[clug] gnome-shell comsuming 80% to 100% CPU possibly due to Nvidia and Wayland

Tue May 21 18:20:39 UTC 2019

Hi,

If you know which currently available Radeon video cards are supported
by amdgpu in Debian's firmware-amd-graphics package, please let me
know.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-amd-graphics
This package contains the binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips
supported by the radeon, amdgpu and r128 drivers. 

I believe the MSI Radeon 8GB RX VEGA 56 Air Boost OC PCI-E VGA Card
[1] is supported by  amdgpu in Debian's firmware-amd-graphics
package. 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

Radeon RX Vega 56 (Vega10 XL)

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-amd-graphics
"Vega 10" ACG-SMC firmware (amdgpu/vega10_acg_smc.bin)

_For anyone with nothing much to do and too much time on your hands,
here is some light reading (via the links below)._

https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html

WAYLAND DOESN’T SUPPORT NVIDIA!

Actually, Nvidia doesn’t support us. There are three standard APIs
which are implemented by all graphics drivers in the Linux kernel: DRM
(display resource management), KMS (kernel mode setting), and GBM
(generic buffer management). All three are necessary for most Wayland
compositors. Only the first two are implemented by the Nvidia
proprietary driver. In order to support Nvidia, Wayland compositors
need to add code resembling this:

WAYLAND DOESN’T SUPPORT GAMING!

First-person shooters, among other kinds of games, require
“locking” the pointer to their window. This requires a protocol
[2], which was standardized in 2015. Adoption has been slower, but it
landed in wlroots several months ago and support was added to sway a
few weeks ago.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-10-GNOME-Wayland-vs-X

As it stands now the upcoming release of Debian 10 [3] "Buster" will
provide a default desktop of the GNOME Shell running atop Wayland, but
that still could change with a Debian developer suggesting the
experience might not be good enough for this next release that they
would be better off still using the X.Org Server. 

https://packages.debian.org/source/buster/wayland

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-amd-graphics

This package contains the binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips
supported by the radeon, amdgpu and r128 drivers. 

https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/8q1ko0/why_cant_existing_nvidia_drivers_be_used_with/
Wayland was obviously a chance to change a lot of the low level stuff
going on with Linux graphics. The wayland teams, Intel, AMD etc...
everyone besides NVIDIA basically, decided to pursue a buffer API
called GBM. NVIDIA flat refused to use GBM and pushed their own
EGLStreams technology instead. Back in the Wayland camp that too was
met with flat refusal.

There are some experimental unofficial patches to get Wayland to work
with NVIDIA by providing this EGLStream support, I've seen GNOME
running on NVIDIA anyway. However no distro or upstream Wayland
developers want to enable this fragmentation by doing anything but
ignoring these patches. They want one clean standard based on GBM.
There are articles from Wayland developers about why they don't like
EGLStreams and won't just standardise on that, I don't really
understand the technicalities though I'll just take it for granted
they know their stuff.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-January-EGLStreams-KWin

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1048573/linux/xwayland-gnome-shell-3-32-wayland-usage/
Is Nvidia's driver still not hooked up for xwayland?

https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/100576

	* Added support for the following EGL extensions: 

EGL_EXT_platform_wayland

to enable Wayland applications to run on NVIDIA's EGL implementation,

EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display

to enable Wayland compositors to run on NVIDIA's EGL implementation,
and

EGL_EXT_device_drm
EGL_EXT_output_drm
EGL_EXT_stream_consumer_egloutput

to enable Mir and Wayland compositors to display their content through
EGLDevice, EGLOutput, and EGLstreams.	* Added a Wayland platform
library, libnvidia-egl-wayland.so, to allow Wayland compositors that
support EGLDevice, EGLOutput, and EGLstreams to share EGL buffers with
Wayland applications.
	* Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect frame rate reporting on
Quadro Sync configurations with multiple GPUs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/8x5hda/new_gpu_time_amd_or_nvidia/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu-1904-desktops&num=1
KDE Plasma with Wayland wasn't tested since on this system I wasn't
able to successfully start the session when selecting the Wayland
version of Plasma from the log-in manager.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gaming-eojan-2019&num=1

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-330-perf&num=1

https://www.msy.com.au/amd/19526-msi-rx-580-armor-8g-oc-8g-rx-580-armor-oc-pci-e-vga-card.html
MSI Radeon (RX 580 ARMOR 8G OC) 8GB RX 580 Armor OC PCI-E VGA Card 
$309.00

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/video-card-recommendation-for-linux-wayland/113681 
[4] (2017)

Nvidia and wayland currently works together, but you have to force it
a little bit. 

