if you switch to compton, it makes all tearing disappear. This is well documented.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    They do for many users, and taming them is a pain. That's why using Mesa is a breeze in comparison.
  - ollien 9y ago
    They definitely tear, at least for me. I was able to do some hacks to make Plasma not tear, but quite a few games tear like crazy.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      What compositor do you use? Feel free to reach me, maybe I can help if you can provide me with more details of your config.
      - ollien 9y ago
        I use whatever is included with Fedora's KDE spin. Not quite sure which to be honest.
- lottin 9y ago
  Buy only from companies that support FOSS, e.g. AMD and Intel.
sleavey 9y ago
What's the best supported graphics card line on Linux now and in the near future, anyway? I recently tried to search and it was difficult to get good information.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported. Both the proprietary blob driver and the Mesa-based free driver share an upstream kernel module. The Mesa-based driver tends to have better performance for most applications, but currently lacks some of the bleeding-edge display technologies from the proprietary driver. That is likely to be completely rectified in the next couple of kernel release cycles. They continue to expand their team, and there is a certain amount of broader community involvement in the Mesa-based driver. Valve software has at least one full time developer working on the driver in addition to the full time developers working directly for AMD on it. The peak performance of AMD's top (pre-vega) cards right now is less than the peak performance of NVIDIA's top cards, but for similarly priced cards, the performance is basically on par. Finishing out 2017, and starting 2018, I think AMD may reach or exceed NVIDIA in flagship performance.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported. This is true and I'm a happy linux gamer these days but I wanted to point out that these are new drivers and the mesa support is really only in new kernels. Ubuntu 16.04 - don't bother, Ubuntu 16.10 - getting there, Ubuntu 17.04 - worked great for me since day 1. Arch will also work fine.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      Gamers know to either use rolling distros, or to make sure to install recent kernels and Mesa from backports and etc. instead of being stuck on LTS kernel / drivers.
      - slavik81 9y ago
microcolonel 9y ago
I currently have no plans to buy an NVIDIA card ever again for display; and if AMD does well enough, probably not for compute either. They've been consistently useless in supporting the platforms I want to use for work and play, and while they've gotten a shade better over the last decade, not as better as their competition in the discrete GPU market.
ajdlinux 9y ago
Wow, that's seriously disappointing. As of recently, I have a mixed 1920x1200 and 4K setup on my home desktop, and 1920x1200 + 2560x1440 setup on my work laptop. I was very interested in what I'd heard about Wayland supporting per-monitor scaling and hoping to move over whenever KDE's Wayland support stabilised. Well, I guess I'll still be doing that on my work laptop with its Intel graphics... here's hoping AMD does better for my next desktop GPU upgrade.
- boardwaalk 9y ago
  Does xrandr's --scale option not do what you want?
- samtoday 9y ago
  You'd be surprised by how many apps support Wayland natively. Gtk+ and QT support it transparently for app developers, and I assume other frameworks do as well. And Wayland is a huge improvement over X. Whenever I go back to X, it really suffers from tearing on portrait sub-1080p DIV-D monitor.
userbinator 9y ago
Perhaps Linus needs to give them another middle finger.
- osmala 9y ago
  No not really. The finger was about not giving enough details for opensource driver and pushing closed source blob instead. This issue is about closed source blob not supporting next gen linux desktop until the desktop has gotten enough market share to force them to.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    But if there was a proper open source driver, no one would need to put up with this shit.
posguy 9y ago
For a company that is wholly reliant on Linux to sell quite a few of their products, the lack of support from Nvidia continues to be impressive. Intel is actively trying to kill off lowend and mid-range GPUs in the desktop, and has locked them out in the mobile space, leaving Nvidia with just the high end GPU market and their ventures into the ARM SOC space. By not treating Linux end user devices as first class citizens, I don't see how Nvidia intends to have a viable business long term. Who wants a tablet, phone or desktop GPU without drivers?
- binarycrusader 9y ago
  The reality is all the money they make off Linux is with workstations cards or HPC. Neither of those market niches are likely demanding Wayland support since stability is a hard requirement and Wayland really isn't sufficiently mature yet (nor does it really have sufficient market adoption). They're a business, so when their customers need it, they'll support it. Until then, only hobbyists or an insufficient part of their customer base is interested, so understandably, they're not investing in it.
  - andars 9y ago
    Those markets are also not demanding support because many of them have no display at all. This is definitely true for HPC GPUs and will be true for deep learning servers.
    - binarycrusader 9y ago
      Yes, I thought that was obvious, so didn't mention it.
  - joelthelion 9y ago
    Wayland is probably going to be the default in all the next stable releases (RHEL, debian (is it already the case?), Ubuntu). Not supporting it sounds risky.
    - 9y ago
Iv 9y ago
Yeah well I doubt they keep that stance for very long. Nvidia is investing like crazy in keeping the deep learning community happy about their products and they are disproportionately on Linux. If/when Wayland becomes the default for Ubuntu, Nvidia will follow. Can't let them ponder the amount of time it would take to code the missing layers for AMD hardware
- mkj 9y ago
  A bit off topic, but do the people using deep learning GPUs use the same device for desktop graphics? There aren't problems with display lockups etc?
  - sdenton4 9y ago
    My home deep learning machine only had a monitor long enough to install Ubuntu. After that it's been accessed entirely through ssh on my home lan... I sometimes fantasize about hooking up twelve monitors for a wicked game of descent, though.
