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NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided bas

NVIDIA doesn't support GBM, which is the standard for buffer allocation. Use nouveau. >The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. This is pretty much what wlroots is.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  It's an nvidia problem, not a standard problem.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    But I mean what's the point of declaring something to be a standard if the important people weren't interested in implementing and supporting it? Anyone can come up with a standard in isolation. Getting the relevant people on board and able and willing to support it is the useful bit. Did they say they'd support it? If they never said they did it seems unfair to criticise. Are you going to support my graphics standard that I just made up?
  - rat9988 7y ago
    This is a standard problem. You can't be a standard if the market does't care about you. You are just a specification and guidelines.
    - boudin 7y ago
      Intel and AMD cares about it. If the Linux desktop market would grow, Nvidia would quickly change their mind. Now, this market growing is another question... But for me, nvidia gpu are just not a possibility because they lack good drivers on Linux.
      - llukas 7y ago
        So how do you want to grow Linux market share if you say FU to a significant part of the potential market? Steam hardware survey is pretty clear about AMD:Nvidia GPU ratio.
        ekc 7y ago
        (For gamers.)
        chungy 7y ago
        Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        I don't think so - I see nobody with a desktop computer these days except gamers or people running CAD or modelling who are basically doing the same thing as running a game.
        boudin 7y ago
        And all people using a computer for work...
        llukas 7y ago
        The same can be said about Linux desktop share. Should we draw the same conclusions? Except gaming is not that "niche": 1.35 billion PCs worldwide - https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-personal-computers-installed-base/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-persona... 47M active daily and 90M monthly users for steam https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-users/ https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-use...
      - krageon 7y ago
        > If the Linux desktop market would grow You can think of any number of fantasy scenarios that would make one of the biggest GPU vendors care about your standards, but sadly that is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one where Nvidia has the best game support on the market (far, far better than AMD - let's not even think about Intel here) and therefore anyone who still plays games on a PC will own one of them unless they are some sort of AMD advocate. At the end of the day, nobody wants to be reading "we don't support this because they're not nice to us". That's going straight back to the linux dark ages of 15 years ago, where you needed to care about all sorts of weird and arcane details to get a functioning desktop system.
- robert_foss 7y ago
  NVidia has a horrible history of Linux support. GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.
    - ori_b 7y ago
      How long did it take to get multiple monitors working with xrandr, again?
      - calcifer 7y ago
        Funnily enough, this is exactly what I was talking about. Nvidia supported multiple monitors on Linux for decades using TwinView, they simply didn't add support for the open source xrandr for 4-5 years, but even that has been supported for ~7 years now.
        ori_b 7y ago
        > Nvidia supported multiple monitors on Linux for decades using TwinView And Xorg supported them for decades before using Xinerama. Instead of collaborating with upstream, they just dumped something incompatible and broken, and said "Deal with it".
      - p_l 7y ago
        Multi monitor display worked perfectly for long time, long before "it works on intel, let's call it new standard" crew decided that flat shared framebuffer is the only way to go (apparently because of compositors and nothing else), something that also broke support for multi-gpu and especially heterogenous multi-gpu.
- makomk 7y ago
  GBM is a very useful standard if you only ever want to request buffers from drivers that use the Linux kernel's GPU buffer management code and modesetting code. (Preferably only Mesa-based drivers too.) NVidia doesn't use this and probably can't for licensing and other reasons. If you want to talk to any graphics driver that isn't correctly and intimately entwined with the right parts of the Linux kernel, GBM is basically useless. It is not in any way, shape, or form a generic standard for buffer management. (In principle GBM isn't quite a single-implementation Mesa only standard - third party implementations are possible, though the only one that exists right now is by ARM for their newer Mali GPUs. People seem to have had mixed results with it and I'm not sure it's even intended to run desktop Wayland.)
  - csande17 7y ago
    I'm not super familiar with the details of this stuff -- does this mean that there's basically no hope of any wlroots-based window manager ever working on non-Linux operating systems like BSD?
    - makomk 7y ago
      Most of the BSD variants have some (generally outdated) port of the Linux kernel graphics stack, sometimes even with a wrapper layer to try and make the BSD kernel internals look enough like Linux for it to run unmodified. So it's probably not completely hopeless, but that's mainly because the best shot at getting the graphics accceleration it needs is a straight port of the Linux kernel drivers. (At least for non-NVidia users.)
      - bojanz 7y ago
        Thankfully, getting less and less outdated (thanks to FreeBSD's wrapper layer, and OpenBSD Foundation sponsoring its own work). FreeBSD 12.0 has Linux DRM 4.16 code (April 2018), while -current has Linux DRM 5.0 code (March 2019). OpenBSD -current (next release) has Linux 4.19 DRM code (October 2018, LTS), with initial AMDGPU backports from 4.20 (AMD Picasso & Raven 2 support).
    - 7y ago
- pmlnr 7y ago
