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>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 a

>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.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      I've personally spoken at length with Nvidia graphics driver developers. They know who we are and they know the technical problems. If you have no reason to doubt me, then perhaps you shouldn't.
      - calcifer 7y ago
        As I said, I've never doubted your technical arguments. I'm just urging you to keep the petty stuff in check.
      - csande17 7y ago
        Are the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces directly with hardware to draw them on the screen. Absent any other technical problems, it's hard not to conclude that this is just an attempt to use politics to cover up one of Wayland's poor design choices.
        Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patches_merged_into_kwin_does_that/el0yu5n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...
        arghwhat 7y ago
        > Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution. NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA. Nothing in wayland is incompatible with NVIDIA's approach. GNOME supports it, and KDE recently gained support. However, the NVIDIA approach exists for only one reason: Because NVIDIA does not want to play along with the open source world, and doing the least amount of work to their proprietary driver. Unless NVIDIA turns their ship around, supporting NVIDIA is harmful to our community. Although, if they'd just keep up with our standardized APIs, maybe we could somehow accept their ridiculous proprietary drivers which has no place in this decade.
        7y ago
    - arghwhat 7y ago
      This would be a great idea if NVIDIA was open to suggestions so that things could be fixed. However, they mostly refuse to play ball. They did seem to be preparing an alternative suggestion, but they seem to have dropped it entirely in favor of just dumping EGLStream patches on KDE and GNOME, hoping every one else will be forced to follow.
      - BearOso 7y ago
        The alternate suggestion would work like EGLStreams. The current Nvidia driver can’t handle any more. EGLStreams works by having children pass ownership of the surface they want to display to their parent for compositing. This invalidates said surface. GBM is a coherent model. Handles are passed around to prevent the need for copying, but ownership isn’t transferred. Nvidia’s driver is a black box, but I don’t think they can do things that way without some significant driver refactoring. Obviously that’s costly, so they’re trying to avoid doing it. AMD took a gamble when they began their open source initiative. It’s starting to pay off now with stuff like Stadia and the Valve stuff. I feel like Nvidia is going to have to do an open driver eventually. I hope they’ve got at least something in the works that we don’t know about. I’m not going to suggest replacing Nvidia cards if they’re working fine for what you do. Just look at AMD (or Intel next year) if you start hunting for your next card. Don’t fall into the brand loyalty pit.
- boudin 7y ago
  I'm quite sure there's much more Intel igpus in the wild than nvidias gpus

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.
  - ddevault 7y ago
    I've personally spoken at length with Nvidia graphics driver developers. They know who we are and they know the technical problems. If you have no reason to doubt me, then perhaps you shouldn't.
    - calcifer 7y ago
      As I said, I've never doubted your technical arguments. I'm just urging you to keep the petty stuff in check.
    - csande17 7y ago
      Are the technical problems documented anywhere where non-NVIDIA-driver-developers can learn about them? Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces directly with hardware to draw them on the screen. Absent any other technical problems, it's hard not to conclude that this is just an attempt to use politics to cover up one of Wayland's poor design choices.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patches_merged_into_kwin_does_that/el0yu5n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...
      - arghwhat 7y ago
        > Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution. NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA. Nothing in wayland is incompatible with NVIDIA's approach. GNOME supports it, and KDE recently gained support. However, the NVIDIA approach exists for only one reason: Because NVIDIA does not want to play along with the open source world, and doing the least amount of work to their proprietary driver. Unless NVIDIA turns their ship around, supporting NVIDIA is harmful to our community. Although, if they'd just keep up with our standardized APIs, maybe we could somehow accept their ridiculous proprietary drivers which has no place in this decade.
        7y ago
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    This would be a great idea if NVIDIA was open to suggestions so that things could be fixed. However, they mostly refuse to play ball. They did seem to be preparing an alternative suggestion, but they seem to have dropped it entirely in favor of just dumping EGLStream patches on KDE and GNOME, hoping every one else will be forced to follow.
    - BearOso 7y ago
      The alternate suggestion would work like EGLStreams. The current Nvidia driver can’t handle any more. EGLStreams works by having children pass ownership of the surface they want to display to their parent for compositing. This invalidates said surface. GBM is a coherent model. Handles are passed around to prevent the need for copying, but ownership isn’t transferred. Nvidia’s driver is a black box, but I don’t think they can do things that way without some significant driver refactoring. Obviously that’s costly, so they’re trying to avoid doing it. AMD took a gamble when they began their open source initiative. It’s starting to pay off now with stuff like Stadia and the Valve stuff. I feel like Nvidia is going to have to do an open driver eventually. I hope they’ve got at least something in the works that we don’t know about. I’m not going to suggest replacing Nvidia cards if they’re working fine for what you do. Just look at AMD (or Intel next year) if you start hunting for your next card. Don’t fall into the brand loyalty pit.
boudin 7y ago
I'm quite sure there's much more Intel igpus in the wild than nvidias gpus