Since nvidia drivers do not properly implement implicit sync, this protocol not existing is the root cause of flickering with nvidia graphics on Wayland. This MR being merged means that Wayland might finally be usable with nvidia graphics with the next driver release.
EDIT: Nvidia dev posted that support is planned in the 555 driver, with beta release planned for May 15: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/pull/104#issuecomment-2010292221
Questions from someone still on xmonad/x11, with 3 computers that have nvidia cards:
Do all nvidia cards have trouble in wayland currently, or is it just some subset?
Is it really unususable, or just really annoyingly flickery?
Would my card be usable now (without this merge) if I was using the nouveau driver?
Once this is merged, will all nvidia cards work in wayland? Or do we not really know yet.
Nouveau should have already been fine, this should fix the proprietary driver’s issues. AFAIK this is a core issue of the proprietary driver, so should affect all cards.
I tried Wayland on my 16xx series GPU, Electron apps were only annoying, but games were unplayable. The desktop itself and Wayland native apps worked fine, though.
The root cause of Nvidia flicker is Nvidia ecosystem being a total shitshow. This has nothing to do with drivers and how bad they are, or how Nvidia refuses to open source even the base of their desktop card drivers, or that the few tools they contribute to in in the OSS space to work around that are awful, or that the entire Linux environment for Nvidia is all about the datacenter (what an insane mess that is).
Good luck Nvidia+Linux fanboys.
Sure, I agree, but Nvidia proprietary driver is still the best for gaming, isn’t it?