NVIDIA Beta 495.29.05 rolls out with GBM for expanded Wayland support

NVIDIA has today released the 495.29.05 driver as a Beta in their New Feature Branch and it's a relatively big one.

The main highlight feature is that NVIDIA has finally added support for the GBM API making it more compatible with Wayland, this is instead of EGLStreams that they were previously pushing. Just another tick in the box for running a Wayland system with NVIDIA with it now using the same API as Mesa with GBM.

From the release notes here's what's new:

• Added support for the GBM API. This adds the new symlink nvidia-drm_gbm.so pointing to the file libnvidia-allocator.so.VERSION to implement a GBM backend driver usable with the GBM loader from the Mesa project version 21.2 and above, as well as the files libnvidia-egl-gbm.so.1.1.0 and 15_nvidia_gbm.json, which implement EGL support for the GBM platform (EGL_KHR_platform_gbm).
• Add indicator for Resizable BAR support on compatible systems.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the X server to crash when starting a new server generation on PRIME configurations.
• Removed support for NvIFROpenGL. This functionality was deprecated in the 470.xx driver release.
• Removed libnvidia-cbl.so from the driver package. This functionality is now provided by other driver libraries.
• Changed the minimum required Linux kernel version from 2.6.32 to 3.10.
• Updated nvidia.ko to load even if no supported NVIDIA GPUs are present when an NVIDIA NVSwitch device is detected in the system. Previously, nvidia.ko would fail to load into the kernel if no supported GPUs were present.

While the changelog doesn't state it, we've also been told that this driver version should also fix VRR issues people saw with Adaptive-Sync monitors.

Since this is a Beta version it may come with unexpected issues but it should still be more suitable for normal users than their separate Vulkan Beta series.