Nouveau Still Pushing Forward In 2020 Thanks To Red Hat But Community Developers Leaving

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Still Pushing Forward In 2020 Thanks To Red Hat But Community Developers Leaving

Red Hat's Karol Herbst spoke at the FOSDEM 2020 conference in Brussels on the state of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver stack...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-2020-Early-Status

[zexelon]

I suppose the question is why reproduce the wheel? Nvidia has an awesome corporate driver developed in house and with very good support for their hardware. Its closed source ... so what its awesome how well it works!

[kpedersen]

I suppose the question is why reproduce the wheel? Nvidia has an awesome corporate driver developed in house and with very good support for their hardware. Its closed source ... so what its awesome how well it works!

The issue is extremely obvious. You can get an idea as to why people have had to spend many hours of their life developing an alternative (or switching to Intel/AMD hardware) from a recent Phoronix article here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...ires-G8x-GT2xx

Nvidia's blob mechanism is old fashioned. It needs to modernise to catch up with Intel and AMD or it will be left behind.

[Britoid]

I suppose the question is why reproduce the wheel? Nvidia has an awesome corporate driver developed in house and with very good support for their hardware. Its closed source ... so what its awesome how well it works!

Because it's supposed to be free software.

Nvidia is the one re-inventing the wheel.

[zexelon]

Because it's supposed to be free software.

Nvidia is the one re-inventing the wheel.

Actually pretty sure Nvidia was doing drivers long before Nouveau. That being said, absolutely if someone wants to make an open source driver go for it! Keep in mind though that the company that produces the hardware has absolutely no requirement or reason to support said open source initiative. If another company (say AMD/ATI) do choose to support an open source initiative for their hardware, then good for them. That is awesome... but again it does not affect whether Nvidia should support such an initiative.

Nvidia produces hardware and the software to drive it. Enjoy the fact that it works so well! I love Linux, I love open source... but I have no qualms with a company that does not wish to FOSS their drivers... especially if said company does such an awesome job supporting their hardware.

Aside from that I think we should have laws that automatically force the open sourcing of all abandonware.

[Calinou]

Aside from that I think we should have laws that automatically force the open sourcing of all abandonware.

Unfortunately, I don't see any legally enforceable way to do this. Many old programs' source code ends up being lost by the developers over time. (This is a common issue in old games.)

[DanL]

A big thank you to imirkin and karolherbst for fighting the good fight and pressuring Nvidia to release the firmware. I understand if Nvidia doesn't want to give away all the latest and greatest "secret sauce" (game optimizations, CUDA, etc.), but they at least need to let the community build good modesetting, power management, OpenGL and video decode modules for humanity's sake.

[DanL]

Actually pretty sure Nvidia was doing drivers long before Nouveau.

The obfuscated nv driver was a joke.

[ix900]

I suppose the question is why reproduce the wheel? Nvidia has an awesome corporate driver developed in house and with very good support for their hardware. Its closed source ... so what its awesome how well it works!

I agree with you but there's a bunch of Linux cry babies that will get very argumentative on that topic that everything has to be open source. I feel that the proprietary driver should be used by default on installation. It works far better. I've never had great times with Nouveau and switch out immediately anymore as games don't work well with it.

All they need to do is switch that to default and add make it easier to switch and install driver versions. Currently, these two things are still horrible with the way they are done. If they have two driver versions available a stable and the latest they can easily switch back to the stable if the latest has a problem.

Linux needs to improve. Nouveau also must improve and keep up with the latest proprietary driver or it should be removed. Anything else is holding Linux back.

[tildearrow]

I agree with you but there's a bunch of Linux cry babies that will get very argumentative on that topic that everything has to be open source. I feel that the proprietary driver should be used by default on installation. It works far better.

There is a problem. They just can't distribute the driver built-in.

Also, NVIDIA come on let me use NvFBC on my GeForce card.