Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia

From KDE Community Wiki
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Here's how to run with the proprietary Nvidia driver on Wayland:

Prerequisites

To use the Plasma Wayland session:

  • Ensure that you are using Plasma 5.20.2 or later — preferably the latest stable release.
  • Ensure the NVIDIA driver is not older than version 495.44 — KWin is no longer compatible with previous versions.
  • You need an up-to-date Qt. Make sure you have >= Qt5.15.0 or 4bd13402f0293e85b8dfdf92254e250ac28094c7 cherry-picked.
  • Make sure to have the Nvidia EGL library installed. For example on Ubuntu and Neon the relevant package is called libnvidia-egl-wayland1

To use the Plasma Wayland session with hardware acceleration on XWayland apps, you need:

  • Xorg 1.20.12 or later.
  • XWayland 21.1.2 or later.
  • libxcb 1.1.7 or later.

Use the modesetting driver

Check our driver is running in modesettings mode:

cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

It should print "Y". If not, modify your kernel command line and add the line nvidia_drm.modeset=1. Search for "kernel parameters" in your distribution; https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_parameters is a good starting point.

It is also possible to pass the parameter via module configuration:

echo options nvidia_drm modeset=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia_drm.conf

You need to regenerate the initramfs in case your distribution provides the graphics drivers in initramfs (e.g. sudo update-initramfs -u)

Login

  • Select "Plasma (wayland)" from your login manager
  • Enjoy your beautiful super-fast accelerated wayland desktop!

Known Limitations