Wait for explicit sync support

[LukeShortCloud]

Explicit sync support in XWayland and KDE Plasma will provide better support for NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers on Wayland (including better Gamescope support). We need to wait for the following releases to come to Arch Linux before making a new release of winesapOS.

Proprietary and open kernel NVIDIA driver:

• [x] Linux 6.8
  • https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/27226
• [x] Gamescope 3.14.3
• [x] KDE Plasma 6.1.0
  • A backport to 6.0 was proposed but closed (not merged).
  • Expected in 2 weeks
• [x] XWayland 24.1.0
  • Expected in 2 months
• [x] NVIDIA 555 (optional for explicit sync Vulkan WSI support)
  • https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1457174-xwayland-24-1-planned-for-release-next-month-with-explicit-sync-other-features
  • KDE Plasma 6 does not use this feature. It is expected for KDE Plasma 7.
    • https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/18cc6ja/comment/kcalm1p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
  • Expected in 3-5 months from now

NVK Mesa driver:

• [x] Linux 6.10
  • https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20240430155453.21132-1-mohamedahmedegypt2001@gmail.com/T/#u
  • [x] Mesa 24.1.0
    • NVK explicit sync support
      • https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/24795
  • Optional for explicit sync Vulkan WSI support for NVK on Xorg
  • Expected in 2 months

[LukeShortCloud]

Once all of these features have been merged and are available in Arch Linux, we could look into removing Xorg completely and rely on Xwayland instead.

[LukeShortCloud]

KDE Plasma 6 still has a hard dependency on Xorg (even with Xwayland) so removing Xorg will not be in scope anytime soon.

[LukeShortCloud]

Last week I tested the following and it did not work for the Steam Gamescope session. There were DRM errors in the Gamescope log file.

• NVIDIA RTX 4070 with the iGPU disabled in the BIOS
• Linux 6.10-rc1
• Mesa 24.1.0-1 from extra-testing
  • vulkan-nouveau and lib32-vulkan-nouveau installed
• xorg-xwayland 24.1.0-1
• gamescope 3.14.16-1

[LukeShortCloud]

Somewhat related, we can reliably enable Zink for Nouveau only by using this environment variable: NOUVEAU_USE_ZINK=1

[LukeShortCloud]

It looks like when NVK and Zink are ready, Mesa will enable Zink automatically. That's great! We won't bother with any environment variables regarding that.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/24.1/src/loader/loader.c?ref_type=heads#L150

There are some big issues with NVK and Zink currently. Using Nouveau will be a more stable experience short-term.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11162 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11163

[LukeShortCloud]

The NVIDIA 555 beta open kernel module driver specifically (it's less of an issue with the proprietary driver) has some serious usability issues right now. Refer to:

• https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/538
• https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/pull/658

[LukeShortCloud]

Here are some other related explicit sync problems in Mesa: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11294

[LukeShortCloud]

NVIDIA 555.58.02 is out now. It fixes the most common cause of flickering on KDE Plasma 6 when using Wayland. NVIDIA 560 will address a less common flickering issue.

[LukeShortCloud]

Somewhat related, Mesa 24.2.0 is coming out next week. It includes improved NVK support including having mature support for NVIDIA Maxwell (GTX 900 series) GPUs and newer.

https://docs.mesa3d.org/release-calendar.html

[LukeShortCloud]

24.2.0 release has been pushed to next week. Instead, 24.2.0-rc4 was released today.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tags

[LukeShortCloud]

The egl-wayland project just released 1.1.15 with fixes for explicit sync crashes and KDE Plasma crashes. We should wait for this to come to Arch Linux (currently only shipping 1.1.13).

https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/releases/tag/1.1.15 https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/egl-wayland/

[LukeShortCloud]

The wait is over! The last required package linux-fsync-nobara-bin has been updated this morning (from 6.9.12 to 6.10.3). NVIDIA explicit sync / Wayland support should be working now.