Wayland Support On The BSDs Continuing To Improve

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland Support On The BSDs Continuing To Improve

While Wayland was designed on and for Linux systems, the BSD support for Wayland and the various compositors has continued improving particularly over the past year or so but it's still a lengthy journey...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-BSD-Improving-2019

[cybertraveler]

Interesting article, thanks.

IIRC, I read that one of the BSDs was planning on making a permanent compatibility layer for allowing unmodified, Linux graphics drivers to slot right into the BSD kernel, thus allowing very fast and easy driver support on that BSD system. It seems like a sensible move to me even if it does add a little bit of overhead.

[starshipeleven]

Interesting article, thanks.

IIRC, I read that one of the BSDs was planning on making a permanent compatibility layer for allowing unmodified, Linux graphics drivers to slot right into the BSD kernel, thus allowing very fast and easy driver support on that BSD system. It seems like a sensible move to me even if it does add a little bit of overhead.

That's FreeBSD, the bigger BSD distro. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...FreeBSD-Heated
And yes, bulk of the "drama" is actually dumb trolls. The project is ok.

[Vistaus]

Interesting article, thanks.

IIRC, I read that one of the BSDs was planning on making a permanent compatibility layer for allowing unmodified, Linux graphics drivers to slot right into the BSD kernel, thus allowing very fast and easy driver support on that BSD system. It seems like a sensible move to me even if it does add a little bit of overhead.

So that means Haiku will get the best driver support it ever had, given the fact that it has native drivers, BSD drivers and soon Linux drivers (as Linux drivers are going to work on BSD's now)?

[cybertraveler]

And yes, bulk of the "drama" is actually dumb trolls. The project is ok.

When is it not? :P

[starshipeleven]

So that means Haiku will get the best driver support it ever had, given the fact that it has native drivers, BSD drivers and soon Linux drivers (as Linux drivers are going to work on BSD's now)?

I'm not an authority on this, but I thought Haiku's shim is only for BSD network drivers. Did this change?

[Mifune]

There also isn't much in the Nouveau space on BSDs or the other smaller DRM and Mesa drivers

Nouveau is available on NetBSD, currently with support for up to 9xx series, and it works really well

[horizonbrave]

What's Theo take on this?
Does anyone run a DE on openBSD?
Thanks

[Mifune]

What's Theo take on this?

If you refer to Wayland, I think they wouldn't mind switching to it someday given the potential threat that Xorg turned out over the years security-wise (last but no least the privilege-escalation bug which affected OpenBSD too in 2018, leading them to enforce the use of Xenodm as preferred login method as opposed to startx/xinit), but as always one should start working on it: there is indeed a openbsd-wip port, but as you can see all too well, it's stalled since 2017. Anyway, the Wayland topic was never really brought up on OpenBSD's MLs, and it definitely doesn't seem one of their primary concern right now, though this may change in a near future, who knows . As opposite the NetBSD's pkgsrc-wip/wayland experimental appears still in active development and upto date; it seems the kwayland compositor was ported too. I'd bet, however, that this is far from being anywhere usable on a daily driver.
Long story short, if you want Wayland on *BSD, get FreeBSD, where it plays well with KDE5 already, has experimental support for GNOME3 and an unofficial Sway port is available too.

If you refer to Nvidia, I'm confident there's no current plan to port nouveau, neither now nor in the foreseeable future. If you have a Nvidia GPU, either unplug/disable it, or install NetBSD or FreeBSD. I can play Redeclipse, OpenMW, 0ad, IoQuake3, Tesseract just fine on NetBSD + nouveau with a 760

Does anyone run a DE on openBSD?
Thanks

Why the question? Obviously yes, most OpenBSD developers use it on desktop too, same applies for a good portion of the whole userbase, so it's natural for them to use a DE, a standalone WM (there's cwm and fvwm in base, both awesome pieces of software) or what else. In particular, OpenBSD has a history of always keeping the GNOME3 port up to date and functional, and I've met many GNOME or XFCE OpenBSD users