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Graphics Software Linux

NVIDIA Presents Plans To Support Mir and Wayland On Linux 80

Posted by Soulskill from the going-official dept.
An anonymous reader writes: AMD recently presented plans to unify their open-source and Catalyst Linux drivers at the open source XDC2014 conference in France. NVIDIA's rebuttal presentation focused on support Mir and Wayland on Linux. The next-generation display stacks are competing to succeed the X.Org Server. NVIDIA is partially refactoring their Linux graphics driver to support EGL outside of X11, to propose new EGL extensions for better driver interoperability with Wayland/Mir, and to support the KMS APIs by their driver. NVIDIA's binary driver will support the KMS APIs/ioctls but will be using their own implementation of kernel mode-setting. The EGL improvements are said to land in their closed-source driver this autumn while the other changes probably won't be seen until next year.
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NVIDIA Presents Plans To Support Mir and Wayland On Linux More

NVIDIA Presents Plans To Support Mir and Wayland On Linux

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  • Seems incorrect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Friday October 10, 2014 @04:40PM (#48115183) Homepage

    Seems more like NVidia should be providing some kind of generic global driver and the display software (whichever it may be) should interface with it. I thought we were past the point of each piece of software needing special drivers to interface with hardware. Isn't this the whole point of a modern OS? What happens when "the next big thing" comes alone?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      That makes as much sense as saying Intel should provide a magic generic driver so it can run ARM software. nVidia, AMD and Intel all have different hardware implementations, the only thing most people care about is high level DirectX/OpenGL support which is the equivalent of Java on the CPU side. You have an expected functionality but how it's actually implemented in assembler differs from hardware to hardware. To be fair, there is a "thinnest possible overlay" created with Gallium3D which is something like

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It can be done. Look at AC97.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          They are going to do it like Nvidia, and put the secret sauce in the binary blob and the open source interface as a kernel module as i've understood it. GPL is not the problem here. GPL has the requirements that it has. If you can't commit to obey the rules, then don't. And why would not GPL be legal? Even the question is absurd. There's nothing in GPL that goes beyond the laws.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      I think this is more or less what is happening.

      As opposed to how X works now, new drivers will pretty much support "use EGL to draw all over the screen". The window system is *atop* that, it uses EGL to take texturemaps of window contents and draw and compose them into the right places on the screen.

      The application making those texturemaps uses EGL as well, to draw into the texture maps. This means the texture map is already in the correct graphics memory for the window system to use it and everything syncs

      • It seems like there's a strong possibility that the replacement for remote X-Windows could be something conceptually simpler but could require one massive block of processing. (And I think Nvidia is most of the way there).

        The remote presentation could all be done with an mpeg 4 stream, direct from the GPU. That chooses one standardized mechanism for presentation, and I think it should be sufficient for almost any sort of application. The presentation space in the GPU would be written with a number of APIs,

        • Per-window VNC should be fairly easy to support within a wayland compisotor. Some of the toolkits also offer remote backends.
    • Would be great if linux could just use the windows or mac drivers

      • Would be great if all OS vendors agreed upon /ONE/ damn driver API. It doesn't need to be binary-compatible. just share the headers.

    • You need at least:

      1. Kernel driver for hardware init, power management, mode setting, GPU buffer management and command submission

      2. Userland library for GPU buffer management and command submission

      3. OpenGL implementation

      In the open source graphics stack, the kernel driver exposes KMS and DRM interfaces and potentially others. Parts 2 and 3 are part of libdrm and Mesa respectively. The display server can (I think) be built on top of KMS, libdrm and OpenGL and be independent of the hardware. However it will

  • Ob (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 )

    Does systemd have its own display stack?

  • Hopefully the Steambox will Help (Score:3)

    by Mr_Wisenheimer ( 3534031 ) on Friday October 10, 2014 @05:08PM (#48115429)

    Linux driver support has always been a huge weakness for home users. Apple fans tend to use mostly Apple-approved hardware and everyone makes a driver for Windows. Linux support has always been an afterthought or a non-thought, often with enthusiasts hacking together support for a device months or even years after it is on the market.

    I don't know too many people who use Linux as a primary home OS, but for those that do, good driver support is a must. It probably won't get Linux any more share of the OS pie, but it will mean less pulled out hair for the 1% or so of people who run it on laptops or workstations.

    • Not in my experience, when was the last time you used Linux? My experience is that Linux often has the driver first and longer than windows. There are only a few areas in hardware where this isn't true. For example, windows server 2012 ripped out the entire scsi driver system. Try to install it on older SCSI based hardware and you will need a driver disk for 2008 because the abolished the entire driver tree for the older hardware. This isn't the only example, only the most recent I've run into. These days L

      • Because I haven't seen a hardware release where Windows drivers didn't ship with the product. I see a reasonable bit of hardware too, what with doing IT support for a living.

      • It is true the support is longer on linux than on windows (who had no printer/scaner which was not working from 98 to XP or XP to 7 ect ...) But " Linux often supports hardware or features months or even years before Windows. ", are you kinding me ? First, hardware is mainly (execept for niche markets as supercomputers) targeted to windows consumers, and would not be sold without working drivers for the last windows. How could the linux driver be ready before launch ?

        • How could the linux driver be ready before launch ?

          That can be true if the hardware company is writing the Linux driver. I have seen it only happen with Intel though.

      • If it works with a driver disk then it's not that unsupported.

      • I only run Linux in a VM environment these days, because (aside from the occasional attached USB device) driver support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V is pretty close to perfect.

        But, just for instance, the live-USB version of Kubuntu absolutely will not work on my HP laptop because the Intel integrated graphics drivers are somehow badly broken. Once it starts booting you get nothing but a blank screen, so it makes it difficult (probably not impossible since there must be a workaround) if I ever wanted to

    • I run linux on my home desktop. I only ever buy Intel with integrated graphics. Their open souce drivers may suck for gaming but work perfectly well to run a modern desktop

    • Except for Broadcom wireless drivers on my Dell laptops and home Kodak/HP cheap ass printers (went with brother laser for easy insall) I haven't had any issues with drivers on linux since I've gone full time in 2006. Yes there have been some performance issues with AMD drivers but nothing that would affect normal day to day usage. Currently I'm using A8/A10- chips in my computers and the latest AMD drivers work really good with games.

  • Bluish People (Score:3)

    by eric31415927 ( 861917 ) on Friday October 10, 2014 @05:17PM (#48115499)

    I remember watching blue people in flash videos.
    At the time, I blamed NVIDIA / vdpau.
    However it was really Adobe Flash crossing red and blue that caused me to see smurfs everywhere.

  • I kind of miss my older ATI card. At least Catalyst didn't have drivers that broke or have versions that peg the hell out of the cpu.

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