NVIDIA Says It Has No Plans To Support Wayland

[deanjo]

Not true. The highest offering was a dualcore GPU with double the amount of RAM, namely 4890x2, which is fair because it's on one chip. And it kicked the shit out of every nVidia card when released.

Ummm your forgetting the GTX 295 (which was a dual gpu as well) which again booted the 4890 to the curb. Nice try though.

[V!NCENT]

That was after the 4890x2 launch. Not to mention the ever static blob performance versus the ever increasing fglrx performance on at least Windows.

[smitty3268]

That single card beats everything in that generation and wasn't even nvidia's highest offering but yet it beat ati's highest offering (even the 4890). Just google any GTX 275/280/285 benchmarks and you will see the trend.

First, I don't buy your argument that it beat the 4890. It was even on 30" monitors, and lost at everything below that.

Second, I know very well that NVidia had the fastest single GPU card that generation. My point was that no one cared, because it sucked. The 4xxx series was fast enough, and the minimal speed increase you could get from nvidia came at the cost of lots of money, noise, power usage, and generally no one thought it was worthwhile. Except, as i said, for the compute freaks out there. Which i believe you probably are one.

[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?

[smitty3268]

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?

They only need to support the EGL extensions and slightly modify Wayland to use their own custom modesetting. It wouldn't be difficult.

[Naib]

Soo many trolls, zealots and sheeples

Widelands isn't even really usable for day to day stuff and people are crying that NVIDIA have stated that they have no plans to support it

They didn't say they won't support it, they didn't say they will never support it JUST they don't plan to.

It aint even fucking stable yet, it aint even rolled out on any distro yet wtf should nvidia waste time providing hooks to wayland when, for something that is in an alpha state, could change its api...

if/when wayland has its 1st stable release and it starts to get picked up I am sure nvidia will look into providing support BUT since noone can say that they will or they won't on something that is in the very far future WTF go full retard over it! never go full retard

[NomadDemon]

no plans = fu*k off
whats policy of all corporations.. same asus xonar DX.. still no binary drivers... a asked them 3 years ago... other manifacturers do same...
no plans = never will be...
cause its non profit for them...

[glisse]

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.

It's really easy to add somethings not using KMS, NVidia or AMD can do a closed source module that does modesetting and the just add support in wayland to use this closed source library.

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.

Maybe you should actualy have read the wayland code, there is no need for dri2 at all in it except in the x11 version but the point of wayland is not to run on x11. Really all the closed source need are the image extension which basicly need to be able to associate a name (unique int number) to gl/gles/... buffer. So no it doesn't need any significant change to nvidia or fglrx closed source driver. All it needs is providing a modesetting facilities outside X and adding support for the EGL image extension, none of this should be hard.

[PGHammer]

Even if Wayland becomes sort of a defacto standard on Linux desktops and nVidia *still* decides not to support it, I don't really see the problem: nvidia blob users will keep on using X.org and nouveau users will use Wayland (or X.org). So everyone would still have a choice in what kind of driver and display server to use (except of course the newest-gen gfx card users, for obvious reasons).

For that matter, I don't get all those people whining about Canonical planning to implement Wayland: They can run an xserver on wayland if they need the features, and if that for some reason doesn't meet their needs X.org will still be in the repo's, so anyone can simply swap out Wayland for X.org. Linux in general is about choice and fortunately Canonical is not about to take that away from Ubuntu's users.
For anyone who doesn't need features like X-forwarding (which will be most Ubuntu users I'm guessing), implementing Wayland will be a huge win both in display quality and performance.

Canonical pretty much has little option as far as supporting Wayland, when two of the three major GPU suppliers (Intel and AMD) to Canonical's hardware partners (especially System76) are also backing Wayland (both directly and indirectly). Finding Intel there is no surprise (largely because of Gallium3D, which has a lot in common with Wayland); it's the presence of AMD that's the Left Field Event.

AMD had been taking a severe lambasting in the open-source community for over-reliance on binary-blob drivers, especially for Linux (for everything from workstation GPUs to netbook GPUs) Starting with Gallium (and now Wayland), AMD has made a rather abrupt turnabout and has been dropping source-code into the pipeline as fast as AMD's lawyers will let it. Instead of a two year lag (as it was at its worst) between hardware-release and the availability of open-source driver support, it's now less than nine months; only HD5xxx/6xxx are not supported by open-source drivers now, and that could change for HD5xxx by the end of this calendar year.

Part of what is causing nVidia's reticence is that they remain hostile to Gallium3D (a solid support base for Gallium3D is pretty much a necessary for Wayland) - while AMD was late, at least they were (and are) there. Whether or not it will come back to bite them is in the hands of nVidia.

[PGHammer]

It's really easy to add somethings not using KMS, NVidia or AMD can do a closed source module that does modesetting and the just add support in wayland to use this closed source library.




Maybe you should actualy have read the wayland code, there is no need for dri2 at all in it except in the x11 version but the point of wayland is not to run on x11. Really all the closed source need are the image extension which basicly need to be able to associate a name (unique int number) to gl/gles/... buffer. So no it doesn't need any significant change to nvidia or fglrx closed source driver. All it needs is providing a modesetting facilities outside X and adding support for the EGL image extension, none of this should be hard.

AMD *is* supporting Wayland, and their drivers (not just the open-source ones, but their binary blob Linux Catalysts) support KMS today. If you have solid Gallium3D support, the jump to solid Wayland support is even easier (which is why Intel is there with both feet).

Lastly, the big driving force behind Wayland is an area in which nVidia is now taking some serious (pardon the expression) heat - netbooks, notebooks, and laptops, which are the LEAST likely to have any desire to run Wayland atop X (simply due to reasons of code weight). Instead, this class of hardware would prefer to run Wayland *instead* of X, not atop it. Without Wayland, nVidia could find itself a non-player in open-source portable computing (and therefore locked into WinMac), and does nVidia really want to wind up there (considering that they aren't exactly chasing either Intel or AMD away)?