We managed to get Fedora Workstation 26 out the door this week which I am very happy about. In some ways it was far from our most splashy release as it mostly was about us improving on already released features, like improving the Wayland support and improving the Flatpak support in GNOME Software and improving the Qt integration into GNOME through the QtGNOME platform.
One major thing that is fully functional now though and that I have been testing myself extensively is being able to easily install the NVidia binary driver. If you set up the repository from Negativo17 you should be able to go install the Nvidia driver either using dnf on the command line or by searching for NVidia in GNOME Software, and just install it without any further work thanks to all the effort we and NVidia have been putting into things like glvnd. If you have a workstation with an NVidia card I would say that you have a fully functional system at this point without any hacks or file conflicts with Mesa.
For hybrid graphics laptops this also just works, with the only caveat being that your NVidia card will be engaged at all times once you do this, which is not great for your battery life. We are working to improve this, but it will take some time as it both requires us re-architecting some older parts of the stack and get the Nvidia driver updated to support the new solution.
We do plan on listing the NVidia driver in GNOME Software soon without having to manually setup the repository, so soon we will have a very smooth experience where the Nvidia driver is just a click in the Software store away for our users.
Another item of interest here for the discerning user is that if you are on the NVidia binary driver you will be using X and not Wayland. The reason for this as I have stated in previous blog posts too is that we still have some major gaps on the Wayland side when it comes to dealing with the binary NVidia driver. The biggest one here is that XWayland OpenGL applications doesn’t work, something the team is hard at work trying to resolve. Also the general infrastructure for dealing with hybrid graphics under Wayland is not there yet, but we are working on that too. We have a top notch team looking at the issues here, including Adam Jackson, Jonas Ådahl and Olivier Fourdan, so I am sure we will close this gap as soon as techically possible.
The other big item we have for Fedora Workstation 26 is going to be the formal launch of the Fleet Commander project, with a fully functional release and proper website. We hope to get that set up for next week, so I will blog more about it then. It is a really cool piece of technology which should make deploying Fedora and RHEL in large orgainzations a lot simpler.
As a sidenote, we received our first HDR capable monitor in the office this week, a Dell Ultrasharp UP2718Q. We have another one already ordered and we should be bringing in more in the next Months. This means we can finally seriously kick off figuring out the plumbing work and update the userland stack to have full HDR support under Linux for both media creation and consumption.
Does XWayland OpenGL apps work with Nouveau plus Intel stack? Curious :)
NVidia driver usage gotcha: the driver needs to be compiled against the current kernel. I upgraded from F25 to F26 and got a kernel panic on boot and a garbled screen (known issue on my GTX970 I guess), adding nomodeset fixed the boot, I could then reinstall the NVidia drivers. I know, not technically Fedora’s fault, but something to keep in mind.
Also, the screen you ordered supports a larger color gamut than sRGB — will you be working on bringing better color profile support, too? The problem is that larger color gamuts lead to uncontrolled, more saturated colors unless *all* applications are color space aware. Not sure what the best solution is, but e.g. macOS handles color at the graphics lib level, so the entire desktop is color space aware. Not sure what a goog solution would be in Linux land. An extension for Wayland to automatically apply correction according to the profile unless the app says it will do it by itself?
I have been using this https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee#For_closed_source_solution_fedora and it appears to be working smooth for running steam games with primusrun. Is this approach unsupported/bad? Since I fin d it way better than using my GPU all the time.
Bumblebee is basically a hack trying to work around some of the limitations of the stack, so if it works for you then great, but hopefully as we progress we our fixes you can get the functionality it provides in a cleaner and more supportable manner.
Hi Christian,
If it’s recognized that hdr can’t be ignored, does that mean that Fedora is working towards getting upstream Wayland support for a fully color managed desktop?
The last discussion about this fizzled out in January on the Wayland ml (https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2017-January/032532.html). This seems like an area where Fedora and GNOME could provide some direction to a problem where upstream is having difficulties.
Really glad to hear that smoother Nvidia support is being worked on. I know the proprietary driver isn’t ideal, but many people that have invested in their cards will appreciate setting up the driver more easily.
I for one find gaming performance on my Nvidia 1060 to be on par with Windows – which is certainly impressive.
One small suggestion would be to update the release notes with information on how to disable Nouveau when booting via liveusb to install. Several people on reddit have reported that Nvidia Pascal (10xx) cards + Nouveau + Wayland is suuuper slow and makes it hard to install.
See here for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/6mxcsk/help_with_f26_install_wayland_and_nvidia_1060/
Fedora 26 seems to be an impressive release indeed!
How about doing the same for amdgpu-pro, so that amd users may choose between open/closed source?
F26 rocks! Still using bumblebee on my laptop. I tried the Nvidia driver with F26. As said, the Nvidia card is on all the time, but curiously some applications only found the internal Intel graphics, e.g. the vulkan enabled Quake engine (vkQuake) that I tried. Vulkan is something that doesn’t work with bumblebee.
Is there any reason why it’s only taken until now to start working on getting the NVIDIA drivers in GNOME Software without adding another repo? Surely someone must have thought of doing that long ago?!
There is a long list of reasons. Many in the community did not want any work to be put towards helping people install a non-free driver. Many hoped that by refusing to work with NVidia it would force NVidia to open their driver. 10 years later I guess we can safely say that approach did not pan out.
Secondly the software architecture to do this needed to be in place. It wasn’t until we got Vendor neutral GL dispatch that we could actually install the NVidia drivers without overwriting other stuff. Various hacks where deployed by packagers and ditros to try to work around this, but these hacks where always a bit risky and if something did go wrong would leave you without a working desktop session.
F26 on a MacBookPro: When can we expect better performance in the power management specifically “suspend when you close lid”?
I would love to switch 100% to Fedora but issues like that on the laptop prevent that.
We are looking to improve the state here and are talking to various vedors about how to improve collaboration around things like battery life. That said for a outright linux-hostile hardware vendor like Apple it is next to impossible to get to a good state in terms of being able to promise users that hardware from that vendor is going to work well. So yes power management needs to be improved and we are working on that, but also users need to accept that there will be linux friendly hardware vendors like Dell or System76 they need to buy from and not from a hardware vendor that has zero interest or is outright hostile to Linux working well on their system.
Well, I can’t argue with the fact that Apple is indeed hostile regarding other operating systems being installed bare-metal on their hardware (be it Linux or Windows)
Nice!
Are there any things stopping getting OpenGL XWayland on the proprietary NVIDIA driver from working (i.e. missing driver features that we need to wait on from NVIDIA itself) or is it only a matter of implementing it on the GNOME side?
Apart from that , there was talk NVIDIA would create a new proposal together with the developers of GDM (so one library could be used and supported accross managers). Although I have not heard anything about that since. Does anyone what happened (if anything did)?