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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

from scratch or with wlroots?

He recommends wlroots. (Which means it won't work with Nvidia GPUs btw.)

was trying to run swaywm this morning to no avail as it refused to start when it detects nvidia driver is in use. why did not wlroots work with nvidia drivers? is it because nvidia drivers are closed that wlroots(i.e. swaywm) can not work with it? a bit disappointed.

Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21628494

That discussion is outdated.

Current Nvidia drivers support GBM, and thus should work with wlroots. Their status of unsupported mean that the wlroots maintainers cannot help if it does not work as they cannot debug a closed source driver, making it impossible to see what might be wrong.

General improvements that help nvidia compatibility are accepted though if other's identify an issue.

Every other driver uses GBM, which is well supported by all the various software related to gpu buffer management. Nvidia decided to not use GBM and instead use this EGLStreams thing, which meant it wasn't compatible. Politically, this was contentious since nvidia was offloading a huge development burden onto the ecosystem to create parallel implementations of buffer management specifically for nvidia. Wlroots ended up deciding this was such an inane thing for nvidia to do, that they refused to implement EGLStreams at all. Eventually, nvidia backpedaled and decided to implement GBM. Now they are just behind, but everything will probably eventually support nvidia.

> why did not wlroots work with nvidia drivers?

Because nvidia drivers traditionally didn't provide APIs that sway and other wayland compositors expected (drm, dmabuf, atomic) and tried to do it's own things (EGLStreams). For compositors it meant to have to code paths, one nvidia-specific and another one generic. Some compositors implemented both, others implemented generic only.

For comparison, it would be like complaining that Windows/DirectX games do not run with a GPU that doesn't come with DirectX driver. Well, duh.

However, Nvidia signaled a u-turn, that they are going to be more cooperative. How and when, well, it remains to be seen.

It does work, you have to add —unsupported-gpu and there’s a bunch of other tweaks to make it good. There’s a long thread on the Nvidia UNIX driver forums on how to configure it.

It is still unsupported though as wlroots only actively support open source video drivers.

0.16 works with Nvidia proprietary driver. I'm using it right now.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/releases has the newest wlroots,google still leads to github wlroots which has an old 0.14 release

Wait, weren't Nvidia drivers finally open-sourced not so long ago?

They open-sourced a kernel intermediary driver that talks to a proprietary binary blob running in userspace. The driver itself is still proprietary.

And a massive multiple MB proprietary blob running on the GPU. It seems they ported most of their privileged driver to running on the GPU itself.

Has this made any real world impacts yet? Has it been implemented in mainline? Will this mean fedora can be used without leveraging contrib repos?

Forgot to add, Xwayland is still busted, at least on my Arch setup (sway-git and wlroots-git from AUR).

*she, also newer Nvidia drivers support GBM supposedly, so this (hopefully) won’t be true for much longer

IIRC, the blob stuff should be able to handle buffers it created itself no problem. The issue here are foreign buffers that are not supported, yet. Supposedly version 525.x will do that, so lets see how that goes.

nvidia drivers generally work but will remain unsupported for as long as they are not fully open source. Providing support requires the ability to debug the driver when issues arise.

(Improvements to Nvidia support is accepted, if it is a general improvement and not just a hack around a driver bug.)

> if it is a general improvement and not just a hack around a driver bug

And that's why linux on nvidia is doomed.

That policy does not doom anything. wlroots does not accept driver bug hacks for any driver, and is merely consistent in that regard. It works for others, so it can work for Nvidia. Things will just always move slow as long as Nvidia are the only ones that can fix bugs.

Maybe it will be better one day: They are (also slowly) moving in the right direction though, and nouveau might be revived by taking some bits from their new (barebone) kernel driver. But until then, swear your allegiance to the GPU vendors that play nice.

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