Five Year Old Ubuntu Bug For NVIDIA Suspend/Resume Experience: Now Working On X11, Wayland Not Yet

For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor.

Going back to May 2020 has been this Ubuntu bug report regarding corrupted and missing textures when resuming from suspend along with switching VTs or users. Experiencing corruption and/or missing textures with the NVIDIA Linux driver on suspend and resume cycles is an unfortunately somewhat common occurrence but at least when using the X.Org session is looking like it will be better.

Canonical engineer Daniel van Vugt of Ubuntu’s desktop team today commented:

“Audited Mutter’s support for Nvidia suspend/resume and confirmed it’s not wired up for Wayland sessions, but also harder to implement than in Xorg sessions. Looks like Mutter Wayland sessions won’t support reliable suspend/resume on the Nvidia driver this cycle at least.”

Unfortunately not good news for Wayland users with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release. Daniel further commented in the aforelinked bug report:

“I did a review of the Mutter code today and tested it on Nvidia 570. Indeed NV_robustness_video_memory_purge isn’t wired up for EGL (Wayland) like it is for GLX (Xorg). But also it seems to behave quite differently. So rather than being a quick fix this may become an exercise in waiting for full ARB_robustness support in some future Mutter version.
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It appears Xorg sessions are good at avoiding this bug now. The only problem you might encounter is if you log out, because in Ubuntu 24.10 and later the login screen doesn’t use Xorg so will be just as broken as a Wayland session. To avoid the problem in both cases you can uncomment ‘WaylandEnable=false’ in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf

To fix the Wayland case it is still looking like we should pursue NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations and just fix the Nvidia driver. Although longer term, Mutter is still expected to be fixed when it gains OpenGL “robustness” support.”

So a nicer NVIDIA driver suspend-and-resume experience for GNOME on Wayland is still expected to take some time.