  - n17r4m 9y ago
    I can only speak from my own experience (2-3 GPU rigs running tensorflow) but I have never had any trouble. Full Ubuntu desktop. Training models on the GPU does not cause any problems with display lockups etc.
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    We don't use the display at all - there's not a lot of space in the server room for monitors.
  - danieldk 9y ago
    We can't even if we wanted too ;) (most Teslas don't have video output).
  - rprospero 9y ago
    Not exactly on the deep learning side, but I am a scientist who does some computatinoal work on the GPU. You're right that we don't use our computer card for our graphics and, as many people pointed out, the computation will wind up running on a headless server. On the other hand, during development, our code will be running on our desktops and will be using the GPUs on the graphics card. I've witnessed a developer's frustration with X11 driver issues cause a project to transition from CUDA to OpenCL. Granted, he didn't just throw a hissy fit an port the code. Rather, it inspired him to write up a tradeoff analysis of OpenCL versus CUDA that showed that OpenCL offered this specific project significant benefits and that the main selling points of CUDA weren't being used in this instance. He also wound up rage coding a prototype port to OpenCL to go along with the proposal. The project would have moved eventually, since it was the better engineering decision in this case, but it was about a half decade away on the timeline until the lead dev's compositor stopped work.
hyperion2010 9y ago
I've been following the X11 vs Wayland story since very close to the beginning and have built and used wayland and weston multiple times over the years. Cutting through all the FUD on both sides, my conclusion is that Wayland was created in the context of some very specific use cases which essentially preclude it from being a general solution that can replace X by itself (it could succeed if there was a single project to reimplement X in a sane way, but leaving it to GKT and QT is NOT a solution by any stretch of the imagination). Nvidia's engagement with linux simply does not cover the use cases that Wayland was created to address. In my view desktop/workstation use cases are not sufficiently covered by Wayland, and that is where nvidia's focus has been. tl;dr Nvidia has no need to play in this space, anyone using X will just use X without the translation layer.
- madez 9y ago
  While your post is interesting, it is also vague. Can you specify what Wayland is missing that can't be adequately handled by QT or GTK, or do you just have the feeling there is such a thing?
  - hyperion2010 9y ago
    Without speaking too much FUD from the X11 side the main issues facing workstation use cases are input handling and permissions. The current wayland party line is "just use dbus to communicate between windows." This is complete madness because it basically means that if you want programs to be able to work together and not steal each others keybinds they all have to depend on a message passing framework. Full disclosure I have done everything in my power to avoid installing dbus and having dbus dependencies, but it is getting harder and harder. That said, it doesn't matter what you think about dbus, it is completely unrealistic to expect that every piece of gui software written for linux to be rewritten to include dbus. This is basically going back to the days of cooperative multitasking and I think we all know how that ended, the overhead is just too high.
    - sjellis 9y ago
      I only follow Linux graphics casually, but AIUI one of the principles of the Wayland initiative was to replace the monolithic model of X with a combination of more tightly scoped components. For example, libinput was created to take responsibility for actually handling input devices, so that Wayland compositors would never need to carry that code, and the input device handling in X could be decommissioned. From that point of view, "Wayland" is kind of a short-hand for a number of different stacks that have some components in common, and speak the Wayland protocol. If you choose not to use a complete stack on a system, then the result can't be fully functional. Personally, I don't have any sense of how much dark matter is in the area of Linux GUI applications. We can easily know about Open Source, where most modern applications sit on toolkits and desktops that are moving to Wayland, but presumably places like CERN have some really old internal applications that will only ever run on X until they are replaced. I'm genuinely unsure how large that problem is. I have to say that I'm always skeptical about arguments that something can't be done for performance reasons. People have been using that argument against new technology since at least the days when C was decried as new-fangled, decadent luxury.
jopsen 9y ago
This is why I buy Intel graphics only... No laptops with Nvidia, not even dual graphics. Maybe AMD if they drop proprietary drivers. But never Nvidia.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  fglrx/amdcccle and now amdgpu-pro is AMD's proprietary driver package
- morecoffee 9y ago
  Intel driver support is pretty bad. If you aren't running with i915 at close to head there are easy to hit graphics bugs. Running most Steam games on Linux yields much worse performance and stability than running the same games on the same hardware with Windows.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    It's far from being a single variable here. WHen you talk about games, it's not just about the drivers, it's about what graphics API used as well, and how well the engine is optimized to run on OpenGL in the first place. Most engines are made with DirectX in mind so any quick port to OpenGL will lead to worse performance regardless of driver quality.
    - morecoffee 9y ago
      To be honest, I can put up with the less than graphics. What really got me was the regular hangs that would happen. I spent a fairly long time trying out different things to debug it, and eventually reported the hangs to the DRM list. While they were helpful, their answer was to update my kernel. It worked, but I am not comfortable having to run at head just to play old video games.
- saghm 9y ago
