9 ms·

Nvidia working on Wayland support for binary driver

107 points by tbrock 13y ago

celebril 13y ago
This is excellent news. It's amazing to see the driver situation of Linux progressing so quickly these days.
- Pacabel 13y ago
  I have to ask, did you even read the first sentence of the email from James Jones of NVIDIA? It says, "This direction seems to conflict with our plans to continue running our DDX driver under XWayland." The rest of the email isn't exactly positive, as well. "Progressing so quickly" just isn't the first thing I think of when hearing about difficulties like those described in that email.
- mrweasel 13y ago
  It kinda sucks if you want Nvidia, Wayland and *BSD. I really wish Nvidia would stop with the binary drivers. Back when Matrox released their G200 card they used a little known fact in X11 that allowed them to do platform independent drivers. I'm not sure how it worked, but remember downloading the and using the "Linux" driver on OpenBSD to gain stuff like dual-head support. I'm not sure the same would work for hardware accelerated graphics, but it would be nice if Nvidia help getting their hardware supported on whatever platform people choose to use.
  - zanny 13y ago
    Gallium is actually designed to be cross platform too. Obviously AMD isn't using that (and they were the major developers of Gallium) but the only part of it that is platform specific is the winsys interface. It does, however, mean you can port the Gallium version of the Intel Driver, or the Nouveau / Radeon free drivers, or the other Gallium drivers like Freedreno to any platform with just that one API switch. I figure it was one of the justifications in funding Gallium from the AMD boardroom perspective - it isn't just a Linux driver, it is a pivot to easily get their driver on any other platform they need it on, whereas Catalyst proves to be very specific, requiring developers on both sides actively maintaining it to have a Linux + Windows version, plus the OSX one they certainly have.
  - oofabz 13y ago
    > Wayland and *BSD I believe Mesa does not even support EGL on BSD. Now I know the Nvidia driver doesn't use Mesa, but this indicates how little effort is being put into Wayland on BSD. I can't say I blame them. BSD is primarily used on servers with no GUI, so the BSD community uses their limited resources to support that use case. It's the same reason BSD has poor support for WiFi and suspend/resume. But I don't think we're going to see Wayland on BSD for a very long time.
Yuioup 13y ago
What about Mir?
- scrollaway 13y ago
  What about it? Why should they care?
  - tormeh 13y ago
    Ubuntu/Unity is the best desktop environment I've ever used, but Mir can go die in a fire. Completely unnecessary. Everyone who looks like they know what they're talking about thinks so, at least, and I'll go with them.
    - yulaow 13y ago
      Personally I am happy to see competition also in the display server protocols. The absence of it made X so stagnant
      - Morgawr 13y ago
        This is not a business. You don't want to see "competition" (competition in what?) Variety is nice and having choices is nice, but when there's compatibility and man-hours to be spent in ensuring that compatibility/support across all the possible flavors of Linux distributions, I'm not sure we really want "competition". It's APIs we are talking about here, standards. How would you feel if there were dozens of TCP/IP protocol standards (not just implementations, mind you) and if you wanted to develop any simple networked application you'd need to write a compatibility layer for each and every one of them? Competition is definitely not what we need in this case, sorry.
        yulaow 13y ago
        I would agree with your position only if we could assert that Wayland is the best protocol we can ever have. But can we affirm that? Can we suppose that there is no way to make a better protocol? What if Mir in the end will become better or will work better or will be more adopted? What if the guys of wayland will fail in making something really good? What if they take some wrong decisions and we will have no alternative in which rely? We need everywhere competition.
zokier 13y ago
Could someone quickly recap what DDX and glamor are, and how they relate to XWayland, Xorg, Wayland, and nVidia binary drivers.
- Spittie 13y ago
  Disclamer: I'm not a kernel/driver developer, so take everything with some salt Right now, every driver provide a different DDX (think about it as an API), which the X.org server uses to offload 2d drawing to the GPU. Glamor is a way of doing 2D rendering on the GPU through OpenGL. It's currently used by RadeonSI (AMD 7xxx cards and newer), and can optionally be used by other free drivers (Intel, r300/r600, Nouveau). If XWayland drop supports for DDX, then drivers that want to offer accellerated 2D on it have to support Glamor. Free drivers can already use Glamor, so it's not a problem, but closed source drivers have yet to implement it (and I'm not sure if it's merely a manpower problem, or there are also licensing problems)
- zanny 13y ago
  Just to simplify Spittie a bit for clarity, under X you have dedicated 2d drawing APIs. Wayland uses EGL, and just drops 2d entirely, so the entire desktop is running top of GLES. In order to run legacy X applications, Glamor is being baked into the X server so that X apps using Xrender can still work, but the binary drivers aren't using it yet, for a myriad of reasons.
mariuolo 13y ago
> we are actively working on support and this certainly throws a wrench into things. That's what happens when you do work in secret.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  More importantly, why does NVidia, who contribute practically nothing to Free graphics development (drivers or the rest of the graphics stack) think that the Wayland developers have any obligation to make Wayland work well with their secretly-developed blobs? If NVidia wants to have input, they could hire people to work on Wayland. Otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s
  - blinkingled 13y ago
    Exactly. Nvidia has got away with crap for far too long. And given the rise of Intel and AMD GPUs which come with fully OSS drivers, they need to get their heads out of sand and realize that they can't get away with it anymore and they need to either invest resources in getting their GPUs supported under Linux - be it Android or Desktop - or at least make their specs open like AMD. (The way they supported Tegra on Android is also similarly crappy - look at how many popular Tegra Android phones or tablets were released post the Nexus 7 2012.)
    - a8000 13y ago
      The last time I tried to use an AMD video card with 3d acceleration under Linux it was a horrible experience. Nvidias binary drivers just work out of the box even with the most recent hardware and have OpenGL 4.3 support. Has the situation changed with AMD cards?
      - rcxdude 13y ago
        It works pretty well for me using the OSS drivers. Better experience than any of the binary drivers (NVIDIA and AMD), and the performance and features are good enough for gaming via WINE (though still not quite as good as the binary drivers AFAIK). I think the current pain points are support for the latest hardware and power saving for laptops.
cordite 13y ago
I remember three or o years ago when NVidia showed no interest in making their driver separate from X on linux for use with Wayland.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  It behooves nvidia's Linux division to be conservative when it comes to driver development. Things change fast in the OSS community, and you never know when someone is going to pull a TTM->GEM. It's best to have reasonable assurance that something is going to stick around before you invest the manpower into supporting it, lest you have to report to the bigwigs that you worked 3-6 months to support something, and ended up having to throw it away because a maintainer decided he liked a certain approach better. Incidentally, that seems to have happened here to a small degree.
dscrd 13y ago
As a long time Linux user, I have loved Nvidia for nearly a decade and continue to do so. They were the pioneers of serious 3D gaming in Linux and still the guys with the best driver. Thanks guys, you rock! Keep it up!
anon4 13y ago
So this in effect makes XWayland just another Wayland client, rather than what it used to be - the usual Xorg running in a very careful way not to step over Wayland and drawing on Wayland surfaces? And now nvidia are complaining that unless XWayland can have direct hardware access, they don't really have a path planned to supporting OpenGL and the like on XWayland, presumably due to them not supporting Wayland? Perhaps their time would have been better spent finding ways to support Wayland proper and not coming up with proprietary workarounds that will stop being feasible the moment someone makes a small change.
- eropple 13y ago
  That's not a small change.

