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by sidkshatriya 957 days ago
> Nvidia is stepping up on their side though - I don't see the same from Wayland/XWayland camp

Genuinely curious -- what stepping up should happen from Wayland/XWayland ? Intel and AMD seem to work well on it so is it because they have some accepted some ugly hacks that Nvidia are not willing to do ? Something else ?

1 comments

In terms of stepping up, they seem to be tackling through Wayland issues. The latest 545 seems to have people on forums saying “this fixed so many Wayland issues for me”. Now either they are paying professional astrosurfers, or they legitimately fixed some classes of bugs (or it’s random). My experience though is that this kind of feedback tends to be genuine. So I’m giving kudos where it’s due and it seems like the Nvidia team is starting to focus on Wayland issues. Similarly, I was observing recent bug tracker activity on Chrome and Nvidia and all that seemed to be tracking bugs on their end (which not surprising - Nvidia and Google have strong relationships between Android, Chrome, and formerly Stadia).

I don’t know the details on the Xwayland BS (which is the main visible issue I’m seeing as unhealthy). I have not done the technical research to fully understand whose position is actually justified. Heck it might be that both sides are correct on the facts (it doesn’t make sense to add the support that makes other GPUs work and it doesn’t make sense yet to add the new way for Nvidia) but the net outcome is that Xwayland on Nvidia’s propietary drivers remains broken for the foreseeable future. Both Intel and AMD both support something called implicit synchronization. But apparently explicit synchronization is “the future” because it enables more performance and Nvidia has clearly communicated they’re not going to support implicit. Xwayland only supports implicit synchronization and refuses to add explicit synchronization (I think strong arming their position is that the explicit synchronization protocol is isn’t ready or not popular enough yet in the ecosystem? I’m not sure). Nvidia has contributed some patch to fix Xwayland to use explicit synchronization when running on the propietary driver (or something like that).