8 ms·

This is a very interesting development for those of us in the CUDA space who work on Linux! I had thought Wayland was not ever likely to be supported by nVidia

This is a very interesting development for those of us in the CUDA space who work on Linux! I had thought Wayland was not ever likely to be supported by nVidia, but something clearly has changed.

nikodunk 6y ago
Is what has changed maybe that XWayland has been refactored out of core X, making it easier to support without dealing with the huge X codebase? Or maybe it's been in the works for a while and everything's just landing at once.
skhameneh 6y ago
Support is inevitable, Wayland is staged to replaced X11, all major distros have it in their roadmap (if not already default on stable).
- nsajko 6y ago
  > Wayland is staged to replaced X11 Wayland can't possibly replace X11, it's got a fundamentally different (I'd even say broken or even malicious) design. If anything, some Wayland compositors may emerge as dominant desktop environments, but this would be a dark day for power users, if it would mean not being able to switch to an actually friendly design, as currently offered by Xorg.
  - yokem55 6y ago
    Then I encourage you to take up leadership to get some development going on the bare metal xorg server. Odds are, within a year or two, it will need serious patches to keep working with up to date kernels, mesa, and nvidia drivers.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      The kernels policy is not to break userspace and RHEL 8 which still supports X is 2 years into a 10 year support term. Also nvidia still provides drivers for 18 year old hardware for x under solaris If you want the current version built this year for Linux instead of the legacy version you will have to move up 2010 hardware though. I find it quite amusing that proponents of insert technology here seem to come in 2 stripes. A) Those who believe new thing is superior and think you ought to try it B) People smugly stating that you must move to new thing because the other options are going away see wayland systemd gnome. It reminds me of a supervisor at a telecom support center who gleefully explained that the new system would hang up on people who kept mashing zero on the automated phone menu that preceeded getting to a person to make you go through it. He didn't understand that people didn't want to use the new automated process because in general such systems are crappy and confusing.
      - zaxcellent 6y ago
        The kernel can choose to not support new hardware with old interfaces. If the X11 can't interface with new hardware, that's game over. No broken userspace necessary.
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        Choosing not to support said interfaces would be the biggest breakage of userspace in 3 decades of Linux history. Such a course of action is nowhere specified by the people who would be responsible. As best I can see you have constructed it from whole cloth from suppositions that seem to be ill considered. Edit: To be clear breaking user space is when a change happens in the kernel level wherein software that used to work no longer works because the public interface presented differs. If you have evidence that this is actually going to happen other than your own misunderstandings please link it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        There is a lot of detail about this in the kernel docs: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#open-source-userspace-requirements https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#ope... The gist of it is that breakage is OK if the userspace isn't open-source and that new uAPIs come around every few years due to the rapid pace development of GPUs. I worked on Chrome OS graphics for years on and one of my earliest projects was to bring DRM/KMS (then a newish interface) to the Cirrus display card (an ancient card that QEMU happens to emulate).
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        Does it specifically mention the kernel breaking X? One would think that would be the topic of discussion years before anyone actually did it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        I don't think the kernel guarantees that if X runs against Linux today, then it will run against the same X on new kernels on new hardware in perpetuity. It's more along the lines of, "if I one calls the read syscall with parameters a, b, c, it won't suddenly require a 4th parameter, or demand they be in a, c, b order." Anyways, if the kernel developers decided they wanted to invent a brand new uAPI that does graphics, I wouldn't at all be surprised if new GPU drivers only implemented the new uAPI if their target userspace programs all use the new uAPI instead of an older uAPI. Nothing in userspace is "broken" because it will seem to the old uAPI using userspace as if there is no driver for the new GPU.
  - anhanhanh 6y ago
    Not sure what have I missed but how is X window system a "friendly design"?
    - nsajko 6y ago