107 points by tbrock 13y ago

celebril 13y ago

This is excellent news. It's amazing to see the driver situation of Linux progressing so quickly these days.

Pacabel 13y ago
I have to ask, did you even read the first sentence of the email from James Jones of NVIDIA? It says, "This direction seems to conflict with our plans to continue running our DDX driver under XWayland." The rest of the email isn't exactly positive, as well. "Progressing so quickly" just isn't the first thing I think of when hearing about difficulties like those described in that email.
mrweasel 13y ago
It kinda sucks if you want Nvidia, Wayland and *BSD. I really wish Nvidia would stop with the binary drivers. Back when Matrox released their G200 card they used a little known fact in X11 that allowed them to do platform independent drivers. I'm not sure how it worked, but remember downloading the and using the "Linux" driver on OpenBSD to gain stuff like dual-head support. I'm not sure the same would work for hardware accelerated graphics, but it would be nice if Nvidia help getting their hardware supported on whatever platform people choose to use.
- zanny 13y ago
  Gallium is actually designed to be cross platform too. Obviously AMD isn't using that (and they were the major developers of Gallium) but the only part of it that is platform specific is the winsys interface. It does, however, mean you can port the Gallium version of the Intel Driver, or the Nouveau / Radeon free drivers, or the other Gallium drivers like Freedreno to any platform with just that one API switch. I figure it was one of the justifications in funding Gallium from the AMD boardroom perspective - it isn't just a Linux driver, it is a pivot to easily get their driver on any other platform they need it on, whereas Catalyst proves to be very specific, requiring developers on both sides actively maintaining it to have a Linux + Windows version, plus the OSX one they certainly have.
- oofabz 13y ago
  > Wayland and *BSD I believe Mesa does not even support EGL on BSD. Now I know the Nvidia driver doesn't use Mesa, but this indicates how little effort is being put into Wayland on BSD. I can't say I blame them. BSD is primarily used on servers with no GUI, so the BSD community uses their limited resources to support that use case. It's the same reason BSD has poor support for WiFi and suspend/resume. But I don't think we're going to see Wayland on BSD for a very long time.

