6 ms·

Is it still the case that Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland?

Iolaum 6y ago
Not exactly. I m successfully using Fedora SilverBlue with proprietary nvidia in Wayland. In the official docs it's not supported but Mutter (from Gnome) has the pieces in place to do so. However I don't use anything too specialised that would force me back to Xorg. For example I did revert to Xorg while I played around with lutris a bit. Still as long as distro maintainers don't declare official support, be ready to expect surprises.
belak 6y ago
The short version is "it depends". Essentially, each separate Wayland compositor needs to add support for the nvidia driver (or the driver needs to support more standardized APIs). Gnome and KDE support Wayland on nvidia hardware (though it's a bit rough around the edges). Wlroots (and therefore Sway) doesn't because they don't want to have a separate code-path for one driver which doesn't want to support standards and because the APIs the driver does support wouldn't work well with the code model of wlroots.
- qudat 6y ago
  Nvidia works with wlroots if you use nouveau and not the proprietary drivers.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    As much as I appreciate Noveau, it's not really practically usable with recent cards (due to Nvidias faults!).
    - shmerl 6y ago
      It's probably not relevant in the long term anyway. I expect desktop Nvidia usage on Linux to pretty much plummet while their driver remains a blob. The trend is negative for them already. So I fully support wlroots developer's approach to it - show Nvidia to the door until they come back with upstreamed driver.
shmerl 6y ago
I don't expect them to ever work properly. Basically, if you care about good Wayland user experience and proper desktop integration, you should be using AMD or Intel GPU already. Waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess is pointless. Nvidia will be DOA as long as they refuse to upstream their driver or to support Nouveau to begin with. And they didn't show any interest for years.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  There's not a lot of options in the workstation space other than NV drivers on X11. As long as nouveau continues sending illegal instructions to cards and crashing Quadros on startup, it's a non-starter. Xeons don't include a GPU, so you'll need to add an RX 2100 to the system instead of another A100 or RTX Titan. It can be done, but I don't see RX 2100s having a place in our machines anytime soon.
  - shmerl 6y ago
    The best option if you need modern Linux desktop is to ditch Nvidia and to switch to AMD.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      For compute as well? Maybe once ROCm is actually supported by their newest cards, but this two-year lag on compute support does not inspire confidence. Neither Navi nor Big Navi are supported -- the last card with ROCm support is Vega.
      - shmerl 6y ago
        Support is better in latest cards, but they are still lagging behind for scenarios like Blender and etc.
      - vetinari 6y ago
        For compute, you don't need the desktop, so the Wayland vs X11 debate is moot.
circularfoyers 6y ago
I believe with the 470 driver series that's coming out soon things are looking a lot better[1][2]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Series-OpenCL-3.0 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...
foobar33333 6y ago
Nvidia is basically dead at this point, no support for standards that have been around for years. And now they are including malware in their cards to slow down unapproved calculations.
- curt15 6y ago
  CUDA is an industry standard, and AMD's lack of support is why NVIDIA enjoys a monopoly in the deep learning community.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Is this due to CUDA being a technically superior product, or is it just that it's entrenched? OpenCL/AMD is a usable and mature platform, right?
    - my123 6y ago
      OpenCL as implemented by AMD is definitely not very usable. AMD themselves aren’t really committed to OpenCL given the state of their OCL 2.x drivers and went to their own AMD-only path (ROCm/HIP), which is broken... (and only supported on a single gen of customer GPUs today, Vega) It doesn’t even work on RDNA or RDNA2 officially today.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      I've been told that OpenCL is in a whole different league than CUDA due to a worse API and much smaller ecosystem. I have, however, seen attempts to use Vulkan for compute. Could that be a viable way forward?
      - my123 6y ago
        Using Vulkan for compute is still a much worse developer experience, it isn't really a reasonable alternative.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Ciantic 6y ago
Yes, but the patch by Erik Kurzinger from Nvidia may soon be merged [1]. It still requires changes to Nvidia's proprietary drivers that I think have not been done, but it maybe that this year it will be settled. Edit: Also it maybe that the Ubuntu choosing Wayland maybe what pushed the Nvidia forward? [2] [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will- https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will- use-wayland-by-default [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/587 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
- kevincox 6y ago
  Link should be https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wayland-by-default https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa...
solarkraft 6y ago
The question is flawed, but I get what you mean. Wayland the protocol has very little to do with graphics drivers (it's just about getting window content to compositors). It's just that the display server (X server or wayland compositor) uses a set of agreed upon kernel APIs (DRI) to render and display things on the screen, which Nvidia refuses to fully implement (GBM vs.EGLStreams). The X server has extra code to support this, but many wayland compositors don't. Semi-recently Nvidia (in the form of Erik Kurzinger) has started contributing such special treatment code to Gnome and KDE. A major hold out is wlroots, the maintainer of which refuses special handling code for proprietary components (https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but recently there has been a 3rd party contribution for an EGLStreams backend. Additionally the Xwayland team are right in the middle of merging code to allow specific acceleration of XWayland windows and Nvidia and the wlroots team are working on building a new memory allocation solution based on Vulkan that will hopefully finally solve the EGLStreams debacle once and for all. So: It kind of works and is improving fairly rapidly.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
It works but the experience was suboptimal. Usable but much slower than x11.