  In my experience, dual graphics on Linux is more of a pain than either solely Nvidia or solely integrated. Both my current and past laptop have had dual integrated/Nvidia setups (the first because I didn't know any better, and the latter because I mistakenly thought it was discrete only), and both times my solution has been to just not set up the discrete card at all because I've been unable to get the dual setup working in a reasonable amount of time and I don't do anything graphics-intensive enough for it to matter.
seiferteric 9y ago
Why is support from nvidia even needed? I remember that there was always this weird thing where graphics drivers were written for X11 instead of being part of the kernel (or a module) like all other drivers, is this still the case? Why can't they write a kernel (framebuffer?) driver so no specific support is needed for a desktop environment?
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-c... Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers. edit I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card. If you do want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.
  - ollien 9y ago
    I personally wasn't able to make multimonitor work with nouveau, but the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion well.
    - krylon 9y ago
      FWIW, I use an nVidia GTX960 with the nouveau driver on openSUSE Tumbleweed, with two displays. Basically, it Just Worked(tm) out of the box. Performance is good for regular desktop use, including video playback (then again, my CPU is a Ryzen 1700), 3d gaming performance is not overwhelming, though. Plus, Kerbal Space Program gives me weird display errors and sometimes manages to crash Xorg. I am not much of a gamer, though, so I can live with this arrangement.
shmerl 9y ago
That's just too bad, especially for those who use Wine (Wine on Wayland now looks completely stalled, and XWayland would be the only way to use it in the foreseeable future). Firefox is also far from ready. But Mesa really caught up lately, so switching to AMD was never as good. Just forget Nvidia and enjoy properly integrated graphics stack.
jolux 9y ago
Is xwayland the same thing as wayland?
- shmerl 9y ago
  No. It's X11 implementation over Wayland.
pfooti 9y ago
this isn't "no plans to support wayland" - these drivers are built to support wayland. It's the Xwayland translation layer they're talking about here, which (I think - my understanding is a bit thin here) is for running applications that are compiled to use X11 graphics in a wayland environment. So: it could well be that this is an issue of resource allocation more than anything else. Over time, most applications should move to using wayland (or whatever window / surface library emerges as the clear winner, but that looks like wayland is the future here) for their graphics. A lot of effort into supporting Xwayland would mean work spent on a library that should be of limited utility - only useful during the transition between platforms (like the old carbon layer for OSX in the early 10.0, 10.1 days). Right? Or maybe I'm misreading it.
- ollien 9y ago
  From what I read on reddit, Xwayland is X running within wayland, and (for some reason) needs some special code in the drivers. I'm not fully clear as to why or what needs to change.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    The motivation for Xwayland is that 1. a lot of applications use no GUI frameworks (or outdated versions thereof, e.g. all these apps that are still on Qt 4), so if the frameworks are ported to Wayland, it doesn't help them. And 2. a lot of applications talk to X directly even if using a framework (e.g. an application that takes a screenshot needs to use xlib or xcb directly because that's typically not abstracted by a GUI framework). Xwayland enables these types of applications to continue working in a Wayland session, so that desktops and distributions can move to Wayland without having to either wait on the legacy applications or remove them from the distribution.
    - d33 9y ago
      Couldn't those just be recompiled with a wrapper that maps X calls to Wayland?
      - 9y ago
sunnyps 9y ago
From what I gather, it's about GLX support in Xwayland. Most general purpose applications won't be affected* but games would be. * The big exception is Chrome which uses GLX for accelerated rendering. The software fallback path uses a lot more CPU and won't support WebGL AFAIK.
concede_pluto 9y ago
Ouch. Is Xwayland still the only way to do remoting? https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8 just punts on it and speculates about what could theoretically happen someday, but I don't even know how or why I'd start using a backend that can only run on one computer.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kronos29296 9y ago
This really sucks considering that nvidia drivers have better perf than nouveau. Well can't help it, only nouveau till nvidia releases new ones.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  nVidia is crippling the Nouveau drivers by not releasing the signed blobs required for basic things as fan control and setting the clockspeed.
  - kronos29296 9y ago
    Yup. Can't believe that such great drivers were written from nothing but Reverse Engineering. Since mine is entry level laptop GPU the performance has no limits. But Nvidia should follow AMD is releasing Opensource drivers. (But they won't)
gigatexal 9y ago
Is AMD supporting xwayland? If so I’ll just buy their stuff and call it a day.
- floatboth 9y ago
  amdgpu is an open source driver, the userspace part is in Mesa, so it should support xwayland all the things
  - gigatexal 9y ago
    Sounds good.
thrillgore 9y ago
I've consistently had issues with Vulkan on the 960M my laptop has. Nvidia sure makes it easy for me to go back to AMD. The graphics market is dangerously locked up by two players and its time some new players took the capital risk and stepped in. Nvidia would probably give a shit if someone bothered to challenge their share of the market in both graphics and computational space.
- sp332 9y ago
  The patent situation is a huge barrier to entry.
digi_owl 9y ago
Well i guess that is more confirmation that my best bet is to buy AMD components when possible.
TheSpecialist 9y ago
Good luck using Wine with Wayland on Nvidia driver. I'm really glad I ditched Nvidia and switched to AMD. With Mesa progressing at fast pace, Nvidia will become simply inferior in many aspects, including the above one.
BusinessInsider 9y ago
The best thing Linux users can do: Buy and recommend AMD and Intel hardware. Both are working well with open source drivers built into the kernel.

