NVIDIA Publishes Code For X Synchronization Fences

[mugginz]

I'll just chime in that there was some discussion from nvidia a while ago about why they don't open their drivers - I might try look for it in a moment (it's on phoronix somewhere). Will post a link if I find it.

If I recall correctly it was pretty vague stuff but the direct links would be great.

[pingufunkybeat]

I don't know why they are not releasing specs, but I still want them.

AMD went through a lot of trouble to produce specs in a releasable state. I haven't even seen goodwill from Nvidia. Only the "you don't really need open source" mantra and an obfuscated driver which was dropped in favour of the VESA one.

[mirv]

See the bouncer at the door. He'll give you a ticket to get back in.

Oh cool.
(interestingly enough, I used to do that for a job).

Link to the previous nvidia replies about spec releases:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...qa_linux&num=3

[mugginz]

Q: AMD was able to open source and/or document a lot by separating out the parts they couldn't legally disclose. Similar problems have been cited as preventing NVIDIA from open sourcing their driver (licensed 3rd parts code, etc) or documentation. Could nVidia use the same strategy?

A similar strategy might be technically possible for NVIDIA, but for better or worse I think it is quite unlikely. There are several reasons for this:

- For competitive reasons on other platforms, I don't think we would ever open source any of our cross-platform driver source code (which is 90%+ of the Linux driver... see my earlier description of code sharing). The Linux-specific pieces of the driver code base don't really stand on their own, and generally need to change in sync with the cross-platform code, so I don't believe it would be practical to just open source the Linux-specific pieces.

- We have developed substantial IP in our graphics driver that we do not want to expose.

- Unfortunately the vast majority of our documentation is created solely for internal distribution. While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption.

[mugginz]

I don't know why they are not releasing specs, but I still want them.

AMD went through a lot of trouble to produce specs in a releasable state. I haven't even seen goodwill from Nvidia. Only the "you don't really need open source" mantra and an obfuscated driver which was dropped in favour of the VESA one.

And here's something I can get behind.

AMD deserve much praise for the effort they went to opening their specs. It helped me along somewhat in my decision to buy the 5870. Not the only reason mind you, just one of many factors.

It's one clear difference between the two companies.

While I can happily agree that nVidia don't do as well as AMD for the Linux platform as a whole as I've said in the past, I don't believe that it follows that nVidia are bad. They aren't as good, but they're not bad.

[yotambien]

Interesting discussion, albeit circular at times. Let me point out something:

But does the lack of specs from nVidia de-legitimise their closed driver?

To a degree in some cases. If nvidia drop support for a card, then it's pretty much well gone as usable under Linux. Open source drivers don't really suffer from this problem.

That's only true if the open source drivers provide the features required by the users. This is, when AMD discontinued fglrx development for cards up to R500* many users were affected: although an open source driver existed by then, it didn't offer the same performance or features the closed driver had. So it depends on a) what you need; b) what the OSS driver offers.


(*) This number may be wrong, it doesn't affect the argument.

[val-gaav]

While AMD needed to recently drop support for some cards in fglrx for technical reasons nVidia have themselves done a pretty decent job for legacy hardware.

Yeah tell that to my riva tnt2 ... and I do not fscking care that it's old crap or whatever... It's enough for a office pc ...

Similiar ATI hardware would be still supported by X drivers while ATM the PC with that riva tnt2 has to stay with old distro version ...

[mugginz]

Yeah tell that to my riva tnt2 ... and I do not fscking care that it's old crap or whatever... It's enough for a office pc ...

Similiar ATI hardware would be still supported by X drivers while ATM the PC with that riva tnt2 has to stay with old distro version ...

I'm not saying they didn't drop support for any cards.

But I can run a 2001 era GeForce 2 MX-400 with Ubuntu 10.04 with a couple of clicks. Ubuntu ships binary drivers for them. It compares pretty favourably with fglrx.

[val-gaav]

From my point of view it does not as I'm stuck with old X and old distro.

With fglrx dropping out my card I could always switch to quite good open source driver...

[mugginz]

From my point of view it does not as I'm stuck with old X and old distro.

With fglrx dropping out my card I could always switch to quite good open source driver...

Did you try Nouveau?