Fedora Sway Spin/Sericea on NVidia

Project Discussion
1

Will Sway Spin/Sericea work out of the box for users with NVidia graphics cards?

2

Probably not. You’ll need RPMFusion to make it work.

3

Hmm . . I am thinking of putting a NVIDIA card in my box for AI crunching - so I could still use the onboard video for other work?

4

This is a complicated question, and we’ll provide an official statement when the spin’s documentation page is up. For now I drafted the following:

  1. Open-source driver (nouveau) - it is a part of a standard open-source graphical stack, implements the functionality required by wlroots and should work as far I’m aware.

    Note that nouveau currently lacks support for Ampere (30xx) or later GPU series. The initial support for Ampere is expected to appear in kernel 6.2/mesa 23.0 and hopefully will be ready by f38 release. No ETA for 40 series (Ada Lovelace).
    There’s some work being done to support these via NVK open-source driver with the GSP firmware (using the Open GPU Kernel Module as a reference), but it’s nowhere near being merged to mesa and enabled in Fedora.

    Note2: the above also means that laptops with discrete Ampere (or later) GPU may fail to use external monitors, as the corresponding ports are routed through the NVIDIA GPU.

  2. Proprietary NVIDIA driver - we are going to follow the wlroots upstream stance on this and say that any configuration involving rendering through an NVIDIA GPU with the proprietary driver is not supported.
    Which means that we are not planning to enable --unsupported-gpu by default or implement any workarounds like sway-nvidia. The reason is simple: we cannot offer any reasonable stability or quality from this configuration, and neither we can troubleshoot it.

    Even if you ignore that, the driver in question is not available in Fedora and therefore cannot be distributed with our official builds.

I know this will disappoint some people, but there’s nothing we (or wlroots dev team) can do to improve the situation.

1 Like
5

I think that’s reasonable. I was just curious because Fedora Workstation installations offer the choice to install the proprietary NVidia driver during the first boot setup. While I would expect the various Spins to also support the same hardware as Workstation, I understand that upstream Sway and wlroots explicitly do not support or take bug reports for the proprietary driver.

I do wonder if the installation of the Sway Spin with the NVidia driver loaded would leave the user with a non-functioning installation?