Wayland not available with proprietary Nvidia drivers even when nvidia-drm.modeset=1 is set

[Ian Johnson]

With Ubuntu 20.04, GDM 3.34.1 (bundled with Focal), and the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, I am unable to use Wayland to login, and can only use XOrg. Debugging this a little, I found that wayland support is wholesale disabled when proprietary NVIDIA drivers are used by this rule: /lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules (coming from the gdm3 package), however it seems there may be more to this as well in upstream so this seems to affect mutter as well.

To be clear, my system only has NVIDIA graphics, I do not also have an Intel integrated GPU, so this is not a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/+bug/1862531.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes#Desktop

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Also something like this would probably help (to allow us to remove the udev rule):

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/625

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Still true in 21.04. You need to comment out the nvidia rule in:

  /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The rule to disable Wayland support on Nvidia is important right now, because it prevents bug 1705369 which hurt a lot of users. Although I have made an attempt to fix that properly (comment #3), upstream did not like it and currently prefers using 61-gdm.rules.

I'm hopeful a magical solution to this issue will appear in driver version 470 but have no evidence to support that. More likely I think I will need to revisit or patch https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/625

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

This was fixed in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/41~rc-0ubuntu1

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The remaining problem is being tracked in bug 1946200