Vote: making wayland=on default (also posted to ports@)

[Tommi Pernila]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Tijl Coosemans <tijl at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Dec 2017 02:55:06 +0300 Greg V <greg at unrelenting.technology>
> wrote:
> > On 12/20/2017 20:01, Tijl Coosemans wrote:
> >> On Wed, 20 Dec 2017 12:53:20 +0000 Johannes Lundberg <
> johalun0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Can you guarantee this?  I seem to have mesa-libs stuff installed
> >>>> even though I use the nvidia-driver.  May be that pkg just
> >>>> installed mesa-libs as a dependency for some other package.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm using the AMD Ryzen which has no on-board graphics, so I'm
> >>>> happily using my NVIDIA GPU and have absolutely no desire to
> >>>> change because someone enables wayland by default.
> >>> x11-toolkits/gtk30 will get some added dependencies:
> >>> libwayland-client.so:graphics/wayland \
> >>> libwayland-egl.so:graphics/mesa-libs \
> >>> libxkbcommon.so:x11/libxkbcommon
> >>>
> >>> Is this a problem for Nvidia users?
> >> The older nvidia drivers don't have libEGL, but if libwayland-egl.so
> >> isn't actually used at runtime it's probably ok.
> > It's not used when you're on X11, because X11 is not Wayland :)
>
> But is libEGL loaded into memory?
> _______________________________________________
>

Hi,

Nvidia and Wayland is an issue currently.

TL:DR;
1.
Pure Wayland application  with the binary Nvidia drivers do work,
Currently normal desktop usage is quite limited.
 E.g. Browsers do not work correctly,
X-applications do not work with XWayland on Nvidia's drivers
2.
Nouveau driver isn't currently supported in FreeBSD.

and here is the looong version

1.
X-applications do not work with xWayland.

Why?
It is because XWayland uses GBM and it does not have support for Nvidia’s
proprietary driver.
All opensource drivers are supporting GBM.

   GBM (Generic Buffer Management) is an API which provides a mechanism
   for allocating buffers for graphics rendering tied to Mesa.

How did we get here?

Nvidia first wanted to do an easy solution from their point-of-view
and have everyone (meaning all window managers) write in support for the
EGL streams.
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2017-
January/032722.html

Most developers were not really excited on this proposal.
 KDE developer:
 https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/
plasmawayland-and-nvidia-2017-edition/

 Sway developer:
 https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Nvidia then publicly apologize for the EGL stream proposal
and also proposed a better way of solving the problem
 https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2017-November/177632.html

Name for the new project initially was "Device Memory Allocator Project"
Nvidia's newer tentative name is *Generic Device Memory Allocator*
and *liballoc* as the allocator library name.

The project has some prototype code in Github, but it hasn't seen much
activity.
 https://github.com/cubanismo/allocator
I'm hoping something will eventually come out from this not-so-ideal
situation.


2.
Only way to get Nvidia hardware running Wayland is currently with the
Nouveau open source drivers.
Nouveau drivers do not have a working port in FreeBSD,
this was dropped from the ports tree in 2014 with this commit message:

  2014-01-31 x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau: Not supported, missing kernel
  support. use the nvidia driver


Wayland can fully work on FreeBSD with Nvidia hardware when:

A/
Nouveau driver works on FreeBSD.
I have no idea how difficult it would be to report Nouveau back to FreeBSD?

  or

B/
Nvidia has their new Generic Device Memory Allocator project in a working
state.
This might take a long time, a year or two?


Br,

Tommi