NVIDIA Reportedly Working On A Unified EGL Driver

[Luke_Wolf]

It is very relevant, if Canonical makes it easy for them to just bring the binary blobs over *what* incentives are there to having open source drivers in future? Having a 'closed' (as in controlled by Canonical in decision making/direction) graphical UI would be an absolute disaster for Linux, I wouldn't trade Xorg for that!

Let me ask you a question: What benefit are there to having Open source drivers now? Now given that X.org can already do proprietary drivers and OSS drivers are being developed and that won't really change if Catalyst and Nvidia's binary driver are brought on board with wayland why would the OSS drivers stop being developed? I believe once you think about those two things you should see that it's really not an issue...

[zanny]

Let me ask you a question: What benefit are there to having Open source drivers now? Now given that X.org can already do proprietary drivers and OSS drivers are being developed and that won't really change if Catalyst and Nvidia's binary driver are brought on board with wayland why would the OSS drivers stop being developed? I believe once you think about those two things you should see that it's really not an issue...

Open source video drivers, since they are devloped in the kernel repos, means open contributions. Like right now how Nouveau has no Nvidia support, Nvidia couldn't just stop developing drivers one day and kill the Linux desktop and leave everyone hanging with FOSS drivers.

One good thing about Wayland is that targeting EGL drivers with the FOSS ones will be much easier than GLX and X support. Hopefully it means more rapid adoption of key GPU features in the free drivers, but the current lack of documentation about how Nvidia / AMD gpus work from the manufacturers means its hard to implement key components.

What I'd really like to see is open design documents about the most modern classes of gpus so FOSS develoers (hell, I'd probably try to contribute) could actually get reasonable acceleration and feature parity in the FOSS ones.

[AJSB]

What I'd really like to see is open design documents about the most modern classes of gpus so FOSS develoers (hell, I'd probably try to contribute) could actually get reasonable acceleration and feature parity in the FOSS ones.

That possibly will never happen because of patents....i heard that both NVIDIA and AMD use stuff not-in-house so they could not fully ever open it....dunno if it's true....

[dee.]

That possibly will never happen because of patents....i heard that both NVIDIA and AMD use stuff not-in-house so they could not fully ever open it....dunno if it's true....

Yet ANOTHER problem that could be solved by simply abolishing software patents.

Not that we're counting or anything...

[uid313]

Great that Nvidia is developing a EGL driver, then we can use proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland which use OpenGL ES.

However, to get full OpenGL support, and not just OpenGL ES support, we need to split out X support from libgl.

libgl is needed for full OpenGL support, but unfortunately it is tied to X.

[zanny]

Great that Nvidia is developing a EGL driver, then we can use proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland which use OpenGL ES.

However, to get full OpenGL support, and not just OpenGL ES support, we need to split out X support from libgl.

libgl is needed for full OpenGL support, but unfortunately it is tied to X.

The backwards compatibility with ogl for old apps is important, but glES is taking off as the graphics API on mobile, and focusing on it in desktop means easier porting between the two. I easily see a lot of game shops just skipping ogl + gles version splits between mobile and desktop games (at least) entirely, and putting one gles version on both.

[kraftman]

Mir will undermine *ALL THE WORK* that's been done to get vendors to open source their drivers and allow for both Linux and *BSD communities the ability to use open source drivers.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't understand why did you even mention *bsd here. Their contribution to FLOSS graphic stack is ZERO, so I don't give a shit if it is able to run Linux drivers or not.

[dh04000]

What. You do realise that this news is completely irrelevant to OSS drivers, right? They already can run Wayland without any issues.

Ignore spstarr, trolls be trolling.

[plonoma]

The support for EGL, an open and royalty free standard, is very valuable.
Everyone can use it and it makes it easier for software to communicate.

Together with OpenGL ES 3 I hope many games will use EGL+OpenGL ES 2 or 3 to provide a very open model where open API's are being used.
We need to use and support open api's as a cornerstone for open software.
I go even further and say that in some situations open api's, formats, specifications can be more important than having the software as open source, with freedoms.

If software is tied to specific, proprietary or not, other pieces of software. Where it is very difficult to run it on newer software, it limits freedom. That seems not right. Well made open api's can make software less tied to specific pieces of other software.

The notion that we need to keep specific libraries that depend on specific pieces, components (libgl) is a sign that we don't have done it good enough (yet). Implementing api's, standards on the right way is also important.

[cirk2]

The support for EGL, an open and royalty free standard, is very valuable.
Everyone can use it and it makes it easier for software to communicate.

I also think so, maybe mir brings closed source driver support to wayland. Then there would be at least something the done for the comunity.

Together with OpenGL ES 3 I hope many games will use EGL+OpenGL ES 2 or 3 to provide a very open model where open API's are being used.

But wouldn't that be be a horendus step backwards?
Isn't OpenGL Es only supporting a subset of OpenGL 3 features? That would mean to throw several years of Graphical progress over board.
Also I don't get what this hype about OpenGL ES is about, it is a tuned down spec for Mobile/Embedded Devices, there is no need to move all software on the desktop to it. Why limit ourselves when there is an open standart aviable, OpenGL?
OpenGL ES support is ok on the desktop to allow porting from mobile to PC, but developers that are making a PC game should not limit their selves to that spec.