181 points by ollien 9y ago

https://url.leanapp.cn/linus-fuck-nvidia https://url.leanapp.cn/linus-fuck-nvidia

Note that this is not equivalent to saying "we plan to not/we will not support Xwayland." It just means it's not currently in the pipeline (and may or may not be in the future).

dpark 9y ago
There's no meaningful difference between these. Not planning support is equivalent to planning no support.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  I mean, that depends, doesn't it? nVidia also refused to support KMS for a long time but they finally added it as it became a harder and harder requirement. KMS was a big overhaul and pre-requisite for modern stacks like Wayland. If that can get added, I'm reasonably confident that Wayland support will show up somewhere along the way (assuming that Wayland continues on its track to widespread adoption).
  - dpark 9y ago
    No, it doesn't depend. The two statements are equivalent. NVidia could certainly change their plans, but the particular way they phrase "no support" is irrelevant. It's not as if "we have no plans for support" could result in accidentally having support.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Wayland will be supported by nvidia. XWayland will not be. XWayland is a transition layer than runs X11 applications under Wayland. Generally speaking, most users will not need to do this.
paulddraper 9y ago
Exactly. 95% of Linux users use X11 and 1% use Xwayland. Reverse those numbers and you'll hear a different story.
- majewsky 9y ago
  You sure about these numbers? What's the share of Fedora users? (Genuine question.)
  - curt15 9y ago
    Here's one source: "Speaking of the Linuxes, Ubuntu is tops among them with 12.3% of the entire OS market for developers. Fedora, Mint, and Debian accounted for 1.4%, 1.7%, and 1.9% of all responses, respectively." https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016

