Solved KDE6 on wayland on Nvidia relatively easy with FreeBSD-16

drsnx60

drsnx60

HI

This is a report on successful startup of KDE6/plasma6 on wayland on Nvidia RTX3060

All I did to start KDE on Wayland on Freebsd 16 WAS:

#1 build Nvidia 580.105 drivers and install them.
#2 Build kde6/Plasma6 selecting and including all wayland options in the ports as I built them.
#3 build and install and run the /usr/ports/sysutils/seatd service.
#4 run " exec dbus-launch ck-launch-session startplasma-wayland "

ISSUE with missing cursor:

the cursor is not visible on the Nvidia display.
this problem occurs on linux as well and is well known.

Solution is to set variables

export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1
export KWIN_FORCE_SW_CURSOR=1

in $HOME/.profile
 
I installed with cmd "doas pkg ins kde".
started it with "exec dbus-launch ck-launch-session startplasma-wayland".
my laptop has Intel UHD Graphics [Integrated] card.
it runs ok.
chrome crashed!!!
There are some issues on system information widget which i haven't sorted out yet.
cursor is working.
so is audio.
sleep works too, except wifi is disconnected n has to restart with "doas service netif restart wlan0"
 
I found out that konqueror crashes too.
chromium was able to start later. but, chromium, librewolf and waterfox could not be minimized.
I have never tried on 15, sorry.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Will it work on 15.0 ?
Because nvidia does not support wayland.
Click to expand...
I tried KDE6/Wayland on two additional machines with FBSD 15-p1 one kabylake cpu with a quadro p2000 GPU , system panics and reboots .
And also on one AMD threadripper with RTX4000 , were machine does not Panic but fails to start desktop with som EGL graphics errors .
that machine is using Nvidia 580.95 drivers from the quaterly repo . so i may try to upgrade to later Nvidia drivers shortly.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Will it work on 15.0 ?
Because nvidia does not support wayland.
Click to expand...
x11/nvidia-driver + x11/nvidia-kmod alone may not work well for Wayland (possibly depends on compositor).
As far as I know, to use Wayland, usually graphics/nvidia-drm-*-kmod{-devel} is wanted. "*" here would depend on the version of base FreeBSD version.

And a correction. Not "nvidia does not support Wayland", but "Wayland does not support nvidia well". This is similar to Xorg, which xorg-server does not look for nvidia proprietary driver (except graphics/nvidia-drm-*-kmod{-devel} which runs via default modesetting driver) without additional manual configuration.

Note that nvidia drivers does not support all patterns of protocols Wayland assumes. But supporting basically EGL for Wayland.
 
drsnx60 said:
I tried KDE6/Wayland on two additional machines with FBSD 15-p1 one kabylake cpu with a quadro p2000 GPU , system panics and reboots .
And also on one AMD threadripper with RTX4000 , were machine does not Panic but fails to start desktop with som EGL graphics errors .
that machine is using Nvidia 580.95 drivers from the quaterly repo . so i may try to upgrade to later Nvidia drivers shortly.
Click to expand...
Beware! Current in-tree version (on latest branch) of "-devel" variant is at 590.48.01. And starting from 590 series, nvidia dropped supports for GPUs older than Turing generation of architectures.

So to use Quadro P2000, you need non-devel variant (master port at 580.119.02 on latest branch) of drivers.

You can see which GPUs are still supported here.

And you can read HEADSUP I've posted to freebsd-ports ML here.
 
HI, I have now tried KDE6-Plasma6-Wayland on Freebsd15-stable with NVIDIA GPU RTX4000 that i upgraded yesterday 2026-01-28 with latest
stable 15 src tree and latest /usr/ports/tree.

I decided to use the same approach that I used on 16-current , to include "WAYLAND" in the /etc/make.conf OPTIONS_SET_FORCE list.
This builds the KDE6_Plasma6 binaries with usable WAYLAND environment when doing a manual build of
x11/xorg, x11/gnome, x11/kde x11/kde-gear, graphics/nvidia_drm_kmod sysutils/seatd . WAYLAND parts is buildt as a biproduct.
( the NVIDIA setup is the standard documented setup from the handbook )
Previously I had not FORCED SET wayland form the /etc/make.conf on this workstation.


and
export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1
export KWIN_FORCE_SW_CURSOR=1
in $HOME/.profile

to address the non showing cursor.

I now believe that the reason for difficulties of setting up wayland with KDE6_Plasma6 and Nvidia GPU is because
some binary packages in the repos are built without the Wayland options.

I now have the following compiled ports with a configured option of WAYLAND .

devel_sdl20
devel_sdl3
graphics_gstreamer1-plugins-gl
graphics_mesa-dri
graphics_mesa-libs
graphics_plasma6-spectacle
graphics_vulkan-loader
graphics_vulkan-tools
multimedia_gstreamer1-vaapi
multimedia_libva
multimedia_libxine
multimedia_mpv
multimedia_vlc
net_freerdp3
sysutils_gnome-control-center
sysutils_gnome-settings-daemon
textproc_ibus
www_webkit2-gtk
x11-toolkits_gtk30
x11-toolkits_gtk40
x11-wm_mutter
x11_libxkbcommon


This makes wayland start on NVIDIA KDE6 Plasma6 for both Freebsd 15 and 16.

using

$ exec dbus-launch ck-launch-session startplasma-wayland

Regards
 
T-Aoki said:
And a correction. Not "nvidia does not support Wayland", but "Wayland does not support nvidia well". This is similar to Xorg, which xorg-server does not look for nvidia proprietary driver (except graphics/nvidia-drm-*-kmod{-devel} which runs via default modesetting driver) without additional manual configuration.

Note that nvidia drivers does not support all patterns of protocols Wayland assumes. But supporting basically EGL for Wayland.
Click to expand...
It is unfair judgement or a wishful description of a fact. nvidia tried to push EGLstreams for wayland compositors while wayland is relying on GBM developed by mesa. which is supported by open source drivers. so it is not wayland not supporting nvidia neither the reverse. but it is good that nvidia went for gbm too. i understand people sentiments about *A* is good and *B* is bad approach to many things in life but reality is always more complex. please read

[Mesa-dev] egl streams, trying to gain some knowledge

mesa-dev.freedesktop.narkive.com mesa-dev.freedesktop.narkive.com
 
Another note.
Not yet prepared as ports, nvidia is developing dma-buf protocols version of Wayland EGL functionalities as egl-wayland2.

This is not based on wl_eglstream protocol unlike existing graphics/egl-wayland, but still under develpopment (not yet tagged with regular version but as RC). And as far as I've heard from the dev, 580 series of drivers does NOT yet have proper support for it (so Linux version has irregular configuration for it).

So it would be depended upon by x11/nvidia-driver-devel only until 590 series appear as Production Branch even if it can be landed.

Anyway, I'll open review for it on Phabricator once it passes RC state and tagged as release version number.
 
Im not sure what the difference is between now and before but :

my workstation is now running Nvidia driver, kmod, drm 580.126 and
KDE6/PLASMA6/Wayland works.
SDDM initiated KDE6/PLASMA6/WAYLAND session also works .
And as I said above Packages are built with FORCED SET Wayland Option from /etc/make.conf

Regards.
 
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