  a standard supported by nothing, that reminds me of xhtml2...
  - imtringued 7y ago
    It is very condescending to label Intel, AMD and pretty much every other GPU vendor other than Nvidia as nothing.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      If Nvidia don't support it, then it's just a standard, not the standard.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        Meanwhile X is still on death watch and Nvidia will be brought into the fold or be forced to stop pretending they support the linux desktop.
        michaelmrose 7y ago
        Wherein "death watch" is expected to work without difficulty for the next decade or longer. They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released. While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years. We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        It really doesn't matter to me if Nvidia drops out of the linux desktop market or not. I've never owned their hardware and never will, so it makes not an iota of difference to me. I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that's going to happen. Unless Nvidia decides to support the new system, they can't plausibly claim to support the linux desktop. I just hope whatever happens will result in less online whining from linux-using Nvidia customers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arghwhat 7y ago
  Intel and AMD maintain open source drivers that have supported this for ages. It's only NVIDIA that still tries to shovel outdated proprietary drivers without support for community developed standards down our throats. Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine. Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    It's an interesting position to suggest that nvidia which has no obligation to support you in any way shape or form is shoveling anything down your gullet by not supporting the standards you prefer. You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.
    - arghwhat 7y ago
      > but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus. Well, for server and ML payloads, we are the vast majority. Things like Google Stadia is certainly enough to move needles, and if AMD ends up able to compete in ML with future products, then we'd be able to make a huge dent in NVIDIA revenue.
csande17 7y ago
The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. Say I wanted to roll up my sleeves and implement NVIDIA's proprietary interface myself. (Or say in a few years we come up with some new, even better way to allocate buffers or whatever.) On X, I can write a compositor that uses that interface, and it'll work with basically every window manager written since the early 90's. On Wayland, I could patch wlroots, but then I'll only be able to use window managers based on wlroots. If I want to use a different window manager, I'll need to patch a different library. And depending on how stable wlroots's interface is, I might need to maintain patches for old versions of it depending on how maintained my preferred window managers are. The Wayland situation is probably fine if you only ever want to use the latest version of the most popular two or three desktop environments. But speaking personally, if I wanted to do that, I'd just run macOS.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  >The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. The only successful one, to be clear. You would be unwise to base your compositor on any of the others (libweston, wlc, swc, etc). wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    > wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case Except the single largest GPU vendor, yes.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      A downstream compositor which wishes to implement Nvidia support could do so and integrate it with wlroots. However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.
      - calcifer 7y ago
        > Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken. If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.
michaelmrose 7y ago
I know it's not the devopers fault that they can't reverse engineer nvidias closed source crap but nouveau has always been garbage. Nvidia should adopt and fix it or at least help.
- saghm 7y ago
  > Nvidia should adopt and fix it Or even better, just open source their own driver
  - yyyk 7y ago
    Probably not possible (or at least not trivial at all) due to third-party licensing agreements. AMD/ATI didn't open source their closed driver but instead supported the open source one.
- johannkokos 7y ago
  You can see why Nouveau devs are having difficulties with Nvidia in a Xorg developer confereence talk[1]. 1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver * Signed firmwares accessible publicly but not redistributable * Reverse engineering of vbios impossible 2. Communication mostly down * Main contact/dev left NVIDIA (Alexandre Courbot) * Most important requests left unanswered... * ... until more complete code than wanted lands publicly innvgpuweeks later [1] https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.pdf https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.p...
new_realist 7y ago
Or use X11, which is what people will actually end up doing. At the end of the day, X, GNOME and KDE have all figured out how to work with NVIDIA binary drivers, but wlroots has not.
- thristian 7y ago
  NVIDIA writes and maintains their own Xorg graphics driver on top of their kernel driver. NVIDIA is apparently not interested in providing the same courtesy to wlroots. (I don't know how much NVIDIA has contributed to GNOME and KDE's Wayland compositors)
krageon 7y ago
Nouveau drivers are pretty terrible (performance-wise) and didn't support the card that I am using last time I could find any real info about it (admittedly more than a year ago, I use a GTX 1070). This uncertainty is a fact of your life if you use nouveau, which is precisely not what I'm looking for on my main workhorse machine. This is leaving aside all of the trouble that you have with running Nvidia's ML stuff when you don't use their own driver (impossible, AFAICT). Both of those things are blocking issues for me, which in turn means that using anything that doesn't support regular nvidia drivers is a no go.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?