dragonne 9y ago

I guess I have no plans to buy another Nvidia card, then. Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that.

ekianjo 9y ago
> Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that. No they don't. I have had 3 different nVIdia configs, and presently 2 for gaming, and through my experience hopping from one distro to the next I find that the problem is actually unrelated to nVIdia drivers - but the compositor. For example, in Mint if you switch to compton, it makes all tearing disappear. This is well documented.
- shmerl 9y ago
  They do for many users, and taming them is a pain. That's why using Mesa is a breeze in comparison.
- ollien 9y ago
  They definitely tear, at least for me. I was able to do some hacks to make Plasma not tear, but quite a few games tear like crazy.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    What compositor do you use? Feel free to reach me, maybe I can help if you can provide me with more details of your config.
    - ollien 9y ago
      I use whatever is included with Fedora's KDE spin. Not quite sure which to be honest.
lottin 9y ago
Buy only from companies that support FOSS, e.g. AMD and Intel.

sleavey 9y ago

What's the best supported graphics card line on Linux now and in the near future, anyway? I recently tried to search and it was difficult to get good information.

microcolonel 9y ago
Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported. Both the proprietary blob driver and the Mesa-based free driver share an upstream kernel module. The Mesa-based driver tends to have better performance for most applications, but currently lacks some of the bleeding-edge display technologies from the proprietary driver. That is likely to be completely rectified in the next couple of kernel release cycles. They continue to expand their team, and there is a certain amount of broader community involvement in the Mesa-based driver. Valve software has at least one full time developer working on the driver in addition to the full time developers working directly for AMD on it. The peak performance of AMD's top (pre-vega) cards right now is less than the peak performance of NVIDIA's top cards, but for similarly priced cards, the performance is basically on par. Finishing out 2017, and starting 2018, I think AMD may reach or exceed NVIDIA in flagship performance.
- flukus 9y ago
  > Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported. This is true and I'm a happy linux gamer these days but I wanted to point out that these are new drivers and the mesa support is really only in new kernels. Ubuntu 16.04 - don't bother, Ubuntu 16.10 - getting there, Ubuntu 17.04 - worked great for me since day 1. Arch will also work fine.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Gamers know to either use rolling distros, or to make sure to install recent kernels and Mesa from backports and etc. instead of being stuck on LTS kernel / drivers.
    - slavik81 9y ago

microcolonel 9y ago

I currently have no plans to buy an NVIDIA card ever again for display; and if AMD does well enough, probably not for compute either. They've been consistently useless in supporting the platforms I want to use for work and play, and while they've gotten a shade better over the last decade, not as better as their competition in the discrete GPU market.

ajdlinux 9y ago

Wow, that's seriously disappointing. As of recently, I have a mixed 1920x1200 and 4K setup on my home desktop, and 1920x1200 + 2560x1440 setup on my work laptop. I was very interested in what I'd heard about Wayland supporting per-monitor scaling and hoping to move over whenever KDE's Wayland support stabilised. Well, I guess I'll still be doing that on my work laptop with its Intel graphics... here's hoping AMD does better for my next desktop GPU upgrade.

boardwaalk 9y ago
Does xrandr's --scale option not do what you want?
samtoday 9y ago
You'd be surprised by how many apps support Wayland natively. Gtk+ and QT support it transparently for app developers, and I assume other frameworks do as well. And Wayland is a huge improvement over X. Whenever I go back to X, it really suffers from tearing on portrait sub-1080p DIV-D monitor.

userbinator 9y ago

Perhaps Linus needs to give them another middle finger.

