KDE Plasma Wayland session using software rendering and is slow - va-api not working on nVidia

[TraceyC77]

Please confirm there isn't an existing open bug report

• I have searched open bugs for this issue

Summary

When logged into Plasma Wayland, rendering is slow. It is unusable with an external monitor. There is a warning in the system tray that software rendering is in use

Steps to reproduce

Log into KDE Plasma with Wayland

Expected result

System is as responsive as with X11

Actual result

System is laggy, more so with an external monitor in use (laptop)

Environment

• Is system up to date?

Repo

Unstable

Desktop Environment

Plasma

System details

Operating System: Solus 4.5
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.10
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0
Qt Version: 5.15.12
Kernel Version: 6.6.17-277.current (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 16 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Product Name: XPS 17 9710

Other comments

Plasma Wayland had been very usable up until around June 2023. After an update, it became laggy. I hadn't reported this before because I had been doing testing of VAAPI / Firefox with Reilly and thought that might have affected things. Even after removing the vaapi package, however, the performance is still slow.

As a workaround I tried setting KWIN_DRM_USE_MODIFIERS=0 in /etc/environment as well as KWIN_DRM_USE_MODIFIERS=1 but saw no change in performance.

• Removed nvidia vaapi driver package, no change
• Switched to nvidia-beta driver, no change
• xeglgears crashes upstream mesa issue
• May be related to this closed issue 452219 in the KDE tracker

Possibly useful logs attached

logs_wayland_compositing.txt

[Conan-Kudo]

These issues sound like a variety of issues that were resolved as part of Plasma 6.0.

Another thing that could also help is turning on NVK in Mesa (with updating to Mesa 24) and setting DRM_NOUVEAU_GSP_DEFAULT=y in linux-current when you upgrade to 6.8. As long as you have the latest linux-firmware along for the ride, you can completely remove the need for the NVIDIA proprietary driver for NVIDIA Turing and newer GPUs.

[Conan-Kudo]

(Blame @EbonJaeger for me commenting there 😜 )

[TraceyC77]

Update: Problem persists after updating to Plasma 6 via regular updates with the unstable repo

[TraceyC77]

I found something that is probably related for nVidia GPU systems

I reinstalled nvidia-vaapi-driver but VA-API is still not working

❯ vainfo
Trying display: wayland
libva info: VA-API version 1.22.0
libva info: User environment variable requested driver 'nvidia'
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib64/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_0
libva error: /usr/lib64/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so init failed
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 1
vaInitialize failed with error code 1 (operation failed),exit

cc @ReillyBrogan

[TraceyC77]

Related issue elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#329

[Conan-Kudo]

Does your NVIDIA driver have kernel modesetting enabled? Without it, Plasma cannot use it.

Does your nvidia driver package have this patch?

[TraceyC77]

@ReillyBrogan, it doesn't look like nvidia-glx-driver has the patch mentioned above. Would you be up for including it?
I don't see anything about modesetting in the package.yml for the package, do we have this enabled?

[EbonJaeger]

It looks like the package installs a kernel cmdline conf file that includes nvidia-drm.modeset=1, is that it?

[joebonrichie]

https://github.com/getsolus/packages/blob/main/packages/n/nvidia-glx-driver/package.yml#L235
https://github.com/getsolus/packages/blob/main/packages/n/nvidia-glx-driver/files/cmdline-nvidia.conf

modeset is enabled by default for our nvidia driver, fbdev is not yet but we ship a patch to workaround it currently:

https://github.com/getsolus/packages/blob/main/packages/l/linux-current/files/patches/hardware/0001-drivers-firmware-skip-simpledrm-if-nvidia-drm.modese.patch

the nvidia-vaapi-driver package is unsupported. However, it should have no bearing on plasma using software rendering.

[ReillyBrogan]

Closed by caa547b which enabled fbdev by default and more importantly fixed nvidia-modprobe not having the setuid bit.