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

[enrico.tagliavini]

Sounds like a bit like: here take this new wonderful car. Oh but you cannot use it anyway as the engine is bricked, you don't have the keys and wheels are only for display.

Sorry for being negative, but this has no benefit whatsoever for users as long as the cards are completely bricked by the lack of a firmware, and I'm afraid there is no plan at all at NVIDIA to address the situation. Fair enough, they are not obliged to, but I wonder why bother going through the process of releasing this documentation if not just to have a PR statement they do so, like Intel and AMD.

[zexelon]

I have to be honest, I like the proprietary driver... I have a 1070 GTX card and it has performed extremely well both in Windows and Linux using the proprietary driver. It has been a wonderful card in both bare metal OS and GPU pass through situations using the proprietary drivers.

At the end of the day function is worth more to me than GPL zealotry.

It is very nice that Nvidia is releasing this documentation, and hopefully yes they release all the spec's needed to get their cards running in the GNU/GPL cult environment... but again... there is nothing wrong with the proprietary drivers and I must admit I am very happy that Nvidia provides them even in the face of all the hate they get from so much of the Linux community. Quite frankly hate that they never get from any other community (OS X, BSD, Windows, etc.)

[andreano]

It is very nice that Nvidia is releasing this documentation, and hopefully they release all the specs needed to get their cards running in the GNU/GPL cult environment...

Oh, yes.

On behalf of Linus: Thank you, Nvidia, for hearing us and releasing what you can release for the benefit of free software support. I don't think anyone really expects every problem to be solved overnight. Maybe the signed firmware is a hard problem. But here's to hoping for more miracles of this sort, and more free-software-friendly engineering decisions in future products.

[birdie]

I have to be honest, I like the proprietary driver... I have a 1070 GTX card and it has performed extremely well both in Windows and Linux using the proprietary driver. It has been a wonderful card in both bare metal OS and GPU pass through situations using the proprietary drivers.

At the end of the day function is worth more to me than GPL zealotry.

It is very nice that Nvidia is releasing this documentation, and hopefully yes they release all the spec's needed to get their cards running in the GNU/GPL cult environment... but again... there is nothing wrong with the proprietary drivers and I must admit I am very happy that Nvidia provides them even in the face of all the hate they get from so much of the Linux community. Quite frankly hate that they never get from any other community (OS X, BSD, Windows, etc.)

The Linux community hates anyone/anything that's not GPL/open no matter how good it intrinsically is.

NVIDIA is in an order of magnitude more successful than AMD and they release great products which work great but that doesn't stop people from hating them because NVIDIA doesn't offer 100% support for a very peculiar OS barely used by gamers.

[adomas]

I wonder how long it can take that I will be able to play video games with open source driver? Finally this should enable me to use Wayland too, as now I can't do that with NVIDIA binary drivers.

[DrLecter]

hell is freezing?

[Jabberwocky]

TLDR; Understand before you critique.

The Linux community hates anyone/anything that's not GPL/open no matter how good it intrinsically is.

Exaggerated, but you are correct about Linux community not liking devices that use proprietary code. There's are very good reasons for that. I'm not going to go into that here.

IMO proprietary and intrinsically good are mutually exclusive terms in most consumer hardware devices. Enterprise has a different story...

NVIDIA is in an order of magnitude more successful than AMD and they release great products which work great but that doesn't stop people from hating them because NVIDIA doesn't offer 100% support for a very peculiar OS barely used by gamers

What kind of research did you do to make up this blanket statement?

I've had various issues with Nvidia's hardware and software, but you get problems with any manufacturer... AMD, Intel, ARM, SUN, IBM etc. The unique thing about Nvidia is that they have not taken responsibility (acknowledging) for hardware or software problems that I had. Sure most companies have semi-evil business practices, the unique thing about Nvidia is their level of evil business practices:

• Bad engineering? Deny-deny-deny until class action lawsuit (anti-consumer)
• Nvidia bribes online actors to promote their products (anti-consumer)
• Different GPU models under the same model name (false advertising)
  • 1060 3gb vs 6gb had the same problem (false advertising)
• GPP - GeForce Partner Program (anti-competitive)
  • "Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program." -- nvidia.com
  • Why would you cancel a massive program with people around the world instead of setting the record strait and opening up to the critics? -- Jabberwocky

IMO when your company becomes successful by some of the ways listed above, I would rather have it not be successful at all.

Quite frankly hate that they never get from any other community (OS X, BSD, Windows, etc.)

zexelon your statement above is factually incorrect. Nvidia gets lots of hate on other OSes too, especially OS X https://appleinsider.com/articles/19...-and-heres-why

Analogy time...
It is satisfying.
It's very successful all over the earth.
They have good marketing and PR.
All children and most adults love it.
They are very secretive about their products and how it's made.
It can get pricey if you buy more often than you should or keep going for the expensive options.
Yes! Nvidia is like McDonald's.

PS: Each to their own, I know many people that are happy with Nvidia. I'm okay with that. Thanks to the nouveau devs for their hard work.

[birdie]

Bumpgate was the real thing - I was among the people who suffered from it (in terms of money and I couldn't claim anything since I'm not a US citizen). All others are not perfect but I wouldn't say they were "evil" - that's where you are exaggerating a thousand times more than I did by saying about the Linux mob hatred towards NVIDIA.

[aht0]

Considering the general attitude of previous posts, if I was Nvidia's CEO, I'd say "fuck you, too" right this instant and order the github repo made private. "Don't publish - whine, publish - whine is even greater". Like vengeful ex-wife - never possible to satisfy, unless you killed himself and even then she would bitch about not getting enough out of it, khm, to her kid.

And I am frankly clueless about your rant about "paid drivers". Jesus, you can download drivers FREE for desktop use for all OS'es, incl "on-life-support" Solaris. All you have to pay for, is the cards, which is exact same situation with AMD. Enterprise has to follow their own contracts and agreements anyway and it's completely irrelevant for desktop users.

[birdie]

Considering the general attitude of previous posts, if I was Nvidia's CEO, I'd say "fuck you, too" right this instant and order the github repo made private. "Don't publish - whine, publish - whine is even greater". Like vengeful ex-wife - never possible to satisfy, unless you killed himself and even then she would bitch about not getting enough out of it, khm, to her kid.

And I am frankly clueless about your rant about "paid drivers". Jesus, you can download drivers FREE for desktop use for all OS'es, incl "on-life-support" Solaris. All you have to pay for, is the cards, which is exact same situation with AMD. Enterprise has to follow their own contracts and agreements anyway and it's completely irrelevant for desktop users.

Open source fan attics in essence. ;-) You've also forgotten about the fact that AMD has not revealed full documentation for their GPUs either - they published just enough to make their GPUs work under Linux.