NVIDIA's Director of Software Development Talks Up Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA's Director of Software Development Talks Up Open-Source

While NVIDIA's desktop graphics drivers may not be open-source, there are other open-source projects maintained by NVIDIA that we have covered over the years particularly in the high performance computing and visual design space, among other interesting bits. Dirk Van Gelder who is NVIDIA's Direct of Software Development gave a talk this week about some of the open-source efforts engaged in by the company...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Open-Source-ASF-2020

[tildearrow]

*yawns*

[ayumu]

Intel and AMD both release docs and work on the open source drivers.

NVIDIA? Talks about how nice to open source they are, while pooling its efforts into inventing new ways (GPL condoms) to try and dodge Linux's license obligations.

[microcode]

LoL. NVIDIA is not a vendor of mine, and will not be as long as they are abusive and snooty about everything.

[kmare]

NVidia definitely has interesting tech. But seriously, especially these days it makes no sense to develop hardware without open source drivers. Every developer out there knows the pain of dealing with that. Hope they'll realize soon (aka, NOW) how stupidly wrong their strategy is and move quickly to an open source model for their drivers.

[OneTimeShot]

Is it that time again? Time for Nvidia to promise to do OpenSource in a useful way?

Did they release the redistributable signed firmware they promised for Nouveau?

[Guest]

It'd be nice if NVIDIA open-sourced more parts of their display driver (specifically whatever is needed for re-clocking at least on Maxwell+), but it's not like they have any obligation to do so. Their GPUs still sell quite well, and their drivers work.

On a slightly related note, I recently built a desktop, and was hard-set on it being AMD-only; had little issue with choosing AMD for the GPU. Ran into a handful of unexpected issues with their Windows driver though that almost had me consider returning that GPU and going NVIDIA. I have an RX 580 which you'd think would be driver-mature by now. Part of it was my fault (unstable XMP), but I ran into a driver bug that made diagnosing that take a lot more time (OCCT's video memory test is completely broken on about 4 or 5 of AMD's newest graphics drivers; and of course not knowing that, I had assumed the VRAM was bad on my GPU and ended up having another shipped to me). I've had HDMI issues with 3 different Polaris GPUs, but since it doesn't happen on the two new GPUs I have, I assume it just had to do with the build quality of the other GPUs (2 RX 580s and a 560, all from XFX; new GPU is from SAPPHIRE).

The worst I've had on NVIDIA? No issues driver-related, but most of my gripes was with Optimus not being ideal on Linux. AMD hasn't disappointed me too badly yet to avoid their GPUs, but I don't particularly foresee any issue going NVIDIA for a desktop GPU.

[ElectricPrism]

Just like an abusive spouse when caught "I promise, I promise, I promise", "I swear, I swear, I swear"

Sorry, no dice -- left green a long time ago and have since bought $4k in GPUs, Open Source first hardware is worth every penny.

[Kohrias]

Some nice PR talk again by NVIDIA. I think Linus Torvalds thanked them properly for their open-source contributions: f*** you, NVIDIA.

[shmerl]

Is that deep learning based on CUDA? If yes, it's a fake open source. If it works on any hardware - then good.

And I'm still waiting for them to unblock nouveau. Then they'll be talking.