osmala 9y ago
No not really. The finger was about not giving enough details for opensource driver and pushing closed source blob instead. This issue is about closed source blob not supporting next gen linux desktop until the desktop has gotten enough market share to force them to.
- majewsky 9y ago
  But if there was a proper open source driver, no one would need to put up with this shit.

posguy 9y ago

For a company that is wholly reliant on Linux to sell quite a few of their products, the lack of support from Nvidia continues to be impressive. Intel is actively trying to kill off lowend and mid-range GPUs in the desktop, and has locked them out in the mobile space, leaving Nvidia with just the high end GPU market and their ventures into the ARM SOC space. By not treating Linux end user devices as first class citizens, I don't see how Nvidia intends to have a viable business long term. Who wants a tablet, phone or desktop GPU without drivers?

binarycrusader 9y ago
The reality is all the money they make off Linux is with workstations cards or HPC. Neither of those market niches are likely demanding Wayland support since stability is a hard requirement and Wayland really isn't sufficiently mature yet (nor does it really have sufficient market adoption). They're a business, so when their customers need it, they'll support it. Until then, only hobbyists or an insufficient part of their customer base is interested, so understandably, they're not investing in it.
- andars 9y ago
  Those markets are also not demanding support because many of them have no display at all. This is definitely true for HPC GPUs and will be true for deep learning servers.
  - binarycrusader 9y ago
    Yes, I thought that was obvious, so didn't mention it.
- joelthelion 9y ago
  Wayland is probably going to be the default in all the next stable releases (RHEL, debian (is it already the case?), Ubuntu). Not supporting it sounds risky.
  - 9y ago

Iv 9y ago

Yeah well I doubt they keep that stance for very long. Nvidia is investing like crazy in keeping the deep learning community happy about their products and they are disproportionately on Linux. If/when Wayland becomes the default for Ubuntu, Nvidia will follow. Can't let them ponder the amount of time it would take to code the missing layers for AMD hardware

mkj 9y ago
A bit off topic, but do the people using deep learning GPUs use the same device for desktop graphics? There aren't problems with display lockups etc?
- sdenton4 9y ago
  My home deep learning machine only had a monitor long enough to install Ubuntu. After that it's been accessed entirely through ssh on my home lan... I sometimes fantasize about hooking up twelve monitors for a wicked game of descent, though.
- n17r4m 9y ago
  I can only speak from my own experience (2-3 GPU rigs running tensorflow) but I have never had any trouble. Full Ubuntu desktop. Training models on the GPU does not cause any problems with display lockups etc.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  We don't use the display at all - there's not a lot of space in the server room for monitors.
- danieldk 9y ago
  We can't even if we wanted too ;) (most Teslas don't have video output).
- rprospero 9y ago
  Not exactly on the deep learning side, but I am a scientist who does some computatinoal work on the GPU. You're right that we don't use our computer card for our graphics and, as many people pointed out, the computation will wind up running on a headless server. On the other hand, during development, our code will be running on our desktops and will be using the GPUs on the graphics card. I've witnessed a developer's frustration with X11 driver issues cause a project to transition from CUDA to OpenCL. Granted, he didn't just throw a hissy fit an port the code. Rather, it inspired him to write up a tradeoff analysis of OpenCL versus CUDA that showed that OpenCL offered this specific project significant benefits and that the main selling points of CUDA weren't being used in this instance. He also wound up rage coding a prototype port to OpenCL to go along with the proposal. The project would have moved eventually, since it was the better engineering decision in this case, but it was about a half decade away on the timeline until the lead dev's compositor stopped work.

hyperion2010 9y ago

I've been following the X11 vs Wayland story since very close to the beginning and have built and used wayland and weston multiple times over the years. Cutting through all the FUD on both sides, my conclusion is that Wayland was created in the context of some very specific use cases which essentially preclude it from being a general solution that can replace X by itself (it could succeed if there was a single project to reimplement X in a sane way, but leaving it to GKT and QT is NOT a solution by any stretch of the imagination). Nvidia's engagement with linux simply does not cover the use cases that Wayland was created to address. In my view desktop/workstation use cases are not sufficiently covered by Wayland, and that is where nvidia's focus has been. tl;dr Nvidia has no need to play in this space, anyone using X will just use X without the translation layer.

