
Nvidia working on Wayland support for binary driver - tbrock
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2014-March/041534.html
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mariuolo
> we are actively working on support and this certainly throws a wrench into
> things.

That's what happens when you do work in secret.

~~~
hdevalence
More importantly, why does NVidia, who contribute practically nothing to Free
graphics development (drivers or the rest of the graphics stack) think that
the Wayland developers have any obligation to make Wayland work well with
their secretly-developed blobs?

If NVidia wants to have input, they could hire people to work on Wayland.
Otherwise:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxHqi8tx048&t=0m28s)

~~~
teacup50
> _More importantly, why does NVidia, who contribute practically nothing to
> Free graphics development (drivers or the rest of the graphics stack) think
> that the Wayland developers have any obligation to make Wayland work well
> with their secretly-developed blobs?_

NVidia could also just not support Linux at all, which would certainly create
even more of an uphill battle for Free graphics development and Linux.

~~~
Morgawr
That would be a pretty terrible PR move by nVidia. While I hate the fact that
they don't open source their stuff, I have to give them props because their
blobs drivers work really well on Linux too.

Abandoning Linux is definitely the wrong move, especially now that the gaming
community is thriving.

~~~
pekk
Terrible PR among the tiny minority of Linux users.

Most people are using Windows or Mac and most of those are either completely
ignorant, completely indifferent or actively hostile to Linux

~~~
Morgawr
You're not too familiar with the gaming community and the noise they can
generate, are you? Just look at the Oculus deal, if you're in the gaming
industry you definitely don't want to piss off gamers, no matter how much of a
minority they can be.

This said, Linux is thriving a lot these days and is gaining a huge momentum
as far as gaming goes. The community is constantly growing, the tools are all
coming to Linux, SteamOS is right behind the corner, more and more companies
are targeting the Linux platform, etc etc.

Bailing out of the Linux ecosystem now would be a terrible and shortsighted
move on behalf of nVidia.

~~~
cookiecaper
What are we supposed to learn about the power of gamers from the Oculus deal?
They can whine on forums and cancel their pre-orders? That has been the only
visible "negative" consequence of the Oculus/Facebook deal thus far.

~~~
gravitasaxe
Cancelled preorders, permanent PR damage, several dozen projects have been
canned & fear has replaced confidence in consumers & devs alike when talking
anything Oculus now. Not the rule but it's prevalent. You downplaying the
impact is just plain stupidity.

~~~
cookiecaper
I mentioned canceled pre-orders and I don't think that was unanticipated. I
don't know how many were canceled, but with Facebook's coffers backing Oculus
VR now, I must say I don't think they're overly concerned. My understanding
was that the DKs were being sold primarily to finance further development and
prototyping (and in particular to provide proof to suppliers that sufficient
volume would exist), which is now a non-issue since they now have essentially
as much money as they want, and can order x million units to get bulk pricing
regardless of consumer demand.

The only major project that's been canceled was Minecraft, which Luckey
privately pointed out was complete and utter vaporware anyway. I have a DK1
and I can tell you that most "Rift projects" were one-off tech demos that
mostly weren't maintained, and no one will miss. If OVR continues to develop a
good product, people will continue to develop for their platform, whether
Facebook owns them or not.

What PR damage, outside of the group that they expected would be unhappy? It's
all over the head of people who didn't know what Oculus was before the
acquisition. I don't think people who aren't part of the industry really care,
because they don't know anything about it. To the extent that it was covered
by mainstream outlets, it was because Facebook bought another company, not
because they were outraged that the dream of Oculus VR was being destroyed by
FB.

Fear hasn't replaced confidence in all consumers and developers. Logical
persons may have their opinions and predictions, but no one is justified in
anything beyond "wait and see" until something actually happens.

I'm not downplaying the impact of the ire of the gaming community. I just
don't think there's been a noteworthy one other than the vast amount of
fruitless rage that's filled tech forums recently. Perhaps we disagree, but I
don't think my assertions are "plain stupidity".

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zokier
Could someone quickly recap what DDX and glamor are, and how they relate to
XWayland, Xorg, Wayland, and nVidia binary drivers.

~~~
Spittie
Disclamer: I'm not a kernel/driver developer, so take everything with some
salt

Right now, every driver provide a different DDX (think about it as an API),
which the X.org server uses to offload 2d drawing to the GPU.

Glamor is a way of doing 2D rendering on the GPU through OpenGL. It's
currently used by RadeonSI (AMD 7xxx cards and newer), and can optionally be
used by other free drivers (Intel, r300/r600, Nouveau).

If XWayland drop supports for DDX, then drivers that want to offer
accellerated 2D on it have to support Glamor.

Free drivers can already use Glamor, so it's not a problem, but closed source
drivers have yet to implement it (and I'm not sure if it's merely a manpower
problem, or there are also licensing problems)

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anon4
So this in effect makes XWayland just another Wayland client, rather than what
it used to be - the usual Xorg running in a very careful way not to step over
Wayland and drawing on Wayland surfaces? And now nvidia are complaining that
unless XWayland can have direct hardware access, they don't really have a path
planned to supporting OpenGL and the like on XWayland, presumably due to them
not supporting Wayland?

Perhaps their time would have been better spent finding ways to support
Wayland proper and not coming up with proprietary workarounds that will stop
being feasible the moment someone makes a small change.

