Xwayland support in Fedora with the NVIDIA 470 series driver

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi all!

NVIDIA has released today a public BETA test of their proprietary driver
which supports hardware acceleration with Xwayland.

For this to work, it requires changes and fixes in Xwayland which are already
part of the current builds shipped with Fedora 34 (currently in testing is
xorg-x11-server-Xwayland-21.1.1-3.fc34).

Please help us test this support for hardware acceleration with the NVIDIA
proprietary driver in Xwayland, and report issues for Xwayland in Fedora
bugzilla (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora) against
xorg-x11-server-Xwayland.

By default, the display manager (GDM) will automatically disable Wayland
when the NVIDIA driver is loaded. To enable Wayland with NVIDIA's proprietary
driver, you'll need comment out that line in the file
“/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules”:

  # disable Wayland when using the proprietary nvidia driver
  # DRIVER=="nvidia", RUN+="/usr/libexec/gdm-runtime-config set daemon
WaylandEnable false"

And restart your system.

This is beta version of the driver, so issues are to be expected and reported:

 * To the NVIDIA forums for specific NVIDIA driver issues
 * To Fedora bugzilla for the rest.

There is a number of currently known issues:

 * A blank window with Chromium based web browsers (including GOOGLE Chrome)

   This is an issue with Chromium's GPU sandboxing, a workaround is to
   disable GPU rendering with “--disable-gpu”

 * Applications such as Blender or Steam sometimes show a black window

   This is an issue with the driver which should be addressed later.

 * EGL on Xwayland does not work with NVIDIA proprietary driver

   This is a known limitation in the driver which should be addressed later.

 * vulkan application such as “vulkaninfo” crashes

 * GTK3 applications running on Xwayland (GDK_BACKEND=x11 …) fail

   This is an issue with the driver which falsely claims support for
   the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension, should be addressed later.

 * GTK4 application show nothing on Wayland with NVIDIA proprietary driver

   This is a known issue with GTK4 reported upstream here:
   https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3772

 * Firefox Webrender fails to render on Wayland native with NVIDIA driver

   Webrender with hardware acceleration uses EGL and fails to render on
   Wayland with the NVIDIA proprietary driver because of an ambiguity in the
   EGL specification causing a difference between Mesa and NVIDIA
   implementations and Firefox Webrender relies on Mesa's implementation.

   The latest Firefox update for Fedora disables hardware rendering with
   NVIDIA proprietary driver to work around the issue.

 * Fullscreen GLX applications do not render in KDE with Xwayland

   This is an issue with KDE's Wayland compositor.

 * Shaped windows on Xwayland are upside-down in GNOME Shell

   This is an issue with mutter reported here:
   https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1792

Thank you!
Olivier