madez 9y ago
While your post is interesting, it is also vague. Can you specify what Wayland is missing that can't be adequately handled by QT or GTK, or do you just have the feeling there is such a thing?
- hyperion2010 9y ago
  Without speaking too much FUD from the X11 side the main issues facing workstation use cases are input handling and permissions. The current wayland party line is "just use dbus to communicate between windows." This is complete madness because it basically means that if you want programs to be able to work together and not steal each others keybinds they all have to depend on a message passing framework. Full disclosure I have done everything in my power to avoid installing dbus and having dbus dependencies, but it is getting harder and harder. That said, it doesn't matter what you think about dbus, it is completely unrealistic to expect that every piece of gui software written for linux to be rewritten to include dbus. This is basically going back to the days of cooperative multitasking and I think we all know how that ended, the overhead is just too high.
  - sjellis 9y ago
    I only follow Linux graphics casually, but AIUI one of the principles of the Wayland initiative was to replace the monolithic model of X with a combination of more tightly scoped components. For example, libinput was created to take responsibility for actually handling input devices, so that Wayland compositors would never need to carry that code, and the input device handling in X could be decommissioned. From that point of view, "Wayland" is kind of a short-hand for a number of different stacks that have some components in common, and speak the Wayland protocol. If you choose not to use a complete stack on a system, then the result can't be fully functional. Personally, I don't have any sense of how much dark matter is in the area of Linux GUI applications. We can easily know about Open Source, where most modern applications sit on toolkits and desktops that are moving to Wayland, but presumably places like CERN have some really old internal applications that will only ever run on X until they are replaced. I'm genuinely unsure how large that problem is. I have to say that I'm always skeptical about arguments that something can't be done for performance reasons. People have been using that argument against new technology since at least the days when C was decried as new-fangled, decadent luxury.

jopsen 9y ago

This is why I buy Intel graphics only... No laptops with Nvidia, not even dual graphics. Maybe AMD if they drop proprietary drivers. But never Nvidia.

tomc1985 9y ago
fglrx/amdcccle and now amdgpu-pro is AMD's proprietary driver package
morecoffee 9y ago
Intel driver support is pretty bad. If you aren't running with i915 at close to head there are easy to hit graphics bugs. Running most Steam games on Linux yields much worse performance and stability than running the same games on the same hardware with Windows.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  It's far from being a single variable here. WHen you talk about games, it's not just about the drivers, it's about what graphics API used as well, and how well the engine is optimized to run on OpenGL in the first place. Most engines are made with DirectX in mind so any quick port to OpenGL will lead to worse performance regardless of driver quality.
  - morecoffee 9y ago
    To be honest, I can put up with the less than graphics. What really got me was the regular hangs that would happen. I spent a fairly long time trying out different things to debug it, and eventually reported the hangs to the DRM list. While they were helpful, their answer was to update my kernel. It worked, but I am not comfortable having to run at head just to play old video games.
saghm 9y ago
In my experience, dual graphics on Linux is more of a pain than either solely Nvidia or solely integrated. Both my current and past laptop have had dual integrated/Nvidia setups (the first because I didn't know any better, and the latter because I mistakenly thought it was discrete only), and both times my solution has been to just not set up the discrete card at all because I've been unable to get the dual setup working in a reasonable amount of time and I don't do anything graphics-intensive enough for it to matter.

seiferteric 9y ago

Why is support from nvidia even needed? I remember that there was always this weird thing where graphics drivers were written for X11 instead of being part of the kernel (or a module) like all other drivers, is this still the case? Why can't they write a kernel (framebuffer?) driver so no specific support is needed for a desktop environment?

peterwwillis 9y ago
Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-c... Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers. edit I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card. If you do want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.
- ollien 9y ago
  I personally wasn't able to make multimonitor work with nouveau, but the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion well.
  - krylon 9y ago
    FWIW, I use an nVidia GTX960 with the nouveau driver on openSUSE Tumbleweed, with two displays. Basically, it Just Worked(tm) out of the box. Performance is good for regular desktop use, including video playback (then again, my CPU is a Ryzen 1700), 3d gaming performance is not overwhelming, though. Plus, Kerbal Space Program gives me weird display errors and sometimes manages to crash Xorg. I am not much of a gamer, though, so I can live with this arrangement.

