NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

[johnc]

Anyway, if nvidia really wants to give support to Linux, it would play under Linux rules, open sourcing their driver.

There is a Linux rule requiring open source drivers?

Does Linus know about this?

Why doesn't he enforce this rule?

[Alex Sarmiento]

I think the "free & open" fanatics sometimes confuse the difference between a project and a product. NVidia offers products, not projects. They manage to make their products work within the confinements of a kernel that basically only supports in-kernel drivers. It's quite a challenge, but they come through with a product that works.

Linux is a product, build upon a project. You don't have any idea about what are you talking about. To build a product you need a project

Anyway, if nvidia really wants to give support to Linux, it would play under Linux rules, open sourcing their driver.

[V!NCENT]

Nice PR response. It doesn't change the fact that the AMD blob kicks the nVidia blob on Windows. It also doesn't change the fact that the open source AMD driver keeps kicking the open source nVidia driver on Linux.

Any other configuration is bullshit to me and I will happily keep on buying AMD products because nVidia is not even worth considdering on both.

Thanks for the reasured reminder not to ever considder nVidia, nVidia. Oh and last but not least: "FUCK YOU, nFailia!"

[blackiwid]

I think the "free & open" fanatics

Omg linus is maybe a troll or something, he outrages sometimes easy, but what linus is not for shure is that he is a free &open fanatic ^^.

he is one of the practicalists guy on that matter that he even is against gplv3 and stuff. he has nothing against android he not even is worried about it even it has some blobs and java in it.

the point is that such important thing like a low-level driver should be compatible with the kernel, and that he can fix it too, its no program I will not install a commercial program, so yes you can see that different and maybe when you sandbox it somehow in a home directory or you trust ^^lol the company that build it, its maybe ok, for linux that is ok shurely, but on such important driver its like intel would have not given out how x86 works, its just retarded, and nvidia wins much money with linux, I would go that far that nvidia without linux would be broke tomorow, they focus not that much anymore on grafic cards for gaming but for them to be supercomputers, what os does supercomputer run linux most of the time, maybe sometimes other unixes. So they could give something back.

And its totaly retarded, so that driver cannot in the userspace, because it would be to slow, but the kernel is gplv2 so it is incompatible with such a blob, and the kernel is the biggest software project at the moment at all I think and the changelog or diffs gets bigger and bigger, this small little company nvidia cannot keep the speed of the linux kernel in the long run, they will not be able to. linus should just to show that to nvidia and also to amd, change much abi stuff for 1-2 years so that this drivers dont work at all for this time. Because that will happen anyway in 5-10 years, this companies will not be able and they are far behind today, they deliver not all features that are there, they can also not keep up with randr versions and such stuff, they will fall further back each year. its impossible to fight as one company against 1000 companies work and keep up with that, it will not happen.

Sorry for my english, did wrote better comments, but you can understand what I mean ^^

[Kivada]

I think you can buy laptop with Nvidia graphic card (without Optimus):

http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

http://linuxpreloaded.com/

My only problem with that is that Zareason, System76 and Ohara only do Intel, I want to see some AMD APU based laptops running Linux, hell theres allot of windows people that would like a decent quality AMD laptop at all, but the only ones making them are the bargain basement companies like HP, so of course the quality is craptacular.

[GreekGeek]

*YAY for nVida blob* Boo to all infants having wee tanties.....

Hi yall,

Thanks nVidia, for drivers that work and have done since about 2003, on my desktops. :-)

I'm "loving" my EVGA GTX 680. :-D

The infantile name calling is really going to push the Linux cause? *Yeah Right* More like make us look like a bunch of spoiled infants having a tanty, for not getting there way.

First nVidia is welcomed to write firmware blobs. Then they are insulted for writing firmware blobs by a hero of mine, Linus. Mr L, you are not making sense to me. Still, you are human and one of our strengths, is being illogical....

Not that not that nVidia can do no wrong, eh Mr Woodscrews? ;-) The support for Optimus is rubbish. Nvidia, screwed up royally there. Guys, release an official fix or at the minimum, allow those revolting intel onboard gfx cards to be turned off.

As for ATI/AMD, there support is rubbish on Linux. But I see years of astroturfing on this site, has created a loyal zombie army. *LOL* I never recommend that rubbish to friends installing Tux and indeed, none use it. As for dropping support, for gfx you are selling into market now? Fail. It is truly a "wonder" of modern marketing/astroturfing, that you have convinced anyone this is a good thing. *waits for the next ati driver release & all the cries of pain. A comedy I have been observing for about a decade.

*BFN*

GreekGeek :-)

[Teho]

It does affect the development of the kernel itself.

How exactly? I can see why NVIDIA not providing documentation for their hardware and not developing open source drivers can make things difficult but the binary blob has nothing to do with that. If I'm not mistaken kernel developers do not do changes just to keep the blob working.

[MonkeyPaw]

LOL, yeah if by "works out of the box" you mean "completely unused but at least not causing problems" then yes on some occasions that may work for you

Could be wrong as it's going off second hand info, but I've heard from a workmate that runs Ubuntu that when he tried to load up a fresh install of 11.10 (or maybe 12.04?) on his optimus laptop, that it came up with a black screen after install. I assume this may have been due to the nouveau driver build of that distro attempting to initialise? I wouldn't call that exactly working out of the box... Apparently running an older version of Ubuntu managed to get him a standard display though.

Actually, what you are describing is pretty much what happens during most AMD llano installs. For some reason, the installer will only display from HDMI, so you have to be hooked up to an HDTV for install. Once you get the AMD drivers working, everything works just fine. That's on 12.04. I think/hope it might be fixed by 12.11.

[hal2k1]

Does FreeBSD, Haiku and other OSs use the same firmware blobs that Windows and Linux use?

Are the firmware blobs OS independent? Are they architecture agnostic, or they just run in x86 / x86_64?

Firmware blobs are binary code which runs on the cards directly. The hardware on the card (such as a GPU or a wireless controller) runs the blob. They have absolutely nothing to do with the OS, the architecture of the computer, or with x86 or x86_64.

[peppepz]

They're not unrelated, since Nvidia's argument is that their driver strategy is for the Linux driver to share 90% of it's code with their Windows drivers - and that while this might not please kernel developers or open-source fans, it's the only reason they can provide Linux drivers at all.

Linus: NVIDIA sucks at open source.

Delgarde: NVIDIA does not care enough about the Linux community to provide open source drivers.

I think both those arguments are true, I can't find the contradiction between the two, which is what I would expect from a response that is not meant to confirm the "harsh words" used by Linus.

Sure, you might not agree with that reasoning, but I don't see why people are claiming it doesn't address Linus's argument. Because it does, if "reduce effort by sharing driver code" and "play nicely with kernel" are exclusive choices.

Why should Linus or the open source community care about NVIDIA's internal development model? AMD are playing nicely. Intel are playing nicely. Both of them are doing well on the market. NVIDIA aren't playing nicely, and therefore Linus is protesting - the matter is as simple as that. The fact that they aren't "playing nicely" because they don't want to spend resources on Linux doesn't change a bit of that; if anything, it's even more offensive for Linux users buying NVIDIA.

Nothing forces NVIDIA to "play nicely" with Linux. But then they can't act surprised when people complain if they don't. It's a typical case of not being able to eat the cake and have it too.