      Friendly compared to Wayland. X Windows offers many features that the designers of Wayland decided to exclude to keep their protocol simple, and for some security theatre reasons. But this simplicity is deceptive, as it means that implementing all the excluded features, and deciding on relevant interfaces, is left to the Wayland compositors. This is the reason "Wayland" (or, more correctly, Wayland compositors) still miss many important features that are * expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac * expected by power users * needed by the visually impaired And it is also the reason why the Wayland ecosystem is destined for horrible fragmentation of interfaces, features and implementations. Another consequence is that the X11 model of having the possibility of easily making a window manager to one's liking is not possible with Wayland, as compositors are monstrous beasts compared to window managers. I also wrote about all this in some of my previous comments, e.g. there was a large thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 EDIT: there's another perspective to this that I didn't express very well, so here are some quotes from Arch BBS: By user neosix: > You can't send keystrokes, move mouse, move windows, you can't even get active window. And all that because of security? > But guess what it's not safe walking down the street, something can kill you, so let's just stay in the house and never go out again :) By user Trilby: > While I place a very high value on security and well designed software, the strategy of saying "you shouldn't want to do that" is not a sane policy. Yet this has been the approach of wayland from the start. Can you have a system panel? No, you should not want to have one. Can you have one client talk to another client? No, you should not want to do this. Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive: here, watch a cat video. Emphasis mine.
      - taway098123 6y ago
        That's not a Wayland problem. The features you're asking for are probably still there but they're implemented at a different spot in the stack instead of trying to stuff everything into the same protocol like in X11. This is actually done to reduce fragmentation. Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that, and then it can run the same on X or on any Wayland compositor. In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Yep, totally inevitable; in just another 12 years it'll be totally prod-ready ;)
mrweasel 6y ago
Couldn't you use the Nvidia card for CUDA and just have an AMD card for the display. It's a little dumb having two graphics cards, you need a spare PCI slot and graphics cards are expensive (but you could just get a cheap old and used card, if it's just for your desktop environment). I'm asking because it seems like no one relying on Nvidia card for number crushing and who want Wayland seem to have opted to just get a second card.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  The top CUDA cards don't even do display. Anyway tons of CPUs have a good-enough on-die GPU that you can use for display in a pinch.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    In a pinch if you only want one display.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Nvidia has a difference in how they implement their driver that would have required a number of players to each implement support for NVIDIA separately from other hardware because NVIDIA wants to directly use a lot of code it uses on other platforms on Linux. Unfortunately due to the misdesign of Wayland each graphical environment must write code to more directly interface with hardware instead of that being a layer above that. This means in current context it is vastly easier if NVIDIA bends on this issue however they also have the least incentive because most of their money isn't earned on the Linux Desktop. People seem to suppose that somehow hardware vendors owe Linux users support and support in the fashion that would be desirable as if somehow not supporting the standards that others do is somehow wronging those developers and users but a private company in fact doesn't owe said developers or users ANY support of any kind.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Well, then that company can expect to continue seeing middle fingers :) Intel and AMD, the arch-rivals they are, coexist and collaborate on the kernel stack and Mesa. Even embedded companies join in (see Broadcom hiring Eric Anholt to make V3D a thing for the RPi4, even Qualcomm vaguely supporting Freedreno and Arm starting to show some kind of interest in Panfrost IIRC). Microsoft is in for virtualization and GL-on-D3D. None of these vendors "owe anybody anything" yet they've joined the party. Turns out sharing is beneficial for everyone.
- kaba0 6y ago
  > Unfortunately due to the misdesign of Wayland It has nothing to do with wayland, it is due to linux not wanting to provide a stable API for drivers, deterring binary blobs (successfully). As for whether this latter thing is good or bad is subjective.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    A desktop environment under x doesn't concern itself with graphics drivers.
    - 6y ago

This is a very interesting development for those of us in the CUDA space who work on Linux! I had thought Wayland was not ever likely to be supported by nVidia, but something clearly has changed.

nikodunk 6y ago

Is what has changed maybe that XWayland has been refactored out of core X, making it easier to support without dealing with the huge X codebase? Or maybe it's been in the works for a while and everything's just landing at once.

skhameneh 6y ago

Support is inevitable, Wayland is staged to replaced X11, all major distros have it in their roadmap (if not already default on stable).

nsajko 6y ago
> Wayland is staged to replaced X11 Wayland can't possibly replace X11, it's got a fundamentally different (I'd even say broken or even malicious) design. If anything, some Wayland compositors may emerge as dominant desktop environments, but this would be a dark day for power users, if it would mean not being able to switch to an actually friendly design, as currently offered by Xorg.
- yokem55 6y ago
  Then I encourage you to take up leadership to get some development going on the bare metal xorg server. Odds are, within a year or two, it will need serious patches to keep working with up to date kernels, mesa, and nvidia drivers.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    The kernels policy is not to break userspace and RHEL 8 which still supports X is 2 years into a 10 year support term. Also nvidia still provides drivers for 18 year old hardware for x under solaris If you want the current version built this year for Linux instead of the legacy version you will have to move up 2010 hardware though. I find it quite amusing that proponents of insert technology here seem to come in 2 stripes. A) Those who believe new thing is superior and think you ought to try it B) People smugly stating that you must move to new thing because the other options are going away see wayland systemd gnome. It reminds me of a supervisor at a telecom support center who gleefully explained that the new system would hang up on people who kept mashing zero on the automated phone menu that preceeded getting to a person to make you go through it. He didn't understand that people didn't want to use the new automated process because in general such systems are crappy and confusing.
    - zaxcellent 6y ago
      The kernel can choose to not support new hardware with old interfaces. If the X11 can't interface with new hardware, that's game over. No broken userspace necessary.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        Choosing not to support said interfaces would be the biggest breakage of userspace in 3 decades of Linux history. Such a course of action is nowhere specified by the people who would be responsible. As best I can see you have constructed it from whole cloth from suppositions that seem to be ill considered. Edit: To be clear breaking user space is when a change happens in the kernel level wherein software that used to work no longer works because the public interface presented differs. If you have evidence that this is actually going to happen other than your own misunderstandings please link it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        There is a lot of detail about this in the kernel docs: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#open-source-userspace-requirements https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/gpu/drm-uapi.html#ope... The gist of it is that breakage is OK if the userspace isn't open-source and that new uAPIs come around every few years due to the rapid pace development of GPUs. I worked on Chrome OS graphics for years on and one of my earliest projects was to bring DRM/KMS (then a newish interface) to the Cirrus display card (an ancient card that QEMU happens to emulate).
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        Does it specifically mention the kernel breaking X? One would think that would be the topic of discussion years before anyone actually did it.
        zaxcellent 6y ago
        I don't think the kernel guarantees that if X runs against Linux today, then it will run against the same X on new kernels on new hardware in perpetuity. It's more along the lines of, "if I one calls the read syscall with parameters a, b, c, it won't suddenly require a 4th parameter, or demand they be in a, c, b order." Anyways, if the kernel developers decided they wanted to invent a brand new uAPI that does graphics, I wouldn't at all be surprised if new GPU drivers only implemented the new uAPI if their target userspace programs all use the new uAPI instead of an older uAPI. Nothing in userspace is "broken" because it will seem to the old uAPI using userspace as if there is no driver for the new GPU.
- anhanhanh 6y ago
  Not sure what have I missed but how is X window system a "friendly design"?
  - nsajko 6y ago
    Friendly compared to Wayland. X Windows offers many features that the designers of Wayland decided to exclude to keep their protocol simple, and for some security theatre reasons. But this simplicity is deceptive, as it means that implementing all the excluded features, and deciding on relevant interfaces, is left to the Wayland compositors. This is the reason "Wayland" (or, more correctly, Wayland compositors) still miss many important features that are * expected by users of X11, Windows, or Mac * expected by power users * needed by the visually impaired And it is also the reason why the Wayland ecosystem is destined for horrible fragmentation of interfaces, features and implementations. Another consequence is that the X11 model of having the possibility of easily making a window manager to one's liking is not possible with Wayland, as compositors are monstrous beasts compared to window managers. I also wrote about all this in some of my previous comments, e.g. there was a large thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886074 EDIT: there's another perspective to this that I didn't express very well, so here are some quotes from Arch BBS: By user neosix: > You can't send keystrokes, move mouse, move windows, you can't even get active window. And all that because of security? > But guess what it's not safe walking down the street, something can kill you, so let's just stay in the house and never go out again :) By user Trilby: > While I place a very high value on security and well designed software, the strategy of saying "you shouldn't want to do that" is not a sane policy. Yet this has been the approach of wayland from the start. Can you have a system panel? No, you should not want to have one. Can you have one client talk to another client? No, you should not want to do this. Can you turn on your computer and do anything even remotely productive with it? No, you should not want to be productive: here, watch a cat video. Emphasis mine.
    - taway098123 6y ago
      That's not a Wayland problem. The features you're asking for are probably still there but they're implemented at a different spot in the stack instead of trying to stuff everything into the same protocol like in X11. This is actually done to reduce fragmentation. Make a service its own daemon with a dbus interface or something like that, and then it can run the same on X or on any Wayland compositor. In my experience it's actually the simplicity of building window managers in X11 that's misleading. It's easy to get something up and running that lets you move windows around, but to build a full desktop that does everything you'd expect is a giant task, and X11 only really gets in the way of that.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Yep, totally inevitable; in just another 12 years it'll be totally prod-ready ;)

mrweasel 6y ago

Couldn't you use the Nvidia card for CUDA and just have an AMD card for the display. It's a little dumb having two graphics cards, you need a spare PCI slot and graphics cards are expensive (but you could just get a cheap old and used card, if it's just for your desktop environment). I'm asking because it seems like no one relying on Nvidia card for number crushing and who want Wayland seem to have opted to just get a second card.

Y_Y 6y ago
The top CUDA cards don't even do display. Anyway tons of CPUs have a good-enough on-die GPU that you can use for display in a pinch.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  In a pinch if you only want one display.

michaelmrose 6y ago

Nvidia has a difference in how they implement their driver that would have required a number of players to each implement support for NVIDIA separately from other hardware because NVIDIA wants to directly use a lot of code it uses on other platforms on Linux. Unfortunately due to the misdesign of Wayland each graphical environment must write code to more directly interface with hardware instead of that being a layer above that. This means in current context it is vastly easier if NVIDIA bends on this issue however they also have the least incentive because most of their money isn't earned on the Linux Desktop. People seem to suppose that somehow hardware vendors owe Linux users support and support in the fashion that would be desirable as if somehow not supporting the standards that others do is somehow wronging those developers and users but a private company in fact doesn't owe said developers or users ANY support of any kind.

floatboth 6y ago
Well, then that company can expect to continue seeing middle fingers :) Intel and AMD, the arch-rivals they are, coexist and collaborate on the kernel stack and Mesa. Even embedded companies join in (see Broadcom hiring Eric Anholt to make V3D a thing for the RPi4, even Qualcomm vaguely supporting Freedreno and Arm starting to show some kind of interest in Panfrost IIRC). Microsoft is in for virtualization and GL-on-D3D. None of these vendors "owe anybody anything" yet they've joined the party. Turns out sharing is beneficial for everyone.
kaba0 6y ago
> Unfortunately due to the misdesign of Wayland It has nothing to do with wayland, it is due to linux not wanting to provide a stable API for drivers, deterring binary blobs (successfully). As for whether this latter thing is good or bad is subjective.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  A desktop environment under x doesn't concern itself with graphics drivers.
  - 6y ago