Linux Kernel Set To Expose Hidden NVIDIA HDA Controllers, Helping Laptop Users

[ThoreauHD]

So, to sum up. Nvidia is permanently gimped on Nouveau. And to compete for the "mid-tier", AMD releases an overclocked vega 3 years later for twice the price of vega, with no open drivers. Am I missing anything? You know the worst part of all this, is when you realize Intel- fking bloated behemoth, is the only hope for the gpu market in linux. Makes my stomach turn just contemplating it.

[aht0]

Nouveau in fact has it's niche. It's better than being without any drivers at all when you happen to have Intel-Nvidia hybrid graphics. Not all BIOSes of such machines allow for turning Nvidia completely off.

[Djhg2000]

And to compete for the "mid-tier", AMD releases an overclocked vega 3 years later for twice the price of vega, with no open drivers. Am I missing anything?

Yes, you are in fact missing quite a lot. Navi definitely isn't Vega (AFAICT (first gen?) RDNA supports GCN instructions for compatibility reasons but that's about it) and IIRC open drivers are coming with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.3.

It's a new architecture and they've done everything to keep leaks away which unfortunately means the driver trees had to be hidden until now. IMHO they can't be faulted for successfully delivering a nice surprise to their loyal fans at Computex/E3 this year. I for one am very excited to see what Navi can deliver in the hands of Michael.

[alex79]

With respect, I can understand how someone might have thought that ~12 years ago when we announced the open source driver initiative, but it's hard to believe anyone would actually think that today. Not only did we hire a new team of open source driver developers, but all of the developers working on closed source fglrx** moved across to work on the open source drivers as well... and that team has also continued to grow. We did this to make better drivers, not to save money.

** except for the developers working on closed source OpenGL, who kept working on closed source OpenGL for AMDGPU-PRO and added closed/open Vulkan as well



Guessing you haven't been following recent reviews and benchmarks ? In general our open source Linux driver performance is on par with NVidia's closed source drivers for comparable boards, with the usual "some games favour NVidia, other games favour AMD" caveats.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...i-linux&num=11

Nice try but that would be a no. I had 290 than moved to 390 and and the support was a joke. Sure you can pumper newest hardware but you ignored everything else. That was the reason I moved to 1070. Nobody cares that after 5 years the drivers catch-up when whole world moved on.
AMD, you keep on digging your own grave.

[nivedita]

I think that says it all right there. AMD is willing (and has) done great things for open source, and Nvidia (by your own admission) has not. In fact, they are actively hostile towards open source developers. AFAIC, that puts Nvidia out of consideration for Linux. If you're comfortable with proprietary drivers for a huge chunk of your OS, why are you even using Linux? But I guess it's all about "muh games". Typical gamer-only attitude.

Open source friendly and Linux friendly really ought to be orthogonal. Nvidia proprietary drivers have higher performance on Linux than windows for compute tasks.

[finalzone]

True, however that was a Ryzen-only testing gap. Epyc and Threadripper were heavily tested on Linux, but for better or worse Ryzen was viewed as selling into a pretty-much Windows-only market and tested accordingly.

I believe that gap has been closed now (AFAIK the second gen Ryzen CPUs had a smooth launch from Linux POV), but we will continue to monitor.

Mobile section notably Raven Ridge and Picasso still needs improvement on Linux ecoysystem as it seems neglected for some times. Case in the point is the incomplete support of GPU part on ROCm leading to slow performance of rendering on software like Blender and Darktable.
On the bright side, the accelerometer needed for screen auto-rotation is in the work and expected to be ready in two months.