Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

[braiam]

Several of the core Linux maintainers need to be kicked out. This kind of religious zealotry for the GPL license is killing progress in the LInux ecosystem. I fully support the ideals of the GPL license but I dont care one bit about it if the core hardware I use is crippled by some zealous idealist who thinks the world should revolve around those ideals.

The kernel makes no guarantees of stability of the internal/private API. Nvidia is playing with fire here and making their users pay for it. There's a set of public API's that are free for use for any Out Of Kernel driver. They can use that. The response just above you described problems with Nvidia using the private API where there were data corruption with block devices.

[braiam]

The result? Android received much faster hardware support than the mainline kernel for most ARM SoCs.

And that support languished after 6 months. There are fields filled with devices that would otherwise work, but are wholly inadequate because there's a drought of drivers to use them with modern kernels. The option their clients have is either having no phone or buy another one. Apple at least gives you 4-5 years of support per device in the software/OS front.

[braiam]

There is no copyright protection and no patents in those pieces of code that blocks Nvidia's kernel blobs from loading.

Nvidia has every legal right to fork the kernel and rip those bits out.

This is a bad take. The contributors retain full copyright of all their works, they give them under the GPL2 license. If you do not respect their license, they very rich employers will come after you, and guess what, that list was 500 companies strong last time they counted, and includes several behemoths. The real question was why Nvidia didn't do this in 2020? Fork the kernel? Because they already tried before, also MS tried it. They still had to comply with the license.

[braiam]

they would just provide a stable ABI for drivers that happen to be blobs and there wouldn't be any of this tiptoing/dancing going on

And they do, they aren't marked with the marked with EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL but with EXPORT_SYMBOL. Those marked with _GPL have zero guarantee, because those symbols are used for in-tree drivers.

There's a good article explaining with Linux devs and Linus himself believe that if it ever goes to court, they would have it in the bag. https://lwn.net/Articles/154602/

[creative]

From reading the article and the posts all of this seems to be a terrible mess.

[oiaohm]

In my opinion, GPL is not helping the kernel for hardware enablement because most hardware vendors actually don't like GPL and does not want to open-source everything. I know someone will disagree with me with examples with "insert hardware vendors here", but I would kindly ask people with such opinion to try the de-blobbed libre-kernel and see how many devices stopped working. Android is doing hardware vendors a favor by providing a mechanism to let them ship their closed-source blobs to address their concerns about being open-source. The result? Android received much faster hardware support than the mainline kernel for most ARM SoCs.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-upstream-first-development-model-for-the-linux-kernel/

The android kernel is a more complex one. Yes at first android kernel got more hardware support but then the nightmare came since source code had not be shared when security flaws were found updating the software for security came impossible.

Yes you are right on the upside of allowing closed source drivers that hardware support comes sooner but you missed the very big downside. Security is poorer in the non GPL enforced model. Yes google with the Android kernel has been forced to admit defeat and start saying to vendors if you don't open source and upstream your kernel drivers don't be surprised if your hardware ends up not supported by Android because it too security problematic.

Please note de-blobbed libre-kernel removes items that with at stock Linux kernel GPLv2 are truly classed as independent works. Device firmware blobs operate without needing the Linux kernel. This is not the case for Nvidia Linux kernel drivers they do operate using features of the Linux kernel so are not truly independent works.

[RealNC]

Wow. With the way things are going, we're gonna need to jailbreak Linux to use it. Never thought I'd see the day.

[timofonic]

From reading the article and the posts all of this seems to be a terrible mess.

That's because they don't share your mindset!

Seriously, some people are zealots. And those zealots believe those pro-FOSS are zealots.

Nvidia proprietary drivers are PITA. There are numerous sources about it. Even Linus Torvalds mentioned it. Numerous bugs happened and still happen that are nearly impossible to debug without driver source code. Block device issue was one of them.

The reason of enforcement of open source in-tree drivers is purely technical pragmatic, not freedom zealotism. Open source in-tree drivers are a lot better for stability and security. Windows is plagued of issues because proprietary drivers, for example.

Proprietary drivers are a nightmare, every one of them. OpenWRT and similar projects are limited because of them, for example.

I'm also against binary blobs, firmware, UEFI and any other crap. But the worst offenders are proprietary drivers.

There was a leak of Nvidia source code. There's the open drivers for Nvidia cards using GSP. There's Nouveau slowly becoming usable. But Nvidia laughs at us.

I wouldn't mind Nvidia abandoning Linux if AMD made real pragmatic non-PR efforts to make CUDA irrelevant. Seriously, I consider Nvidia hardware quite overvalued.

AI/HPC, okay. AI is a bubble, it has many useful uses but too much computing effort for so little.

[gnattu]

And that support languished after 6 months. There are fields filled with devices that would otherwise work, but are wholly inadequate because there's a drought of drivers to use them with modern kernels. The option their clients have is either having no phone or buy another one. Apple at least gives you 4-5 years of support per device in the software/OS front.

Vendors dropping support for their hardware for less than a year is a totally legit thing to be criticized, but this is more of an effort issue than license issue. Nvidia provides support for their GPUs for relatively a long time despite being not GPL licensed, and having a GPL licensed driver, even merged in mainline kernel, does not mean the hardware support is at an adequate level. For example, Broadcom's brcmfmac Wireless driver in the kernel is extremely outdated and lots of the features are missing with years behind the firmware integration. There are 3 Broadcom employees on paper as the maintainer of this driver, but their last commit are from January; 2018 and 2016 respectively. At the current status the kernel does not work with a lot of recently released Broadcom WiFi chips because the driver just won't work with the chips/firmwares. However, in a separate branch, the bcmdhd driver they wrote for the Android kernel, supports all the features that required to use recent chips from them. Bothe bcmdhd and brcmfmac are licensed under GPL so this is clearly not a license issue.

[creative]

Wow. With the way things are going, we're gonna need to jailbreak Linux to use it. Never thought I'd see the day.

I know it's crazy.