Nvidia (prop) driver support in wayland session

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1

Is there currently any such support in Ubuntu & if not is it likely in the near future? (by near I mean 20.04

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2

Last I checked (a few months ago), it basically works. You just have to:

  1. Enable Wayland support on the Nvidia kernel driver by adding this to your command line:

    nvidia-drm.modeset=1

    which is done in /etc/default/grub.

  2. Run:

    sudo update-grub

  3. Verify in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf that you don’t still have Wayland disabled.

  4. Reboot.

Unfortunately CPU performance was very bad last I checked. Bad enough to not want to use it. But that was Nvidia driver version 410. Maybe it’s better now?

3

IIRC, that can potentially break your system, right?

4

I don’t think so. I’ve just done a search for bugs relating to nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and the above link is the only confirmed problem in 19.04 that I can see.

But you may find other bugs which haven’t been reported yet, or are not adequately reported. That’s always true for any component of Ubuntu.

5

That hasn’t been my experience at all…
So maybe support is limited to certain hardware.
Ex.
Haswell laptop, nvidia 755m (optimus), a wayland session falls back to Intel
Coffee lake laptop, nvidia 1060 only (no Intel iGPU), falls back to llvmpipe

In the later case it maybe should fall back to nouveau?
Though on that hardware nouveau is only possible in very limited circumstances (- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1822482

6

OK, I have been testing nvidia-drm.modeset=1 recently and looking more closely at existing bugs. There are too many bugs so I recommend not using it for now. So that means no Wayland support either.

I am using this tag to track the bugs:

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7

I would gather that cpu use bug is wayland only, if so the bug report should reflect that…
nvidia-drm.modeset=1 works fine in Xserver, for optimus devices it’s the only way to get a tearfree experience (w/ xserver.

8

I’m not sure, but would be surprised if it was Wayland-specific. I’m not returning to Nvidia work for the time being so can’t confirm right now.

P.S. Xorg logins with nvidia-drm.modeset=1 are also known to be buggy as shown by bug 1823301.