NVIDIA Driver Support

[skyne98]

Hey there! As we had a small discussion on the twitter before, this should be a good place for its continuation.

The point of the discussion is: can we have NVIDIA Linux driver support? As far as I know, the problem is in the way NVIDIA allocates and manages memory (using EGLStreams), which is not compatible with the Wayland way of doing things.

Neither Gnome, nor KDE support Wayland on NVIDIA. However, as @levansfr and @Drakulix mentioned on twitter, it is a possibility in Smithay - which is exciting.

[Drakulix]

Yeah this is entirely possible, I already have a bunch of code regarding that on my hard drive, I just need to find the time to test, debug and polish it. So this will happen rather sooner then later actually.

which is not compatible with the Wayland way of doing things.

It is, it is just annoying to support two different code paths.

Neither Gnome, nor KDE support Wayland on NVIDIA.

Gnome is actually actively working on support btw, not sure what the story for KDE is though.

[skyne98]

@Drakulix, glad to hear the news. I will be very excited to hear about the status of this feature 👍

[csnewman]

@Drakulix Did you ever get chance to create a PR for this?

[Drakulix]

@Drakulix Did you ever get chance to create a PR for this?

I have an implementation that should be working, but errors out, because my nvidia card does not expose crtc's for EGLStreams, but only planes. Smithay, on the other hand, has no idea what drm-planes are and any work-around would have been quite hacky.

It might be, that some older cards work with my implementation, but I have no way to tell, so I have not released it.

Regarding planes in smithay: Planes are not terribly useful without the atomic mode-setting api of the drm system, so I do not want to add support for those in smithay's current renderer, but rather when adding atomic-modesetting support. That is currently blocked on implementing the api inside drm-rs (discussed here), which I want to tackle in the upcoming weeks.

So the plan is currently:

• implement atomic-modesetting in drm-rs
• implement an atomic-modesetting based renderer in smithay
• implement support for planes (overlay planes missing, but unneeded for now)
• fixup my nvidia branch (which should just work at this point)
• (maybe try to support the old renderer as well, but I have no seen any nvidia cards supporting EGLStreams, but not atomic-modesetting yet, so why bother works)

(Updated: 2020-05-23)

[PolyMeilex]

Sorry for the noise, but shouldn't this be reopened, since #261 got merged?

[i509VCB]

This issue has progressed with the new 495 beta drivers now supporting gbm

[Drakulix]

It has, but I would leave this open until we have properly tested it (which is not super straightforward, given the packaging situation of e.g. the new XWayland version required).

[PolyMeilex]

I have tested it with-git dependencies, and it works fairly well, but I would keep the issue until the driver stabilizes. In sway it has a lot of bugs so my guess is some of them would manifest in anvil as well, but I simply did not find them yet.

[Drakulix]

I think we can close this now. Support through the new nvidia driver is there and nobody seems to be interested in maintaining an EGLStream codepath inside smithay. Implementating that out-of-tree is also easily possible with the current architecture.