~~~
eropple
That's not a _small change_.

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dscrd
As a long time Linux user, I have loved Nvidia for nearly a decade and
continue to do so. They were the pioneers of serious 3D gaming in Linux and
still the guys with the best driver.

Thanks guys, you rock! Keep it up!

------
cordite
I remember three or o years ago when NVidia showed no interest in making their
driver separate from X on linux for use with Wayland.

~~~
cookiecaper
It behooves nvidia's Linux division to be conservative when it comes to driver
development. Things change fast in the OSS community, and you never know when
someone is going to pull a TTM->GEM. It's best to have reasonable assurance
that something is going to stick around before you invest the manpower into
supporting it, lest you have to report to the bigwigs that you worked 3-6
months to support something, and ended up having to throw it away because a
maintainer decided he liked a certain approach better. Incidentally, that
seems to have happened here to a small degree.

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Yuioup
What about Mir?

~~~
scrollaway
What about it? Why should they care?

~~~
tormeh
Ubuntu/Unity is the best desktop environment I've ever used, but Mir can go
die in a fire. Completely unnecessary. Everyone who looks like they know what
they're talking about thinks so, at least, and I'll go with them.

~~~
yulaow
Personally I am happy to see competition also in the display server protocols.
The absence of it made X so stagnant

~~~
Morgawr
This is not a business. You don't want to see "competition" (competition in
what?)

Variety is nice and having choices is nice, but when there's compatibility and
man-hours to be spent in ensuring that compatibility/support across all the
possible flavors of Linux distributions, I'm not sure we really want
"competition".

It's APIs we are talking about here, standards. How would you feel if there
were dozens of TCP/IP protocol standards (not just implementations, mind you)
and if you wanted to develop any simple networked application you'd need to
write a compatibility layer for each and every one of them?

Competition is definitely not what we need in this case, sorry.

~~~
yulaow
I would agree with your position only if we could assert that Wayland is the
best protocol we can ever have.

But can we affirm that? Can we suppose that there is no way to make a better
protocol? What if Mir in the end will become better or will work better or
will be more adopted? What if the guys of wayland will fail in making
something really good? What if they take some wrong decisions and we will have
no alternative in which rely?

We need everywhere competition.

~~~
zanny
Wayland exists because it was proposed with concrete reasons _why_ X was
rubbish and needed replaced.

So everyone said "yes, true, valid, you speak honestly here" and they
proceeded to develop Wayland and _everyone_ was on board with transitioning to
it when it was ready.

Mir has never produced any arguments for its adoption and has only spread
false information claiming why it has merits over Wayland.

Free software will usually jump on any software that can clearly state "this
replaces X, for reasons Y, because X is insufficient for purpose in these
domains Z and can't be fixed". You get situations where projects like pulse
and systemd come under fire over disagreements over what Z domains X is
appropriate for, not because there are arguments against Y being lacking
functionality.

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celebril
This is excellent news. It's amazing to see the driver situation of Linux
progressing so quickly these days.

~~~
mrweasel
It kinda sucks if you want Nvidia, Wayland and *BSD. I really wish Nvidia
would stop with the binary drivers.

Back when Matrox released their G200 card they used a little known fact in X11
that allowed them to do platform independent drivers. I'm not sure how it
worked, but remember downloading the and using the "Linux" driver on OpenBSD
to gain stuff like dual-head support. I'm not sure the same would work for
hardware accelerated graphics, but it would be nice if Nvidia help getting
their hardware supported on whatever platform people choose to use.

~~~
zanny
Gallium is actually designed to be cross platform too. Obviously AMD isn't
using that (and they were the major developers of Gallium) but the only part
of it that is platform specific is the winsys interface.

It does, however, mean you can port the Gallium version of the Intel Driver,
or the Nouveau / Radeon free drivers, or the other Gallium drivers like
Freedreno to any platform with just that one API switch.

I figure it was one of the justifications in funding Gallium from the AMD
boardroom perspective - it isn't _just_ a Linux driver, it is a pivot to
easily get their driver on any other platform they need it on, whereas
Catalyst proves to be very specific, requiring developers on both sides
actively maintaining it to have a Linux + Windows version, plus the OSX one
they certainly have.

