Some Ugly Code Can Get Nvidia's Linux Driver Working with Accelerated XWayland | Hacker News Reader

Some Ugly Code Can Get Nvidia's Linux Driver Working with Accelerated XWayland

phoronix.com

30 pointsfigomore24 comments

I tried for a while to get Wayland working in order to get rid of tearing I saw in X Windows, until I found out a kernel module parameter for the Nvidia driver fixed tearing in X. I run xmonad as well, which doesn't work with wayland. Don't see any reason to run Wayland at the moment.

How about "X is insecure, flaky, unsupported, and solves problems nobody actually has"? Such is the considered opinion of just about anybody who knows spit about the Linux graphics stack. Hint: The major Wayland devs are former Xorg devs.

For some of us X just works right now and the security issue isn't urgent. (For serious impact someone would have to break out of browser sandbox and then spy... on the browser)

In theory I'd like to move to Wayland, but X solves my problem which is "I want to see windows, some of them accelerated".

I don't see how Wayland would improve security in my case. There are basically two types of applications on my system: some which can't be used in sandboxes in a reasonable way and those which work well in sandboxes. In the first case I wouldn't gain anything with Wayland because my shellrc, launcher configuration, ssh keys, personal data, ... are accessible to those applications, giving them and a potential attacker basically full access to my system, including the control of all Wayland clients.

In the second case, those applications work well with X security extensions and X11 proxies so I'm pretty fine in that regard, even with X11.

And since X11 also works just so much better in the majority of cases I care about, regarding my productivity and flexibility, I don't see any reason to use Wayland right now.

I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

> Hint: The major Wayland devs are former Xorg devs.

But notably, major Xorg developer Keith Packard is missing from that list.

Agreed, which means that right now Keith Packard is about the only person or entity keeping X alive. Red Hat have washed their hands of it. When the legacy versions of RHEL that still use it go out of support, maintenance on Xorg will pretty much grind to a halt. It is a moribund project, and that presents considerable risk.

> I run xmonad as well, which doesn't work with wayland.

There is Waymonad, but not sure how mature it is:

https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

Same. I've grown so accustomed to my xmonad setup over the past decade that sway isn't a viable replacement - I did spend 2-3 months full-time on i3 a couple of years back but the tiling models are different enough that I just won't. There is Waymonad but it is neither practically usable nor maintained.

It's like asking a taxi driver to start steering with a joystick.

Could you describe how you got rid of tearing?

It's an issue I've wanted to get rid of for a while now.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/video-tearing-with-gef...

This is a recurring pattern I keep seeing come up again and again with open source / Linux. I still don’t see any real benefits to switching to Wayland as a user other than it being a Shiny New Thing. In fact, this is a net negative for me.

When I previously tried Wayland, my DE wasn’t compatible and most of my software had to be run through their XWindows compatibility layer and required myriad workarounds and tuning just to get a basic desktop environment running. This NVIDIA hack is yet another example.

It still felt like alpha quality software even though it has been in development for 10 years(!) now. Why would users ever not stick with something that is stable and just works?

For fractional scaling or multiple monitors with different DPIs, I've found Wayland to be much smoother than X11. And with GNOME, I realize this isn't 100% related, but touchpad support is way better on Wayland.

Overall Wayland is certainly more janky than X11 right now, but the better DPI and multi-monitor support makes me think that it's worth the effort in the long run.

But definitely if you are satisfied with X11 then might as well stick to it.

Most people with your kind of posts either never bothered to read what Wayland is or what it does, or, are employed by Law enforcement.

I kinda get the first bit, but I'm not sure what you meant by employed by law enforcement? Does the police have stereotypes about Linux software?

I think it's referring to a stereotype that police officers are not the brightest, therefore insulting the poster by bringing their intelligence into question.

It may be a reference to Wayland having better security than X, since any X apps can key log, screen capture, etc. each other while this is limited in Wayland.

I have less screen tearing in wayland/sway compared to X11/compton FWIW. Also everything being newer means configuration is easier to understand. In X11 there are too many tool combinations and it often requires googling and fiddling to change any configuration.

I've been using wayland for 4 years. It is stable and just works.

I agree in general that too many things pop up because people want change without good reason. But Wayland is a highly needed replacement, not just in my opinion, but according to the X.org developers themselves. See e.g. this [1] talk by someone who has worked on both X.org and Wayland.

> Why would users ever not stick with something that is stable and just works?

As a user, I switched to Wayland 1.5 years ago for two reasons. The first is that Wayland has way better performance than X. It solves some long-standing and highly irritating issues with e.g. screen-tearing that I and others have been experiencing with X. The second is security. Wayland is nearly a prerequisite for proper sandboxing of GUI apps, as X apps can all keylog each other, screen-record each other, inject keys into each other, and so on, without much restrictions. Since Wayland is backwards-compatible with X via XWayland, which these days has quite good performance, I haven't yet run into an X-only app that didn't just work.

As for the issues with nVidia, that's mostly due to nVidia implementing their own Wayland backend (EGLStreams) that is different from what every other graphics card driver uses (GBM), resulting in every desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.) having to implement nVidia support separately from generic Wayland support. The single biggest factor holding Wayland back at the moment is nVidia; my experience is that currently Wayland already works way better than X.org if you have an Intel or AMD card, but is highly broken on nVidia.

The second factor holding it back would be that the number of window managers (compositors) for Wayland is lower than for X, currently the main ones are GNOME, KDE, and Sway. But this is changing fast: when I first switched only GNOME worked well; now both KDE and Sway are stable and fully usable on Wayland; and thanks to wlroots, a lot of new window managers for Wayland have popped up [2] and should mature over time.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

[2]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...

Why did Nvidia decide to do that anyway? I understand they have a history of being annoying on Linux, but I'm having trouble seeing what value there is in implementing this with your own backend.

Minimum effort. On Linux they are basically only interested in Cuda and Mining working.

Did they eventually fix the story around being able to make screenshots and screen recordings? I haven't been following Wayland much because there didn't seem to be much interest in enabling basic functionality like this early on.

Yes. GNOME has its bundled screenshot tool, and Zoom supports screen recording on GNOME/Wayland. Sway has grim + slurp for screenshots, and wf-recorder or wlrobs for screen recording.

However, one difference between X11 and Wayland, is that the role of the compositor (window manager) is much larger in Wayland. Thus, I believe it is up to the compositor to offer an API for features like this in Wayland, and the API may differ between compositors. In practice, GNOME has done their own thing; KDE and Sway collaborate on protocols, and are partly compatible; nearly every other compositor is based on Sway's wlroots, and should be compatible with Sway.

[1]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki

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