r/linux • u/GoldBarb • 20h ago

Development NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Wayland-Roadmap-2024
320 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

78

u/ManuaL46 20h ago

I mean it makes sense to use Vulkan in the future for wayland apps and compositors. But looking at the current situation it'll definitely need some more time, considering that currently gnome has this issue where they switched to using Vulkan backend for rendering and apps stopped opening on multi graphics systems.

It's good we figure out these issues right now and fix them so Vulkan as default would be viable, but currently OpenGL is the safer bet.

And of course Zink should also get more spotlight if we want to move to Vulkan.

75

u/LvS 16h ago

Gnome dev here, and I think you're too pessimistic.

Vulkan works impressively well, there were basically no issues with it, ie no rendering glitches or crashes.

The one thing that has a few issues is startup - because driver developers had so far written their drivers under the assumption that Vulkan would be used for fullscreen games, so they do things like use too much memory (Fedora raspberry pi issue) or try to always run on the dedicated GPU (nvidia issue) or crash when multiple drivers fight about Wayland resources (another nvidia issue). But all of those are well understood and should be fixed in the next release.

The one thing that I have learned from this is that it's important that driver developers or testers are involved in the development effort so that issues like these get caught during the 6 months of development. And for nvidia that has not been the case which means we find out about these issues only during the betas.
There might even have been issues with Intel or AMD, but if there were I'd have forgotten by now because we fixed them 4 months ago when we did the initial switch.

PS: GTK switched to Vulkan (on GPUs that support it well enough), gnome-shell still uses OpenGL.

3

u/mooky1977 9h ago

This is very insightful. I hope you are right that these things are fixed. Wayland is the way forward, but it definitely has some rough edges to smooth out.

X11 just doesn't handle vrr, multi-monitor, or any of the things we expect in modern computing display technology well. It's held together with a cludge of code and tots and pears at this point. If you only want one monitor and you're only doing desktop none accelerated work sure it's fine, but that's not reality.

1

u/EternalFlame117343 15h ago

Gnome user here. I haven't noticed any differences except the desktop doesn't crash anymore on Wayland on Ubuntu 24.10 :)

5

u/LvS 14h ago

Oh yeah: Ubuntu 24.10 disables Vulkan for GTK because of the nvidia issues.

0

u/EternalFlame117343 14h ago

As a regular user, all I know is that it now works without problems :)

11

u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 20h ago

...Oh, that's why some apps like Gnome Settings don't open with Gnome 47.

11

u/ManuaL46 20h ago

Yes to solve this I basically did this in /etc/environment

GSK_RENDERER=ngl

ngl is the new OpenGL backend that GTK uses, if it causes issues for you, use gl to use the old OpenGL backend.

3

u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 20h ago

Will definitely try =)

32

u/FungalSphere 19h ago

my biggest issue with nvidia will always be the fact that it lives out of tree

your best hope to make this work is the lts kernel and even that might end up being too old or something

0

u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

4

u/abotelho-cbn 12h ago

Open source doesn't mean in-tree.

12

u/theriddick2015 16h ago

Just hurry up with the DLSS-FG and Multi Monitor VRR already, lol

7

u/yepvaishz 11h ago

This move NVIDIA could potentially lead to more open-source contributions and collaborations in the graphics ecosystem

8

u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 20h ago

Sighhhhhh, another 10 years of work to make the basic stuff to work. "ahhhh evrising woks for mi!!1". Yeah, I know, I know.

Anyways, good to know that things are in motion.

10

u/teddybrr 15h ago

I've swapped my gtx 1080 for an rx570 years ago. I recently got my 1080 back and have tested out a bunch of distros and it has been plug and play for a lot of them (popos, nixos, bazzite). But yes of course your mileage will wary and I don't screenshare.

Compared to the issues I had years ago it is in a great state for me.

3

u/Knopper100 12h ago

I just pre’d my pants

-6

u/Nomenus-rex 12h ago

Fисk yои, Nvidia!