Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

NVIDIA Doesn't Expect To Have Linux 5.9 Driver Support For Another Month

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #61
    Originally posted by mdedetrich View Post

    AMD used to have a proprietary driver which they inherited from their acquisition of ATI (called FGLRX). The acquisition of ATI was terrible on a lot of fronts, but one of them was the inherited driver from ATI was so terrible that AMD did the decision to just recode it from scratch.

    NVidia had the privilege (which they still had) of having a well designed and functioning driver, I highly doubt they are going to re code it. Furthermore, the scope of NVidia's driver is much more nowadays. Its not just a GPU driver, there are thins like DLSS, Geforce Streaming, CUDA, G-Sync etc etc etc. Recoding all of this is just not going to happen and parts of their driver (i.e. the neural models used for DLSS) definitely fall into the bucket of trade secrets.
    The components you mention are user-space though (well, G-Sync would be partly kernel). I'm just talking about the kernel driver, as that's where most of the friction with updates comes from anyways (also XOrg releases in the past, though those aren't really happening anymore, so kinda a non-issue there). If Nvidia just open-sourced their current kernel portion of their driver and upstreamed it, while still leaving the user-space portion as a blob, it would still be a HUGE win for users. Not to mention, probably a win for Nvidia's legal team now that it's known that their kernel module is violating the terms of the GPL by using GPL-only exports.

    Comment


    • #62
      Man the hate on Phoronix for Nvidia is always fun to watch... pretty sure Nvidia pays no attention to this community, as they laugh all the way to the bank with pretty much every Top 500 Supercomputer running their hardware and Linux. The "GPL condom" incident was also actually caused by Facebook just for those who attached Nvidia to it in their mind. Facebook supplied the patch and it was equally gray to the ATI proprietary driver in the end.

      In the end Linux is a tool. I can use Windows as well but I prefer Linux... if Linux actually does find a way to kick Nvidia out they will be blowing a huge whole in their user base. Both the KDE devs and Steam have done a lot of research into this and realized that Nvidia hardware is used in many more Linux boxes (desktop and server) than AMD GPUs.

      They do like to put a shot across the bow every once and again. I also have no problem waiting a few weeks for things to stabilize on a Linux kernel, I and people I know have lost to much data and time in our lives working on the bleeding edge. Its cool and fun, but I am happy to let the Arch/Gentoo/Etc. group loose their data and weeks recovering from a cutting edge kernel release before I use it.

      By the way huge thanks though to those intrepid voyagers into the first releases of kernel versions

      Any way, this really isnt a rant so much as a bemused watching of the Phoronix community blow up at the mention of Nvidia again and some minor observations of a happy Nvidia user. I will be investing in a 3080 or 3090 too as soon as stock reaches approachable levels and the e-bay "bot buyers" move on to something else. If the card doesnt work on Linux then, well thats fine, I can move back over to Windows 10 and wait. In the end these holy wars dont matter and will be long forgotten when we also are.

      Comment


      • #63
        Originally posted by birdie View Post
        Proofs about "don't work properly" or GTFO. I've been using NVIDIA GPUs with Linux since the late 90s. I don't recall "don't work properly" ever.
        Well, you had been extremely lucky or I define `work' in a much wider sense than you do.
        As a former scientist in Astronomy I got a laptop with Nvidia chip and later a GPU with Nvidia as using highest resolution available at that time.
        I had problems in mutiple ways and was killed when Nvidia no longer supports their legacy driver (for HW not even 5 years old which would not work after a given kernel version).

        Currently I have an AMD system - and if a games does not run here, it does not run on a friend's system with Nvidia, too - and experiencing some additional problems there, too.
        For a proprietary driver not too bad - but one should be aware that no Linux distribution can support proprietary drivers.
        And one can still find old pages for games claiming one should use latest proprietray driver (even for AMD) ON LINUX - which is just nonsense and shows complete incompetence.

        So you are a happy Nvidia user - and you are not alone.
        But I know many people who would never buy Nvidia HW again due to using mainly Linux.
        And this use case is not reasonable using Nvidia cards. Even professional workstation manufacturers are not aware of that fact which did not change since 1990-ies - so nice old document linked above ...

        And kernel hacker know why they have trouble with that company ... and for a very long time now.
        By helping Nouveau making good use of their cards the infrastructure would be in place needed by their proprietary driver. They can do it - but deliberately do things that Nouveau can not run at reasonable speed (not talking about as fast as their proprietary driver here).

        So officially Nvidia can not run with support by any GNU/Linux distribution - even if they use the proprietary driver. It's as simple as that.
        If it runs - be happy ... but it can byte - and will if you really want to make full use of Linux - and that means in some cases using -rc kernels.

        No other proof is needed for that statement.

