Uh, through this article I noticed that I missed a juicy but if news:
Nvidea seems to jump on the GBM wagon, at least for some GPUS.
Nvidea seems to jump on the GBM wagon, at least for some GPUS.
> Generic Buffer Management (GBM) is an API that provides a mechanism for allocating buffers for graphics rendering tied to Mesa. GBM is intended to be used as a native platform for EGL on DRM or openwfd. The handle it creates can be used to initialize EGL and to create render target buffers.
Where
> The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics)#Gener... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
What does it mean for nvidia to jump on the GBM bandwagon? Firefox would just talk (perhaps via some intermediate API like EGL or BGM) to the Linux kernel for talking to an nvidia card, if I understand it correctly?
yes, I'm not sure how everything is divvied up. NVIDIA ships multiple kernel modules in their driver, and one of them is called ‘nvidia_drm’. So idk, maybe you have to use their DRM implementation or something
But it does matter for developers of Wayland compositors. A lot.
This e.g. mean developer cost for gnome/kde would be reduced and sway(wlroots) would work on devices with Nvidia cards (at least some).
I.e. in general it makes it easier for everyone, except maybe Nvidea. But even for them it (long term) could make maintenance simpler.