shmerl 9y ago

That's just too bad, especially for those who use Wine (Wine on Wayland now looks completely stalled, and XWayland would be the only way to use it in the foreseeable future). Firefox is also far from ready. But Mesa really caught up lately, so switching to AMD was never as good. Just forget Nvidia and enjoy properly integrated graphics stack.

jolux 9y ago

Is xwayland the same thing as wayland?

shmerl 9y ago
No. It's X11 implementation over Wayland.

pfooti 9y ago

this isn't "no plans to support wayland" - these drivers are built to support wayland. It's the Xwayland translation layer they're talking about here, which (I think - my understanding is a bit thin here) is for running applications that are compiled to use X11 graphics in a wayland environment. So: it could well be that this is an issue of resource allocation more than anything else. Over time, most applications should move to using wayland (or whatever window / surface library emerges as the clear winner, but that looks like wayland is the future here) for their graphics. A lot of effort into supporting Xwayland would mean work spent on a library that should be of limited utility - only useful during the transition between platforms (like the old carbon layer for OSX in the early 10.0, 10.1 days). Right? Or maybe I'm misreading it.

ollien 9y ago
From what I read on reddit, Xwayland is X running within wayland, and (for some reason) needs some special code in the drivers. I'm not fully clear as to why or what needs to change.
- majewsky 9y ago
  The motivation for Xwayland is that 1. a lot of applications use no GUI frameworks (or outdated versions thereof, e.g. all these apps that are still on Qt 4), so if the frameworks are ported to Wayland, it doesn't help them. And 2. a lot of applications talk to X directly even if using a framework (e.g. an application that takes a screenshot needs to use xlib or xcb directly because that's typically not abstracted by a GUI framework). Xwayland enables these types of applications to continue working in a Wayland session, so that desktops and distributions can move to Wayland without having to either wait on the legacy applications or remove them from the distribution.
  - d33 9y ago
    Couldn't those just be recompiled with a wrapper that maps X calls to Wayland?
    - 9y ago

sunnyps 9y ago

From what I gather, it's about GLX support in Xwayland. Most general purpose applications won't be affected* but games would be. * The big exception is Chrome which uses GLX for accelerated rendering. The software fallback path uses a lot more CPU and won't support WebGL AFAIK.

concede_pluto 9y ago

Ouch. Is Xwayland still the only way to do remoting? https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8 just punts on it and speculates about what could theoretically happen someday, but I don't even know how or why I'd start using a backend that can only run on one computer.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kronos29296 9y ago

This really sucks considering that nvidia drivers have better perf than nouveau. Well can't help it, only nouveau till nvidia releases new ones.

robert_foss 9y ago
nVidia is crippling the Nouveau drivers by not releasing the signed blobs required for basic things as fan control and setting the clockspeed.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  Yup. Can't believe that such great drivers were written from nothing but Reverse Engineering. Since mine is entry level laptop GPU the performance has no limits. But Nvidia should follow AMD is releasing Opensource drivers. (But they won't)

gigatexal 9y ago

Is AMD supporting xwayland? If so I’ll just buy their stuff and call it a day.

floatboth 9y ago
amdgpu is an open source driver, the userspace part is in Mesa, so it should support xwayland all the things
- gigatexal 9y ago
  Sounds good.

thrillgore 9y ago

I've consistently had issues with Vulkan on the 960M my laptop has. Nvidia sure makes it easy for me to go back to AMD. The graphics market is dangerously locked up by two players and its time some new players took the capital risk and stepped in. Nvidia would probably give a shit if someone bothered to challenge their share of the market in both graphics and computational space.

sp332 9y ago
The patent situation is a huge barrier to entry.

digi_owl 9y ago

Well i guess that is more confirmation that my best bet is to buy AMD components when possible.

TheSpecialist 9y ago

Good luck using Wine with Wayland on Nvidia driver. I'm really glad I ditched Nvidia and switched to AMD. With Mesa progressing at fast pace, Nvidia will become simply inferior in many aspects, including the above one.

BusinessInsider 9y ago

The best thing Linux users can do: Buy and recommend AMD and Intel hardware. Both are working well with open source drivers built into the kernel.