Not exactly. I m successfully using Fedora SilverBlue with proprietary nvidia in Wayland. In the official docs it's not supported but Mutter (from Gnome) has the pieces in place to do so. However I don't use anything too specialised that would force me back to Xorg. For example I did revert to Xorg while I played around with lutris a bit. Still as long as distro maintainers don't declare official support, be ready to expect surprises.

belak 6y ago

The short version is "it depends". Essentially, each separate Wayland compositor needs to add support for the nvidia driver (or the driver needs to support more standardized APIs). Gnome and KDE support Wayland on nvidia hardware (though it's a bit rough around the edges). Wlroots (and therefore Sway) doesn't because they don't want to have a separate code-path for one driver which doesn't want to support standards and because the APIs the driver does support wouldn't work well with the code model of wlroots.

qudat 6y ago
Nvidia works with wlroots if you use nouveau and not the proprietary drivers.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  As much as I appreciate Noveau, it's not really practically usable with recent cards (due to Nvidias faults!).
  - shmerl 6y ago
    It's probably not relevant in the long term anyway. I expect desktop Nvidia usage on Linux to pretty much plummet while their driver remains a blob. The trend is negative for them already. So I fully support wlroots developer's approach to it - show Nvidia to the door until they come back with upstreamed driver.

shmerl 6y ago

I don't expect them to ever work properly. Basically, if you care about good Wayland user experience and proper desktop integration, you should be using AMD or Intel GPU already. Waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess is pointless. Nvidia will be DOA as long as they refuse to upstream their driver or to support Nouveau to begin with. And they didn't show any interest for years.

freeone3000 6y ago
There's not a lot of options in the workstation space other than NV drivers on X11. As long as nouveau continues sending illegal instructions to cards and crashing Quadros on startup, it's a non-starter. Xeons don't include a GPU, so you'll need to add an RX 2100 to the system instead of another A100 or RTX Titan. It can be done, but I don't see RX 2100s having a place in our machines anytime soon.
- shmerl 6y ago
  The best option if you need modern Linux desktop is to ditch Nvidia and to switch to AMD.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    For compute as well? Maybe once ROCm is actually supported by their newest cards, but this two-year lag on compute support does not inspire confidence. Neither Navi nor Big Navi are supported -- the last card with ROCm support is Vega.
    - shmerl 6y ago
      Support is better in latest cards, but they are still lagging behind for scenarios like Blender and etc.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      For compute, you don't need the desktop, so the Wayland vs X11 debate is moot.

circularfoyers 6y ago

I believe with the 470 driver series that's coming out soon things are looking a lot better[1][2]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Series-OpenCL-3.0 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...

foobar33333 6y ago

Nvidia is basically dead at this point, no support for standards that have been around for years. And now they are including malware in their cards to slow down unapproved calculations.

curt15 6y ago
CUDA is an industry standard, and AMD's lack of support is why NVIDIA enjoys a monopoly in the deep learning community.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Is this due to CUDA being a technically superior product, or is it just that it's entrenched? OpenCL/AMD is a usable and mature platform, right?
  - my123 6y ago
    OpenCL as implemented by AMD is definitely not very usable. AMD themselves aren’t really committed to OpenCL given the state of their OCL 2.x drivers and went to their own AMD-only path (ROCm/HIP), which is broken... (and only supported on a single gen of customer GPUs today, Vega) It doesn’t even work on RDNA or RDNA2 officially today.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    I've been told that OpenCL is in a whole different league than CUDA due to a worse API and much smaller ecosystem. I have, however, seen attempts to use Vulkan for compute. Could that be a viable way forward?
    - my123 6y ago
      Using Vulkan for compute is still a much worse developer experience, it isn't really a reasonable alternative.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Ciantic 6y ago

Yes, but the patch by Erik Kurzinger from Nvidia may soon be merged [1]. It still requires changes to Nvidia's proprietary drivers that I think have not been done, but it maybe that this year it will be settled. Edit: Also it maybe that the Ubuntu choosing Wayland maybe what pushed the Nvidia forward? [2] [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will- https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will- use-wayland-by-default [2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/587 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

kevincox 6y ago
Link should be https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wayland-by-default https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa...

solarkraft 6y ago

The question is flawed, but I get what you mean. Wayland the protocol has very little to do with graphics drivers (it's just about getting window content to compositors). It's just that the display server (X server or wayland compositor) uses a set of agreed upon kernel APIs (DRI) to render and display things on the screen, which Nvidia refuses to fully implement (GBM vs.EGLStreams). The X server has extra code to support this, but many wayland compositors don't. Semi-recently Nvidia (in the form of Erik Kurzinger) has started contributing such special treatment code to Gnome and KDE. A major hold out is wlroots, the maintainer of which refuses special handling code for proprietary components (https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but recently there has been a 3rd party contribution for an EGLStreams backend. Additionally the Xwayland team are right in the middle of merging code to allow specific acceleration of XWayland windows and Nvidia and the wlroots team are working on building a new memory allocation solution based on Vulkan that will hopefully finally solve the EGLStreams debacle once and for all. So: It kind of works and is improving fairly rapidly.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

It works but the experience was suboptimal. Usable but much slower than x11.