        Comment


        • #64
          Problem with AMD: Unstable.

          Problem with NVIDIA: Want advanced feature X (FBC, running on VM)? Go Quadro ($$$) or die.

          Comment


          • #65
            The only ridiculous thing going on here is how much time some of you are devoting to continuing to reply here when it's beyond obvious that nobody actually cares what the other person is saying.

            Comment


            • #66
              If 5.8 goes EOL before they have a 5.9 driver, it wouldn't even be the first time that has happened since the 5.4 LTS. I think 5.6 took about a month or so as well? Something around there.

              Comment


              • #67
                Originally posted by JMB9 View Post
                I had problems in mutiple ways and was killed when Nvidia no longer supports their legacy driver (for HW not even 5 years old which would not work after a given kernel version).
                The current driver supports GeForce 600 Series cards which were released in March, 2012. That's at the very least eight years of support. At least get your facts straight before trying to criticise the company. And again, you haven't listed any serious issues other than, "I've heard someone had issues".

                And lastly, speaking of "Some Linux users no longer buy NVIDIA cards". God, NVIDIA is so scared. A small bunch of fan-atics choose not to buy NVIDIA due to their idealogical preferences. Wake me up when Linux have native AAA games. God, this whole thread is laughable. We are talking about Linux as a serious desktop OS with tons of software and games. Oh, wait.
                Last edited by birdie; 17 October 2020, 09:49 PM.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by kylew77 View Post
                  You don't see FreeBSD being dicks making their kernel hard to work with the Nvidia driver. The Nvidia driver works great with FreeBSD.
                  One of my fears of NVIDIA making their drivers open source and making it part of the Linux kernel is that we'll lose that. Instead of timely first party support, we'll end up having to wait for ages for the Linux drivers to be ported. The RX6000 series are about to be released, but the RX5000 series still aren't supported, and won't be until 13.0 releases next year.

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by tildearrow View Post
                    Problem with AMD: Unstable.
                    Problem with NVIDIA: Want advanced feature X (FBC, running on VM)? Go Quadro ($$$) or die.
                    Well, price is a little off-topic from my point of view - but stating that AMD is unstable is well heard of - but this general statement does not hold.
                    There are still trouble with old Polaris - and some may be addressed lately ...

                    But with Navi 10 the system is rock solid with GNU/Linux when using Linux 5.7+ and Mesa 20.1+ after my experience.
                    No browser hang-ups, no crashes ... even with gaming ... no problem with stability ...

                    Sorry, the statement of "AMD being unstable" in that general sense is not true these days.
                    But yes - one may have to use kernels from Ubuntu Mainline PPA - but no compiling needed. So this can be done by every one ...
                    But yes, *ubuntu 20.10 STS `Groovy' will be the first Ubuntu distro with full stable support without any changes ... and is not yet released ... just next week.
                    So the situation is not ideal - but improving in a way that we may soon see much better and wider support.

                    But this is what is meant by really using Linux - following mainline if you want - or if you are forced to by new HW.
                    And from my point of view monitoring temperature is necessary for a professional workstatation - this can not be done in a stable way with Linux 5.3 (stuttering) or 5.4-5.5 (even crashes). But one can find this info easily ...
                    And I am sure there are people which will say that Navi 10 is stable on Linux 5.3 - for them this is true.

                    And this feature (following mainline) is not always possible for Nvidia users ... so guess if a kernel hacker would be glad using such a system.
                    As some of them have current AMD systems would be astonished if they experience crashes frequently without making some noise ... or just fixing it.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Originally posted by birdie View Post
                      The current driver supports GeForce 600 Series cards which were released in March, 2012. That's at the very least eight years of support. At least get your facts straight before trying to criticise the company...".
                      Well, if you don't remember what you said and not read what I said (we both reffered to the 1990ies - got this? - and suddenly only the last 8 years are important ... nice) - maybe you should not discuss in a forum.
                      I have not touched any Nvidia product since 2001 - you can be rest assured - so when concentarting on the last 8 years my Nvidia chips were long ago just trash.

                      But the general problem of Nvidia is just the same ... and you may argue with the kernel hackers about that topic ... as maybe this source may be a qualified one for you ... but maybe even this may not be sufficient for you (I remeber an LWN comment ... where you had a point but were not amused about handling of documentation).

                      There are people out there thinking the world is flat ... as an astronomer I may hint to visual proofs and impressive data showing otherwise ... if they don't get it and want to stay in their own universe I am OK with that. I just accept that they disagree with simple facts. That's life!
                      And this is true currently as experienced in every single detail - every news magazine ...
                      But none the less it is important to make it clear that some are just ignoring facts or change the rules along the way.
                      I don't regard this as worthless - just due to all of those reading these comments - and trying to get a clear picture.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X