jniedrauer 7y ago
It's an nvidia problem, not a standard problem.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  But I mean what's the point of declaring something to be a standard if the important people weren't interested in implementing and supporting it? Anyone can come up with a standard in isolation. Getting the relevant people on board and able and willing to support it is the useful bit. Did they say they'd support it? If they never said they did it seems unfair to criticise. Are you going to support my graphics standard that I just made up?
- rat9988 7y ago
  This is a standard problem. You can't be a standard if the market does't care about you. You are just a specification and guidelines.
  - boudin 7y ago
    Intel and AMD cares about it. If the Linux desktop market would grow, Nvidia would quickly change their mind. Now, this market growing is another question... But for me, nvidia gpu are just not a possibility because they lack good drivers on Linux.
    - llukas 7y ago
      So how do you want to grow Linux market share if you say FU to a significant part of the potential market? Steam hardware survey is pretty clear about AMD:Nvidia GPU ratio.
      - ekc 7y ago
        (For gamers.)
      - chungy 7y ago
        Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        I don't think so - I see nobody with a desktop computer these days except gamers or people running CAD or modelling who are basically doing the same thing as running a game.
        boudin 7y ago
        And all people using a computer for work...
        llukas 7y ago
        The same can be said about Linux desktop share. Should we draw the same conclusions? Except gaming is not that "niche": 1.35 billion PCs worldwide - https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-personal-computers-installed-base/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-persona... 47M active daily and 90M monthly users for steam https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-users/ https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-use...
    - krageon 7y ago
      > If the Linux desktop market would grow You can think of any number of fantasy scenarios that would make one of the biggest GPU vendors care about your standards, but sadly that is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one where Nvidia has the best game support on the market (far, far better than AMD - let's not even think about Intel here) and therefore anyone who still plays games on a PC will own one of them unless they are some sort of AMD advocate. At the end of the day, nobody wants to be reading "we don't support this because they're not nice to us". That's going straight back to the linux dark ages of 15 years ago, where you needed to care about all sorts of weird and arcane details to get a functioning desktop system.
robert_foss 7y ago
NVidia has a horrible history of Linux support. GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.
- calcifer 7y ago
  Nvidia has excellent support, I think you are conflating Linux with open source. For decades, Nvidia had (and arguably still has) excellent support for the former, without really caring for the latter.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    How long did it take to get multiple monitors working with xrandr, again?
    - calcifer 7y ago
      Funnily enough, this is exactly what I was talking about. Nvidia supported multiple monitors on Linux for decades using TwinView, they simply didn't add support for the open source xrandr for 4-5 years, but even that has been supported for ~7 years now.
      - ori_b 7y ago
        > Nvidia supported multiple monitors on Linux for decades using TwinView And Xorg supported them for decades before using Xinerama. Instead of collaborating with upstream, they just dumped something incompatible and broken, and said "Deal with it".
    - p_l 7y ago
      Multi monitor display worked perfectly for long time, long before "it works on intel, let's call it new standard" crew decided that flat shared framebuffer is the only way to go (apparently because of compositors and nothing else), something that also broke support for multi-gpu and especially heterogenous multi-gpu.
makomk 7y ago
GBM is a very useful standard if you only ever want to request buffers from drivers that use the Linux kernel's GPU buffer management code and modesetting code. (Preferably only Mesa-based drivers too.) NVidia doesn't use this and probably can't for licensing and other reasons. If you want to talk to any graphics driver that isn't correctly and intimately entwined with the right parts of the Linux kernel, GBM is basically useless. It is not in any way, shape, or form a generic standard for buffer management. (In principle GBM isn't quite a single-implementation Mesa only standard - third party implementations are possible, though the only one that exists right now is by ARM for their newer Mali GPUs. People seem to have had mixed results with it and I'm not sure it's even intended to run desktop Wayland.)
- csande17 7y ago
  I'm not super familiar with the details of this stuff -- does this mean that there's basically no hope of any wlroots-based window manager ever working on non-Linux operating systems like BSD?
  - makomk 7y ago
    Most of the BSD variants have some (generally outdated) port of the Linux kernel graphics stack, sometimes even with a wrapper layer to try and make the BSD kernel internals look enough like Linux for it to run unmodified. So it's probably not completely hopeless, but that's mainly because the best shot at getting the graphics accceleration it needs is a straight port of the Linux kernel drivers. (At least for non-NVidia users.)
    - bojanz 7y ago
      Thankfully, getting less and less outdated (thanks to FreeBSD's wrapper layer, and OpenBSD Foundation sponsoring its own work). FreeBSD 12.0 has Linux DRM 4.16 code (April 2018), while -current has Linux DRM 5.0 code (March 2019). OpenBSD -current (next release) has Linux 4.19 DRM code (October 2018, LTS), with initial AMDGPU backports from 4.20 (AMD Picasso & Raven 2 support).
  - 7y ago
pmlnr 7y ago
a standard supported by nothing, that reminds me of xhtml2...
- imtringued 7y ago
  It is very condescending to label Intel, AMD and pretty much every other GPU vendor other than Nvidia as nothing.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    If Nvidia don't support it, then it's just a standard, not the standard.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      Meanwhile X is still on death watch and Nvidia will be brought into the fold or be forced to stop pretending they support the linux desktop.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        Wherein "death watch" is expected to work without difficulty for the next decade or longer. They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released. While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years. We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        It really doesn't matter to me if Nvidia drops out of the linux desktop market or not. I've never owned their hardware and never will, so it makes not an iota of difference to me. I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that's going to happen. Unless Nvidia decides to support the new system, they can't plausibly claim to support the linux desktop. I just hope whatever happens will result in less online whining from linux-using Nvidia customers.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 7y ago
Intel and AMD maintain open source drivers that have supported this for ages. It's only NVIDIA that still tries to shovel outdated proprietary drivers without support for community developed standards down our throats. Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine. Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  It's an interesting position to suggest that nvidia which has no obligation to support you in any way shape or form is shoveling anything down your gullet by not supporting the standards you prefer. You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    > but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus. Well, for server and ML payloads, we are the vast majority. Things like Google Stadia is certainly enough to move needles, and if AMD ends up able to compete in ML with future products, then we'd be able to make a huge dent in NVIDIA revenue.

