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Aren't large parts of the wayland stack incompatible with NVIDIA drivers? It would be ironic if Microsoft was the one to bridge that gap.

microcolonel 6y ago
That's more a matter of buffer management. Though it may turn out , if their work is too tied to NVIDIA, to only support NVIDIA's de facto proprietary selection: EGLStreams. Though in principle, there's nothing preventing them from using GBM instead of EGLStreams, and there are some good practical reasons such as having compatibility with the broad base of existing accelerated Wayland windowing libraries and applications.
josefx 6y ago
You can use Wayland with NVIDIA drivers. The problem is that NVIDIA and the open source drivers expose different buffer management APIs and Wayland does not abstract over that, so it has to be explicitly handled by every client application. Some Wayland clients refuse to support both, others had NVIDIA support patched in by NVIDIA itself.
- dcgudeman 6y ago
  Sorry if this question misses the point but how did AMD avoid this issue? Are their drivers open source?
  - josefx 6y ago
    AMD started to support the development of the open source driver several years ago by publishing hardware specs. . I am not sure if they switched completely or are still maintaining a closed source driver on the side - I haven't bought AMD cards in years, my last one only "works" with the binary blob. The people working on the NVIDIA open source driver have no official support and were fighting with signed firmware blobs last I heard. I wish them luck, but even on older cards it is more likely to crash your system than render anything.
    - ghostpepper 6y ago
      Single data point here but I just switched from an NVIDIA GTX 960 (2015 card) to an AMD RX 570 (2017), both using open source drivers, and the performance improvement in Wayland/Sway is huge. My understanding is that even 2015 is too new for nouveau to run with high performance due to something called reclocking, where the card starts up at a minimal clock rate and then it's up to the drivers to reconfigure it for running at the advertised clock.

microcolonel 6y ago

That's more a matter of buffer management. Though it may turn out , if their work is too tied to NVIDIA, to only support NVIDIA's de facto proprietary selection: EGLStreams. Though in principle, there's nothing preventing them from using GBM instead of EGLStreams, and there are some good practical reasons such as having compatibility with the broad base of existing accelerated Wayland windowing libraries and applications.

josefx 6y ago

You can use Wayland with NVIDIA drivers. The problem is that NVIDIA and the open source drivers expose different buffer management APIs and Wayland does not abstract over that, so it has to be explicitly handled by every client application. Some Wayland clients refuse to support both, others had NVIDIA support patched in by NVIDIA itself.

dcgudeman 6y ago
Sorry if this question misses the point but how did AMD avoid this issue? Are their drivers open source?
- josefx 6y ago
  AMD started to support the development of the open source driver several years ago by publishing hardware specs. . I am not sure if they switched completely or are still maintaining a closed source driver on the side - I haven't bought AMD cards in years, my last one only "works" with the binary blob. The people working on the NVIDIA open source driver have no official support and were fighting with signed firmware blobs last I heard. I wish them luck, but even on older cards it is more likely to crash your system than render anything.
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    Single data point here but I just switched from an NVIDIA GTX 960 (2015 card) to an AMD RX 570 (2017), both using open source drivers, and the performance improvement in Wayland/Sway is huge. My understanding is that even 2015 is too new for nouveau to run with high performance due to something called reclocking, where the card starts up at a minimal clock rate and then it's up to the drivers to reconfigure it for running at the advertised clock.