Yuioup 13y ago

What about Mir?

scrollaway 13y ago
What about it? Why should they care?
- tormeh 13y ago
  Ubuntu/Unity is the best desktop environment I've ever used, but Mir can go die in a fire. Completely unnecessary. Everyone who looks like they know what they're talking about thinks so, at least, and I'll go with them.
  - yulaow 13y ago
    Personally I am happy to see competition also in the display server protocols. The absence of it made X so stagnant
    - Morgawr 13y ago
      This is not a business. You don't want to see "competition" (competition in what?) Variety is nice and having choices is nice, but when there's compatibility and man-hours to be spent in ensuring that compatibility/support across all the possible flavors of Linux distributions, I'm not sure we really want "competition". It's APIs we are talking about here, standards. How would you feel if there were dozens of TCP/IP protocol standards (not just implementations, mind you) and if you wanted to develop any simple networked application you'd need to write a compatibility layer for each and every one of them? Competition is definitely not what we need in this case, sorry.
      - yulaow 13y ago
        I would agree with your position only if we could assert that Wayland is the best protocol we can ever have. But can we affirm that? Can we suppose that there is no way to make a better protocol? What if Mir in the end will become better or will work better or will be more adopted? What if the guys of wayland will fail in making something really good? What if they take some wrong decisions and we will have no alternative in which rely? We need everywhere competition.

zokier 13y ago

Could someone quickly recap what DDX and glamor are, and how they relate to XWayland, Xorg, Wayland, and nVidia binary drivers.

Spittie 13y ago
Disclamer: I'm not a kernel/driver developer, so take everything with some salt Right now, every driver provide a different DDX (think about it as an API), which the X.org server uses to offload 2d drawing to the GPU. Glamor is a way of doing 2D rendering on the GPU through OpenGL. It's currently used by RadeonSI (AMD 7xxx cards and newer), and can optionally be used by other free drivers (Intel, r300/r600, Nouveau). If XWayland drop supports for DDX, then drivers that want to offer accellerated 2D on it have to support Glamor. Free drivers can already use Glamor, so it's not a problem, but closed source drivers have yet to implement it (and I'm not sure if it's merely a manpower problem, or there are also licensing problems)
zanny 13y ago
Just to simplify Spittie a bit for clarity, under X you have dedicated 2d drawing APIs. Wayland uses EGL, and just drops 2d entirely, so the entire desktop is running top of GLES. In order to run legacy X applications, Glamor is being baked into the X server so that X apps using Xrender can still work, but the binary drivers aren't using it yet, for a myriad of reasons.

mariuolo 13y ago

> we are actively working on support and this certainly throws a wrench into things. That's what happens when you do work in secret.

hdevalence 13y ago
More importantly, why does NVidia, who contribute practically nothing to Free graphics development (drivers or the rest of the graphics stack) think that the Wayland developers have any obligation to make Wayland work well with their secretly-developed blobs? If NVidia wants to have input, they could hire people to work on Wayland. Otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s
- blinkingled 13y ago
  Exactly. Nvidia has got away with crap for far too long. And given the rise of Intel and AMD GPUs which come with fully OSS drivers, they need to get their heads out of sand and realize that they can't get away with it anymore and they need to either invest resources in getting their GPUs supported under Linux - be it Android or Desktop - or at least make their specs open like AMD. (The way they supported Tegra on Android is also similarly crappy - look at how many popular Tegra Android phones or tablets were released post the Nexus 7 2012.)
  - a8000 13y ago
    The last time I tried to use an AMD video card with 3d acceleration under Linux it was a horrible experience. Nvidias binary drivers just work out of the box even with the most recent hardware and have OpenGL 4.3 support. Has the situation changed with AMD cards?
    - rcxdude 13y ago
      It works pretty well for me using the OSS drivers. Better experience than any of the binary drivers (NVIDIA and AMD), and the performance and features are good enough for gaming via WINE (though still not quite as good as the binary drivers AFAIK). I think the current pain points are support for the latest hardware and power saving for laptops.

cordite 13y ago

I remember three or o years ago when NVidia showed no interest in making their driver separate from X on linux for use with Wayland.

cookiecaper 13y ago
It behooves nvidia's Linux division to be conservative when it comes to driver development. Things change fast in the OSS community, and you never know when someone is going to pull a TTM->GEM. It's best to have reasonable assurance that something is going to stick around before you invest the manpower into supporting it, lest you have to report to the bigwigs that you worked 3-6 months to support something, and ended up having to throw it away because a maintainer decided he liked a certain approach better. Incidentally, that seems to have happened here to a small degree.

dscrd 13y ago

As a long time Linux user, I have loved Nvidia for nearly a decade and continue to do so. They were the pioneers of serious 3D gaming in Linux and still the guys with the best driver. Thanks guys, you rock! Keep it up!

anon4 13y ago

So this in effect makes XWayland just another Wayland client, rather than what it used to be - the usual Xorg running in a very careful way not to step over Wayland and drawing on Wayland surfaces? And now nvidia are complaining that unless XWayland can have direct hardware access, they don't really have a path planned to supporting OpenGL and the like on XWayland, presumably due to them not supporting Wayland? Perhaps their time would have been better spent finding ways to support Wayland proper and not coming up with proprietary workarounds that will stop being feasible the moment someone makes a small change.

eropple 13y ago
That's not a small change.