NVIDIA Says It Has No Plans To Support Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Says It Has No Plans To Support Wayland

Last week Mark Shuttleworth shared that Ubuntu will begin shipping the Wayland Display Server with their Unity desktop in a future release (likely around Ubuntu 11.10 it will become an experimental part of their desktop stack, but a PPA repository of Wayland for Ubuntu is already being worked on now). While being a supporter of Wayland and the first to cover this display server project two years ago when it was just in its infancy, this even caught me by surprise and a bit of a shock that Ubuntu, the leading desktop Linux distribution, planned to begin shipping support for it so soon...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODc2Mg

[darkbasic]

"We have no plan to buy an Nvidia" cit.

[Detructor]

after that point is cleared now, could we get back to real buisness and work for the next X.org/Xserver release? tnx.

[NomadDemon]

we have no plans to buy nvidia or other GPU

stupid bussines stuff.. for taking money they are first, for making a new features.. not...

if you will call wayland a DX12... they will be racing to implement...

[liam]

we have no plans to buy nvidia or other GPU

stupid bussines stuff.. for taking money they are first, for making a new features.. not...

if you will call wayland a DX12... they will be racing to implement...

If only they provided a video acceleration path for Linux like ALL the other cards manufacturers...

[MaestroMaus]

Lol, this is such non-news. If Wayland will ever become what X is now Wayland will be supported by NVIDIA. Right now Wayland isn't even being used. Easy enough to tell your not going to support it now.

In other words: Nothing to see here, move along.

[makomk]

Lol, this is such non-news. If Wayland will ever become what X is now Wayland will be supported by NVIDIA.

I'm not convinced. There appear to be some pretty major technical and legal barriers to NVidia supporting Wayland. In particular, Wayland requires KMS support from drivers, which NVidia can't implement due to it requiring GPL-only symbols in the kernel. It also assumes the use of DRI2 and GEM, meaning a major redesign of NVidia's driver would be needed and they wouldn't be share nearly as much code with the Windows driver as they currently do.

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm not convinced. There appear to be some pretty major technical and legal barriers to NVidia supporting Wayland.

I don't think that there are any technical barriers for nvidia drivers under Wayland. Nvidia just doesn't see a point in doing it now, and that's quite understandable.

In particular, Wayland requires KMS support from drivers, which NVidia can't implement due to it requiring GPL-only symbols in the kernel.

Nvidia blob does modesetting in the kernel. They don't need to tie into the kernel modesetting code, since they do all the modesetting in kernel space inside their proprietary blob already.

It also assumes the use of DRI2 and GEM, meaning a major redesign of NVidia's driver would be needed and they wouldn't be share nearly as much code with the Windows driver as they currently do.

You don't really need DRI2 and GEM, but the infrastructure needed for redirected direct rendering, which Nvidia has had for a long time.

KMS, DRI2, GEM, etc. are open-source technologies which pretty much do the same thing that the binary blob does internally. Nvidia just can't be bothered at this time.

[makomk]

Nvidia blob does modesetting in the kernel. They don't need to tie into the kernel modesetting code, since they do all the modesetting in kernel space inside their proprietary blob already.

They do need to, because Wayland is currently hardcoded to use the kernel modesetting code and a fairly significant chunk of DRI2 directly. What's more, this part of Wayland is itself under the GPL, so it's not like they can fork a modified version that uses their own proprietary modesetting library either.

You don't really need DRI2 and GEM, but the infrastructure needed for redirected direct rendering, which Nvidia has had for a long time.

That's the minimum requirement for something like Wayland to be used. Wayland itself does actually require DRI2. If they wanted to, AMD might just be able to implement enough of DRI2 to allow Wayland to run on top of X.org on fglrx, but this option really isn't practical for NVidia because they don't actually use DRI. Even then, running Wayland without using X.org as a backend is another matter entirely.

[jonwil]

They do need to, because Wayland is currently hardcoded to use the kernel modesetting code and a fairly significant chunk of DRI2 directly. What's more, this part of Wayland is itself under the GPL, so it's not like they can fork a modified version that uses their own proprietary modesetting library either.



That's the minimum requirement for something like Wayland to be used. Wayland itself does actually require DRI2. If they wanted to, AMD might just be able to implement enough of DRI2 to allow Wayland to run on top of X.org on fglrx, but this option really isn't practical for NVidia because they don't actually use DRI. Even then, running Wayland without using X.org as a backend is another matter entirely.

Would NVIDIA be able to support Wayland if they ported their driver and used DRI2? Or would they be unable to do so without subjecting their proprietary code to the GPL?