csande17 7y ago

The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. Say I wanted to roll up my sleeves and implement NVIDIA's proprietary interface myself. (Or say in a few years we come up with some new, even better way to allocate buffers or whatever.) On X, I can write a compositor that uses that interface, and it'll work with basically every window manager written since the early 90's. On Wayland, I could patch wlroots, but then I'll only be able to use window managers based on wlroots. If I want to use a different window manager, I'll need to patch a different library. And depending on how stable wlroots's interface is, I might need to maintain patches for old versions of it depending on how maintained my preferred window managers are. The Wayland situation is probably fine if you only ever want to use the latest version of the most popular two or three desktop environments. But speaking personally, if I wanted to do that, I'd just run macOS.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
>The problem is that wlroots is one of several libraries with this goal. The only successful one, to be clear. You would be unwise to base your compositor on any of the others (libweston, wlc, swc, etc). wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case.
- calcifer 7y ago
  > wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case Except the single largest GPU vendor, yes.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    A downstream compositor which wishes to implement Nvidia support could do so and integrate it with wlroots. However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.
    - calcifer 7y ago
      > Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken. If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.

michaelmrose 7y ago

I know it's not the devopers fault that they can't reverse engineer nvidias closed source crap but nouveau has always been garbage. Nvidia should adopt and fix it or at least help.

saghm 7y ago
> Nvidia should adopt and fix it Or even better, just open source their own driver
- yyyk 7y ago
  Probably not possible (or at least not trivial at all) due to third-party licensing agreements. AMD/ATI didn't open source their closed driver but instead supported the open source one.
johannkokos 7y ago
You can see why Nouveau devs are having difficulties with Nvidia in a Xorg developer confereence talk[1]. 1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver * Signed firmwares accessible publicly but not redistributable * Reverse engineering of vbios impossible 2. Communication mostly down * Main contact/dev left NVIDIA (Alexandre Courbot) * Most important requests left unanswered... * ... until more complete code than wanted lands publicly innvgpuweeks later [1] https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.pdf https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.p...

new_realist 7y ago

Or use X11, which is what people will actually end up doing. At the end of the day, X, GNOME and KDE have all figured out how to work with NVIDIA binary drivers, but wlroots has not.

thristian 7y ago
NVIDIA writes and maintains their own Xorg graphics driver on top of their kernel driver. NVIDIA is apparently not interested in providing the same courtesy to wlroots. (I don't know how much NVIDIA has contributed to GNOME and KDE's Wayland compositors)

krageon 7y ago

Nouveau drivers are pretty terrible (performance-wise) and didn't support the card that I am using last time I could find any real info about it (admittedly more than a year ago, I use a GTX 1070). This uncertainty is a fact of your life if you use nouveau, which is precisely not what I'm looking for on my main workhorse machine. This is leaving aside all of the trouble that you have with running Nvidia's ML stuff when you don't use their own driver (impossible, AFAICT). Both of those things are blocking issues for me, which in turn means that using anything that doesn't support regular nvidia drivers is a no go.