"We have no plans to support Wayland."

[deanjo]

Source: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...2&postcount=11

This is gonna be fun. But as long as they are happy launching the GTX 580 on tuesday that sucks more power than my whole computer...

Means nothing at all. On pretty much any specific item about the linux drivers nvidia has always said "No plans at this time" until they are ready to release a driver to do so.

[libv]

At least Nvidia said it doesn't mind people creating open source drivers for their hardware (which is very good if you think about it), unlike for instance Microsoft, who recently vehemently opposed the intent of a third party to create open source drivers for their newly launched "Kinect".
As I understand it, Nvidia doesn't offer open-source drivers because they're afraid they might be infringing some patents which would show up in the source code.. (I heard many companies do this for same reason, don't we all love software-patents?) but then I don't know why they won't even release documentation since AMD doesn't have (serious) problems neither with the source code nor with releasing documentation about its hw.

When have you last seen documentation from ATI?

[curaga]

Five months ago according to

http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

[libv]

Five months ago according to

http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

Which would be R5xx_Acceleration_v1.5.pdf ...

I think only the firegl versions of those are still being actively sold.

[agd5f]

Just as the r5xx accel documentation applies to r3xx/r4xx for the most part, the r6xx/r7xx acceleration documentation still applies to evergreen as the 3D state registers did not change significantly as you can see:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...een_reg_auto.h
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...eg_auto_r6xx.h
What did change were the shaders, which are well documented here:
http://developer.amd.com/documentati...s/default.aspx

[libv]

Just as the r5xx accel documentation applies to r3xx/r4xx for the most part, the r6xx/r7xx acceleration documentation still applies to evergreen as the 3D state registers did not change significantly as you can see:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...een_reg_auto.h
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...eg_auto_r6xx.h
What did change were the shaders, which are well documented here:
http://developer.amd.com/documentati...s/default.aspx

So what about register specs for the display, or maybe even the documentation for atombios?

[agd5f]

Unfortunately, we haven't had time to review and release register specs for the DCE4 display blocks yet. DCE1 (r5xx) and DCE2 (early r6xx/rs690/rs740) are available here:
http://developer.amd.com/documentati...s/default.aspx
and here:
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
and most of DCE3 (later r6xx/rs780/rs880, r7xx) is in the rs780 docs here:
http://developer.amd.com/documentati...s/default.aspx

At this point atombios is fairly well documented by the various parsers and utilities that have been released.

[ioannis]

Means nothing at all. On pretty much any specific item about the linux drivers nvidia has always said "No plans at this time" until they are ready to release a driver to do so.

Yes, just like with KMS, right? right? ....

[deanjo]

Yes, just like with KMS, right? right? ....

Search the nvnews.net linux forum for "purevideo support" and "sli support". You will see that nvidia didn't announce anything until they had a working solution.

[patstew]

The nvidia driver already does KMS (mode setting in the kernel). What it doesn't have is a framebuffer console driver, so it can't do the seamless switching thing that everyone seems to think 'KMS' means. Also, as I understood it, doesn't wayland rely on EGL rather than KMS/GEM specifically? Shouldn't nvidia supporting GL outside of X be enough?

Essentially, my point is that if we're going to ask the developers at nvidia to support things, we ought to ask for the actual things we want (EGL/fbdev etc) not implementation details from the open source drivers (KMS/GEM/TTM/DRI/mesa/gallium etc) which they will reject immediately, for obvious reasons.

See: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=129253 especially post 5