Binary Driver Blobs Aren't Yet Ready For Wayland

[Gusar]

So basically why is it so hard to make the blobs run with wayland?

Who said it is? As far as I know, Wayland doesn't care which modesetting and gl implementation is used. Now Weston may be tied to KMS and DRI2, but Weston is just a reference compositor. If it can't be easily adjusted for the blobs, there will be other compositors that can. Or maybe even Weston can be easily adapted, it's just that no one has done it because there hasn't yet been a reason to do it.

[daniels]

After all, nvidia has a driver that works on both Windows' protocol and X (on Linux, BSD and Solaris, no less) with minimum adaptations already.

'Minimum adaptations' is both ridiculous and wrong. Their X11 driver is crazy complex and deeply X-specific.

[daniels]

And I already see how Wayland is going to go:

"We didn't bother to even consider the existence of binary drivers."

And sure enough, absolutely nothing will work outside of FOSS-land. People will be forced to engage in all kinds of Wayland-on-X hackery to get basic functionality and the masses will avoid Linux like the plague... And where does that put companies like Valve? Questioning their priorities and commitments, probably.

Absolute nonsense.

The Wayland GL integration was in fact designed to make it as easy as possible. There's nothing Mesa-specific about it, and NVIDIA could do it quite easily today with not very much work. Certainly it would be infinitely smaller than their X driver, which is huge and spectacularly complex. They just don't want to at the moment, because the customers they care about (thousands of workstations) aren't interested right now.

[asdx]

Yeah they deserve respect as human beings, we all do, and perhaps they have good intentions, but they can't contribute to nouveau because of other reasons.

I retract from saying this, I don't think the people at nvidia deserves any respect, what they keep doing is just horrible:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE0Njg

What a bunch of asshats (those from nvidia)

[1c3d0g]

Please RTFA, asdx.

The good news is that it looks like the ex-NVIDIA engineer has caved under pressure and will grant patent immunity to open-source projects. From Doug's blog, "I have heard you and I am granting the open source community immunity from this patent."

This isn't even about NVIDIA, but about one of their EX-employees having a patent on his name. Anyways, your bitching is unnecessary as it appears the patent will be usable by the open source community.

[bridgman]

Also "caved under pressure" seems a bit dramatic -- from reading all the blogs it seems that :

- the initial approach was reasonable and professional,
- they discussed a bunch of options including collaboration,
- in the end they decided not to collaborate but the patent holder agreed to exempt open source projects

That seems like a best-case scenario -- something which should be appreciated and held up as a good example for others to follow.

Just a thought...

[johnc]

Also "caved under pressure" seems a bit dramatic -- from reading all the blogs it seems that :

- the initial approach was reasonable and professional,
- they discussed a bunch of options including collaboration,
- in the end they decided not to collaborate but the patent holder agreed to exempt open source projects

That seems like a best-case scenario -- something which should be appreciated and held up as a good example for others to follow.

Just a thought...

But Michael never over-dramatizes and exaggerates...

[varikonniemi]

I am pretty sure the kernel/wayland devs are so proud folks that they will make the binary drivers adapt to wayland, not the other way around.