Red Hat Developers Continue Working On OpenCL/Compute For Nouveau

[starshipeleven]

As for getting the signed firmware blobs, probably the reason for it still not happening is that the greater community is giving up on nouveau.

You mean "the reason for it not happening is that NVIDIA wants the greater community to give up on Noveau" right?

[starshipeleven]

If this was the case, coreboot would make much more sense than trying to make nvidia products work without blobs.

Coreboot duplicates functionality of the UEFI firmware (i.e. board initialization) which is already kinda ok.

Running NVIDIA GPUs with a driver you control is much more interesting if your core businness does encompass computing nodes and workstations like RedHat. They can optimize it regardless of what NVIDIA thinks is best for its own sales.

[arcangeli]

Is this may be related to the new restrictive license of the GeForce drivers which forbid the use of these CG in data centers? This licence is only about the software part, not the hardware. And redhat has many customer in the data center market which use GeForce...
I may be wrong...

[humbug]

This theory I have is more plausible when you consider that Valve are almost exactly following this pattern in a different market to mitigate the threat of Microsoft using their near-monopoly position to take over the extremely lucrative PC game distribution and social platform market. Valve are investing in Open Source, GPU, driver development.

This is the best I've got

Valve does it for AMD hardware though. And Valve started contributing after AMD themselves committed to the open source driver. They are helping things along in the same direction because they know AMD is on the same side. Notice they do not contribute to Nouveau.

In Red Hat's case they are doing it without the support of the IHV!!

[kpedersen]

Personally, I think nouveau is essential even if it remains slow. It the very least it can serve as a fast-enough, basic and reliable graphics driver to allow GNU/Linux distributions to just-work on most systems it is booted on. The user can get a desktop environment running and do basic tasks without the need of the proprietary driver.

Yes, I agree with this. RedHat isn't really into the gaming market but after installing an OS and having the screen stretched over your monitor at around 640x480 resolution is not good for end user experience. Any correct graphics displaying, is fine for many workstation and especially server usage. It must actually be quite liberating not having to worry too much about the shits that are NVIDIA and AMD

For my "internet browsing" machine, I don't bother installing the NVIDIA blob and nouveau is perfectly adequate for posting this message on a forum

[cybertraveler]

Yes, I agree with this. RedHat isn't really into the gaming market but after installing an OS and having the screen stretched over your monitor at around 640x480 resolution is not good for end user experience. Any correct graphics displaying, is fine for many workstation and especially server usage. It must actually be quite liberating not having to worry too much about the shits that are NVIDIA and AMD

For my "internet browsing" machine, I don't bother installing the NVIDIA blob and nouveau is perfectly adequate for posting this message on a forum

nouveau could also server the niche of enabling users to run old NVIDIA hardware on new software stacks (eg latest Kernel). So if NVIDIA drop support for old hardware in their proprietary driver, it doesn't mean the user is forced to use old proprietary drivers which only support older software stacks.

[starshipeleven]

Any correct graphics displaying, is fine for many workstation and especially server usage.

Workstations don't install NVIDIA dedicated GPUs to get "correct displaying", and servers don't even care about display at all because most have a "integrated" graphics in their remote management system.

They want performance on 3D (OpenGL) and computing (OpenCL and CUDA) as they are used to render CAD or 3D modeling, or used to run calculations for various things.

Which is why they are working on OpenCL on noveau as stated in this article. I'm unsure about how useful it can be if the card does not work at higher frequencies because they don't load the firmwares NVIDIA isn't releasing.

For my "internet browsing" machine, I don't bother installing the NVIDIA blob and nouveau is perfectly adequate for posting this message on a forum

If you are just browsing the internet why are you using a dedicated GPU at all? I assume that is a PC with no integrated graphics at all?

[cybertraveler]

Workstations don't install NVIDIA dedicated GPUs to get "correct displaying", and servers don't even care about display at all because most have a "integrated" graphics in their remote management system.

...

If you are just browsing the internet why are you using a dedicated GPU at all? I assume that is a PC with no integrated graphics at all?

You seem surprised by his setup. It's pretty normal. There's millions of old PCs out there with old NVIDIA graphics cards in them. These machines can be given new life by installing a lightweight GNU/Linux distribution on them. And yes, many of them will either have no integrated graphics or they will have worse performance using the integrated graphics over the discrete card with the nouveau drivers.

[M@GOid]

You seem surprised by his setup. It's pretty normal. There's millions of old PCs out there with old NVIDIA graphics cards in them. These machines can be given new life by installing a lightweight GNU/Linux distribution on them. And yes, many of them will either have no integrated graphics or they will have worse performance using the integrated graphics over the discrete card with the nouveau drivers.

I know a example of a HP workstation that used Nouveau, before the motherboard gave up after the warranty expired... The interest on the machine was the dual Xeon setup and the humongous amounts of memory. The Quadro card only came along because it was the only GPU available on the thing at the time of purchase.

It was a waste? Of course, but wasn't me that bought it so...

On a interesting note, Red Hat was among the list of officially supported OS on the documentation. People tend to ignore Linux on the desktop, but on enterprise market that is not the case at all. And looking at how much money Red Hat make, they are taken really serious by big hardware vendors.

[coder]

[*]Red Hat recognise that they are competing with Microsoft.[*]Red Hat recognise that Microsoft have a recorded history of utilizing their near-monopoly to make special deals with hardware manufacturers to promote their software & services at the expense of their competitors.

No. Microsoft doesn't have nearly that much pull, in this case. They are not the end customer (for the most part), nor are they even the preferred OS for GPU compute.

The end customers have far more clout, and ultimately drive the decisions about which operating systems Nvidia will support.