Gnome 3.24 is shipping the end of this month, and Nvidia should play
with wayland out of the box so you are good on that front. 

The 1060 is a solid card, and I would probably go with it over a 480.
However I would also look at a 1050ti. Its not that much slower, and
it is cheaper, quieter, and puts out less heat.

 [5]

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/9r7eqb/best_gpu_that_supports_wayland/

 went with an RX580 8GB last year; never been happier with a GPU under
Linux. Plasma Wayland works without a fuss, with just Mesa, using arch
and the last kernel, and never a single glitch (something I can't say
about Intel and their drivers)

https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/radeon-rx-580

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

Radeon RX 580 (Polaris20 XT)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_NextChips

discrete GPUs:[35] [6] 

	* Polaris 10 (also codenamed Ellesmere [7]) found on "Radeon RX 470"-
and "Radeon RX 480"-branded graphics cards
	* Polaris 11 (also codenamed Baffin [8]) found on "Radeon RX
460"-branded graphics cards (also Radeon RX 560D)
	* Polaris 12 (also codenamed Lexa) found on "Radeon RX 550" and
"Radeon RX 540"-branded graphics cards
	* Polaris 20, which is a refreshed (14 nm LPP process) Polaris 10
with higher clocks, used for "Radeon RX 570" and "Radeon RX
580"-branded graphics cards[36] [9]
	* Polaris 21, which is a refreshed (14 nm LPP process) Polaris 11,
used for "Radeon RX 560"-branded graphics cards
	* Polaris 22, found on "Radeon RX Vega M GH" and "Radeon RX Vega M
GL"-branded graphics cards
	* Polaris 30, which is a refreshed (12 nm LP GloFo/Samsung process)
Polaris 20 with higher clocks, used for "Radeon RX 590"-branded
graphics cards[37] [10]

	* 

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-amd-graphics

"Polaris 12"

https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon-pro-wx-7100

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-330-perf&num=1
A Look At The Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance With GNOME 3.30
X.Org/Wayland
Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 10 September 2018

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-330-perf&num=2
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-330-perf&num=5

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/03/27/solus-4-linux-gaming-report-nvidia-amd-steam/#56cbe64f533a

As I've repeatedly mentioned, Radeon gamers have an advantage across
several Linux distributions: the open source driver is part of the
kernel (and thus ready to use immediately), well maintained and quite
performant. This typically means less steps to get up and running with
Steam and Steam Proton. As a rolling release, I was thrilled to see
that Solus 4 ships with MESA 19.0 out of the box. At time of their
respective reports, Fedora 29 uses MESA 18.3.4 while Pop uses MESA
18.2.8.

>From what I could tell, there's also no need to install any additional
Vulkan libraries.

https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

The amdgpu driver in Debian 9 "Stretch" [11] supports newer AMD GPUs. 

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=135330

I had some bugs, so I still dried the official AMD drivers. But
unfortunately it failed to install, even with modifying their
installation scripts (it seems I had to install 32 bit dependencies,
but I actually want to keep a 64 bit only installation on this
machine, at least for now). On the various sites I visited it seems
that free drivers can even overpass the proprietary ones...

https://mike42.me/blog/2018-01-how-to-use-a-radeon-graphics-card-on-debian-9

apt-get update

apt-get install firmware-linux-free firmware-linux-nonfree

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/118496

On an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX box with 32GB of RAM, Samsung 970
EVO NVMe SSD and Radeon RX 580 graphics, I compared the current
performance of Debian 9.6 to the latest Debian Testing images. 

https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/radeon-rx-graphics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c

Hello Wayland, Goodbye X11 - The year of the Linux desktop! - Carsten
Haitzler - FOSSASIA 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoqxphFukTQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGQlJgdxFs

Links:
------
[1]
https://www.msy.com.au/nswonline/amd/21153-msi-radeon-radeon-rx-vega-56-air-boost-8g-oc-8gb-rx-vega-56-air-boost-oc-pci-e-vga-card.html
[2]
https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/master/unstable/pointer-constraints/pointer-constraints-unstable-v1.xml
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Debian+10
[4]
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/video-card-recommendation-for-linux-wayland/113681
[5]
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/9r7eqb/best_gpu_that_supports_wayland/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_Next#cite_note-35
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellesmere_Island
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baffin_Island
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_Next#cite_note-36
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_Next#cite_note-37
[11] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStretch