NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

[Kamikaze]

Open-source intel driver works out of the box on Optimus and is 100% approved by Linus...

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.

[lithorus]

Switched to using bumblebee on my laptop and I have to say that it works quite nicely..

[johnc]

It's kind of useless to even argue because there is no Linux desktop market and never will be a Linux desktop market so it's the equivalent of arguing about something that affects nearly 0% of the human population.

Linux is an absolute train wreck on everything but servers and the only reason it's anything more than a blip in the mobile OS market is because Android has the Google powerhouse behind it.

And anybody who wants some kernel developer / open-source jabroni programming the drivers for his $300 video card is a moron.

JMO of course.

[patstew]

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 should be agnostic to everything except the specific piece of hardware it's made for. It is configuration bits/code that run on some microcontroller inside the device, it is not executed on your CPU. If the firmware is OS dependent it's because the driver teams for each OS decided to hack the firmware around rather than do things properly

[Kamikaze]

It's kind of useless to even argue because there is no Linux desktop market and never will be a Linux desktop market so it's the equivalent of arguing about something that affects nearly 0% of the human population.

Linux is an absolute train wreck on everything but servers and the only reason it's anything more than a blip in the mobile OS market is because Android has the Google powerhouse behind it.

Annnnd Phoronix's equivalent to the Godwin law strikes again...

[smitty3268]

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 should never even touch your CPU or OS, unless they are doing something really funky.

It used to be that device manufacturers would hardcode that stuff into chips on the devices themselves. Eventually they figured out that they could make their devices flashable to enable updates if there were any bugs in the shipping hardware.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.