NVIDIA Talks Up RTX Capabilities On Arm - Showcased Using Arch Linux

[CochainComplex]

They do contribute patches, even if they're all self-serving ones. That's okay though. GPL doesn't restrict the motives of contributors, it works in spite of them! Then, it's the jobs of the kernel maintainers to accept patches that don't only benefit Nvidia.

You are right that it complies with GPL. But morally there should be some payback you can not always take the free beer but never pay a round even if you are not obliged to do.

[coder]

Don't many of them get star struck and just accept any code from a large corporation?

Well, there was that case where some key facility needed for NVLink support got dropped, because it only benefitted Nvidia's out-of-tree driver. I think there's an explicit policy around the GPU driver tree that it can't contain stuff that only works with a closed-source userspace.

I feel the open-source community could have weaponized Linux a little more.

GPL + not having a stable driver API is a powerful combination of factors for pulling drivers into the kernel's official sources.

Strengthening freedom and all that whilst weakening some of these larger leeches.

There's only so far you can push, before people get completely turned off and go a different direction. I think Linux has struck the right balance, for now.

In time, alternatives will mature and be better adapted to the hardware of the day & specific users' needs. Then, Linux' policies will start working more against it and the sun could set on it very rapidly. I give it maybe 10 years until we hit an inflection point. Let's say 2038, at the latest. Heh, that would be a fitting T_END.

[coder]

For sure. And long before Quake. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on Slackware Linux (version 1.2?) on my 486 in the early 1990's thanks to id's native Linux ports. They even ported a few games to Linux on non-x86 platforms, like the DEC Alpha.

Yeah, I mainly remember Carmack posting* about his experiences with porting GL Quake to different workstation platforms. For a while, I think he was using a SGI O2 as his main desktop.

* Before blogs, Carmack would update his .plan with all kinds of stuff. You actually use finger to read the latest, but I seem to recall there was a web page where they were archived.

[Viki Ai]

The amount of people playing desktop (non-browser) games on ARM is likely less than that of people playing desktop games on Linux. Potentially not if you include ARM based Macs. Even the modern consoles from Sony and Microsoft are x86 based, including the recently announced SteamDeck.

This was likely done as a partnership development for the future, but you're unlikely to see anything come out right now. It's not like consumers can go out an purchase ARM systems with the discrete graphics necessary for this.

Cheers,
Mike

And I imagine the not-releasing it even if they have is is more about support resources than development resources for them. And having something that compiles well enough for a tech demo is a lot of time and money away from having something release quality (for certain values of 'release quality' only - this is gaming companies we are talking about here! )

[mulenmar]

I can't help but find it hilarious that nVidia would choose a port of the very distro whose rolling-release model makes them look bad via the driver seemingly breaking with kernel updates.

And don't even say it doesn't happen, it was one of the reasons (newly-limited net access being the other) I switched to Debian. And even there, Minetest stopped working with an nVidia update.