NVIDIA Starts Publishing GPU Hardware Documentation To Help Open-Source Drivers

[Britoid]

Point is, no one will pay them anything, if they can use Nouveau with Mesa. Nvidia profits by controlling the market by the fact that the blob is the only functional driver now. I.e. if they want, they can charge anything to those who need certain features. since they are the gatekeeper. Open driver will remove the middleman. I think that's the primary reason Nvidia were such jerks towards Nouveau.

a lot of NVidia's special sauce is already in their userland blob. (It's relatively big...) I really don't think it would make much of a difference except distros would actually work properly on nvidia cards out the box without any downstream distro hacks.

[shmerl]

a lot of NVidia's special sauce is already in their userland blob. (It's relatively big...) I really don't think it would make much of a difference except distros would actually work properly on nvidia cards out the box without any downstream distro hacks.

I think kernel driver is the main blocker. I.e. for example for some enterprise cards, they can simply refuse to provide the fully functional driver, unless they are paid. I didn't dig into it, but it's something they easily can do. May be with their userland lock-in they aren't really interested. Either way, open driver will remove the lock-in completely, and Nvidia tactics are toast.

[Kohrias]

Before anyone asks in the forums: unfortunately, no, at this stage it doesn't help with Nouveau's biggest challenge of re-clocking / signed firmware since GTX 900 series making it a real obstruction to be able to re-program the hardware to operate at its effective clock speeds rather than the lower boot clock speeds. When asking NVIDIA about it, they are aware of the situation but no solution to announce right now.

They don't even have anything to say to this most basic feature? Nice PR stunt, Nvida!

I think I have to agree with Linus Torvalds: "Fuck you, Nvidia!"

[Jumbotron]

They don't even have anything to say to this most basic feature? Nice PR stunt, Nvida!

I think I have to agree with Linus Torvalds: "Fuck you, Nvidia!"

THIS !!

[DMJC]

Oops, I just bought Navi, oh well. This is what happens when you don't invest in GPU Hotplug on Linux and your competitors do. AMD to their credit has put in the effort and gets to reap the rewards.

[Danny3]

Too little, too late.
I'm sorry, but I'm not betraying AMD with 10+ of documentation releasing and working on the open source driver!
Nvidia doesn't deserve anything but what Linus showed them.
AMD is the future!

[ElectricPrism]

It goes back to at least 2012 when they said they would release more docs while now it appears they are living up to that promise for helping Nouveau.

Did it really take them 7 years to BEGIN to make good on their promises?

We thought ValveTIME was slow, by NvidiaTIME the day there is a proper performant open source driver we'll all be dead and Phoronix will be 100 years old.

Ludicrous.

[dweigert]

Sometimes, you just have to wait for patents and license deals to run out.

[shmerl]

Sometimes, you just have to wait for patents and license deals to run out.

How are patents preventing them from opening the documentation? Patents themselves are already public.

[tuke81]

Point is, no one will pay them anything, if they can use Nouveau with Mesa. Nvidia profits by controlling the market by the fact that the blob is the only functional kernel driver now. I.e. if they want, they can charge anything to those who need certain features. since they are the gatekeeper. Open driver will remove the middleman. I think that's the primary reason Nvidia were such jerks towards Nouveau.

Well they would still has cuda, which is probably the only reason they still do linux drivers at all. Doubt linux desktop means them anything now-a-days, it just a by-product from the main drivel: multi million dollar AI/Datacenter/HPC segment running on linux.