NVIDIA Developer Talks Openly About Linux Support

[blackiwid]

For me Nvidia died with the day when AMD bought ATI. The opensource strategy was then only a matter of time and it happend fast.

To tell nouvou would be great and not giving the developers any documentation is marketing bullshit, the block it as much as they can, the only way to be more incooperative would be to sue them, but 1. they likely would not win 2. the marketing damage would be extremly big. I hope nobody develops any big stuff for nouvou. Good opensource support for Nvidia hardware with massive effort of reverse-engineering would be silly, because you take pressure from the company. And with the same or less work you could make the amd drivers with the docs to an excellent driver with good 3d speed (the other stuff works since a few weeks nearly perfekt anyway, except VDPAU like stuff)

Nvidia have hard work to do to not die in next few years. They are heavily under attack with better and cheaper grafics-cards from Amd. If cuda dont succeed (and it won?t) and they get no big foot into gp-prozessing they will at least shrink massivly or go bankrupt.

And in this situation could be a missing opensource support and with it some lost sells be the waterdrop that brings the burrel to overflow or fasten den process (don?t know if that adage is common internatioly it?s a german saying )

Nvidia isn?t in a strong position anymore, let?s ignore them (don?t upgrade the nouvou) the opensource community have the stronger position so just wait till they release docs/source or till they die.

[V!NCENT]

*chuckle*
*tags the post "yodawg"*

Lolwhut?

I should get a patent on patent trolling and then troll every patent troll with my patent troll patent, n stuff yo

Aiiiiiiight, fo' shizzle my dizzle!

I got dem transistor in my silicon, yo. Doin' threads n shit!

2009, yeah, uhu... latawr dawg!


Alright STOP! HAMMERTIME!

[rah_]

You seem to think this interview was conducted face-to-face.

What makes you say that?

[BhaKi]

Things are more clear now

Thanks to mtippett for explaining.

[niniendowarrior]

You seem to think this interview was conducted face-to-face.

I enjoyed this interview. Thanks Michael. I think the responses have been rather more open and honest than I expected.

[rah_]

Disappointing interview

This was a pretty disappointing interview. NVidia isn't thought very highly of in the free software and Linux communities. The questions that were asked in the original thread reflected that. Phoronix had an opportunity to address the issues head-on and pass the difficult questions on. Instead, it seems they pandered to NVidia. The questions were all soft-balls; sliced and diced, de-toothed versions of the questions the community wanted answered. Very disappointing indeed.

And on the content of the interview, quite a lot of interesting admissions of inactivity there. They say they can't be bothered to go through the internal documentation and edit it for release. OK, fine. Are they going to change their documentation process so that future documentation will be written to be suitable for release without editing? I'd imagine they would have said as much if they were. Which begs the question, why aren't they doing this? Alas, I don't think this question is one Phoronix will ask.

[myxal]

I should get a patent on patent trolling and then troll every patent troll with my patent troll patent

*chuckle*
*tags the post "yodawg"*

[V!NCENT]

Patents cover SW, HW, process, programming techniques, etc. *lots* of places.

I should get a patent on patent trolling and then troll every patent troll with my patent troll patent

PS: And then earn a loads of $$$$$$$ and give it partially back to companies that got patent trolled xD

[mtippett]

Thanks to mtippett
...

But that is all there is to it: the cost involved in releasing programming documentation is just the cost of sanitizing these internal documents which is far less than the cost of writing documentation from scratch.

...

One thing I learnt a while ago is to look out for a few keywords that usually mean bad things.

JUST - Implies a trivialization of effort. As movieman points out above the JUST usually costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

SOMEONE - Implies that it is thought to be important, but too amorphous or too low a priority to be handled by the person making the commoent. Basically it means that NO-ONE will do it.

I have become so sensitive to those words that I don't think I ever use them, and automatically translate them as

You JUST need to go from A to B -> You will spend a large amount of time, effort and money from A to B.

SOMEONE should stand up and do this -> I don't think it is my job, and it isn't important enough for me to do it anyway. I'll just complain and accept the status quo.

Not quite on thread, but I thought I'd just add one more post .

[movieman]

Firstly, inside the company, the person/team that designs hardware is most likely different from the person that writes the usual proprietary drivers. How do these separate teams communicate?

In our case, we had a pile of internal specs explaining what the chip was supposed to do and defining exactly how it worked in pseudo-code, and a simulator built by translating that pseudo-code as directly as possible into C++... and we could go talk to the designers if that wasn't enough. No company is going to want to release such precise documentation on exactly how their chips work.

But that is all there is to it: the cost involved in releasing programming documentation is just the cost of sanitizing these internal documents which is far less than the cost of writing documentation from scratch.

We did write external programming documents for some of our chips; particularly the ones sold into embedded markets where they typically wrote their own drivers. Since the only people who really understood how the chips worked were the designers, the VHDL programmers and the people writing the drivers, that basically meant that many of those people had to be taken off the work they were doing for a few days in order to rough out documentation that the technical writer could turn into a book that external developers could understand. You're talking about 100+ man-days lost at the 'front line' where the next chip is being prepared; even ignoring the $100,000+ cost in salaries for that work, delaying the next chip by a week or more could cost millions of dollars.