this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
63 points (100.0% liked)
Linux Gaming
15378 readers
42 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Clarification: GBM is what Intel, AMD and the general "nice players" of the Linux graphics ecosystem decided, whereas EGLStreams was something NVidia came up with because it worked better with their proprietary drivers (AFAIK)
Gnome and KDE were fine going out of their way to support both, but smaller implementations such as wlroots (the thing behind sway and Hyprland and other non-Weston "window managers") didn't feel the tradeoff was worth it (in both philosophical and manpower reasons) and stuck to GBM.
NVidia comparatively recently "caved in" and got GBM support working (alongside kernel mode setting & other terms you don't really need to know about), and being one of the few proprietary players in the ecosystem they have not been able to benefit from help from the community, which is one of the reasons why their Wayland support is immature compared to the likes of Intel and AMD.
You're mostly there, but the big issue now is their handling of Xwayland. nVidia also doesn't expose VRR/GSync under Wayland (but an engineer remarked that it's slated for the 545 series release on the nVidia Linux forums).
The most glaring issue currently that effectively blocks Wayland for nVidia users is the lack of implicit sync on their end, and the Xwayland developers refusal to merge nVidia's proposed explicit sync method. This is oversimplifying but the short version is from nVidia "implicit sync is too slow, it architecturally conflicts with our driver forcing a comprehensive rewrite, and we don't want to look bad with implicit sync's performance". The response from X devs boils down to "You weren't there when we planned all this, implicit sync works fine, explicit sync won't benefit how the Mesa drivers work so this would only be for your benefit, and you've been complete assholes".
Neither side looks like it's going to flinch, so getting Wine to run in Wayland is the only feasible solution for nVidia users. In an all-wayland environment with no applications running under Xwayland, Mutter and plasma-wayland run like a dream, it's a great experience.