Talk Of NVIDIA Looking At Wayland Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Talk Of NVIDIA Looking At Wayland Support

Reports are surfacing that NVIDIA is looking at ways to implement Wayland support for their binary Linux graphics driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE2MjY

[Thaodan]

Nice to hear this, but it woud be better if Nvidia woud support Nuveau driver. I hope that all applications are able to work in Wayland without X11 in long term.

[garegin]

i knew they would cave in. unless the main dev of wayland gets killed, I really don't see wayland failing. its a win win for everyone other than old neckbeards who live in 1984.

[bug77]

Just what I expected to hear: it's not out, so no plans to commit resources - that's the sane thing to do. Keeping an eye out for Wayland is also a bonus. The only thing that could become a problem is Wayland attitude towards blobs; they have ignored blobs so far. This can be justified, concentrate available resources to getting Wayland to 1.0 first, deal with non-essential features after you have a stable, solid product. Afaik, there is no info available about possible blob support. Seeing that nvidia takes Wayland seriously, let's hope the reciprocal is also true.

[johnc]

I predict yet another Phoronix superthread.

[mark45]

Just what I expected to hear: it's not out, so no plans to commit resources - that's the sane thing to do. Keeping an eye out for Wayland is also a bonus. The only thing that could become a problem is Wayland attitude towards blobs; they have ignored blobs so far. This can be justified, concentrate available resources to getting Wayland to 1.0 first, deal with non-essential features after you have a stable, solid product. Afaik, there is no info available about possible blob support. Seeing that nvidia takes Wayland seriously, let's hope the reciprocal is also true.

Wayland doesn't have a good or bad attitude towards blobs, it's about blobs not working under Wayland because they've been written to work on Unix-like systems only under X.org, hence to make the blobs work with Wayland the best way would be to implement EGL & KMS support, that is, the stuff that Wayland relies on. There's no bias nor artificial barriers.

[China_Guy]

I don't use discrete GPU anymore, I only have a Intel IVB CPU+iGPU for now and future, I'm very happy with more cooler, power efficiency and quiet!

[bug77]

Wayland doesn't have a good or bad attitude towards blobs, it's about blobs not working under Wayland because they've been written to work on Unix-like systems only under X.org, hence to make the blobs work with Wayland the best way would be to implement EGL & KMS support, that is, the stuff that Wayland relies on. There's no bias nor artificial barriers.

I didn't mean they were hostile or anything. Just that I'm not aware of any efforts to accommodate blobs yet and if Wayland doesn't show any interest past 1.0, this could become a problem. But as long as Wayland and others agree to tackle blob support together, we'll all be in heaven.

PS I doubt nvidia's blob was written for X.org only because it seems to be working fine on Windows, too.

[89c51]

I didn't mean they were hostile or anything. Just that I'm not aware of any efforts to accommodate blobs yet and if Wayland doesn't show any interest past 1.0, this could become a problem. But as long as Wayland and others agree to tackle blob support together, we'll all be in heaven.

PS I doubt nvidia's blob was written for X.org only because it seems to be working fine on Windows, too.

An X dev here in the forums stated that its easy for the blob makers to support wayland. So the problem isn't the wayland devs not wanting to support blobs.

[mark45]

I didn't mean they were hostile or anything. Just that I'm not aware of any efforts to accommodate blobs yet and if Wayland doesn't show any interest past 1.0, this could become a problem. But as long as Wayland and others agree to tackle blob support together, we'll all be in heaven.

PS I doubt nvidia's blob was written for X.org only because it seems to be working fine on Windows, too.

The Wayland devs are ready and open, it's Nvidia who has to step in and start cooperating, the source code is there, just read it and propose better solutions if you (Nvidia) have ones. But the cooperation must be reasonable, e.g. Nvidia can't ask to remove KMS and/or EGL (or any other core concept) in favor of something that suits Nvidia better.

Nvidia's Unix/Linux blob was written only for X.org, but of course the driver core is platform neutral. Though non-core stuff is X.org specific - it has XRandR, COMPOSITE, xlib etc etc support which is not needed under Wayland either at all or replaced with the corresponding (and simpler) Wayland solution.

I'm sure creating a driver for Wayland is way easier than for X.org because by today's standards the latter is an old, sophisticated and wacky standard.