Another NVIDIA Engineer Just Made His First Contribution To Mesa

[ThoreauHD]

The nvidia mesa posts are entertaining. Bet he saw his shadow, and decided to hide for another 6 weeks.

[CommunityMember]

I appreciate any open contribution they make though.

Exactly. Do not look the gift horse in the mouth too closely.

And in any case, this is a 2 line fix that, based on the reviewer, likely was a customer of RH opening a case which got bounced over to nvidia who understood the internal opcodes that needed to be changed.

[Cotyso]

While I hope that nvidia will open-source their driver, I don't believe they'll start to do it without an announcement. Especially given that they announced xwayland support on the proprietary driver yesterday.(via Eglstreams)

[ElectricPrism]

Not holding my breath. It ain't over till the fat lady sings.

Still -- credit where credit is due, if they do earn a place next to AMD & Intel I'll stop boycotting their products in the vast array of 100% AMD & Intel builds I've been doing these last few years.

[OneTimeShot]

While I hope that nvidia will open-source their driver, I don't believe they'll start to do it without an announcement. Especially given that they announced xwayland support on the proprietary driver yesterday.(via Eglstreams)

I would imagine they would do many announcements over many years about an open source driver before they wrote supplied any code, and people would believe them.

Luckily, we will soon likely be at a point where PCs get squashed into a single chip, putting-add on cards at a massive price disadvantage.

[Linuxxx]

Actually, I'm serious with my assumption about nVidia following AMD's route in open-sourcing their kernel driver part & trying to mainline it upstream (until then shipping it in DKMS-form, like they do now), mainly for the following reason:

NVIDIA's Graphics Driver Will Run Into Problems With Linux 5.3 On IBM POWER

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.3-NVIDIA-POWER-Problem

So, this is probably going to be their big open-source anouncement after all...

Again, the main driver forcing nVidia to take this route is not because of our miserable desktop marketshare, but the big money of enterprise & AMD's recent supercomputer wins with their inferior but open-source compute stack.

Also, this would solve their GPL woes once and for all!

And the (limited) MESA support?
Well, Linux & Linus would simply reject the kernel driver part without an (at least somewhat) usable open-source counterpart...

Anyone got any better theory?

[illwieckz]

Michael

It hasn't been clear why Red Hat has been investing so much on getting this open-source NVIDIA compute support improved, especially as to date all GPUs since the GTX 900 Maxwell series suffer from incredibly poor performance stemming from the re-clocking situation around signed firmware images and the Nouveau driver not having the ability to provide proper PMU handling.

…especially since AMD support is very good on anything but OpenCL but people are waiting for OpenCL in Mesa, not waiting for OpenCL in ROCm.

AMD just removed GCN2 and GCN3 support in ROCm.

• proof GCN2 support is dropped from ROCm: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute...ment-755272927 (in fact it was broken since years)
• proof GCN3 support is dropped from ROCm: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute...ment-753772733

Linux market is just waiting for a working OpenCL stack on AMD hardware to ditch Nvidia completely.

OpenCL is the only reason to buy an Nvidia (with a proprietary driver) today.

I can see why Nvidia can benefit from having Mesa supporting OpenCL on Nvidia hardware before AMD hardware.

[qarium]

Actually, I'm serious with my assumption about nVidia following AMD's route in open-sourcing their kernel driver part & trying to mainline it upstream (until then shipping it in DKMS-form, like they do now), mainly for the following reason:
NVIDIA's Graphics Driver Will Run Into Problems With Linux 5.3 On IBM POWER

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.3-NVIDIA-POWER-Problem

So, this is probably going to be their big open-source anouncement after all...
Again, the main driver forcing nVidia to take this route is not because of our miserable desktop marketshare, but the big money of enterprise & AMD's recent supercomputer wins with their inferior but open-source compute stack.
Also, this would solve their GPL woes once and for all!
And the (limited) MESA support?
Well, Linux & Linus would simply reject the kernel driver part without an (at least somewhat) usable open-source counterpart...
Anyone got any better theory?

yes and a lot of more points... for example in the past you had no choice if you want high-end gpu for gaming but to buy nvidia.. but right now if you use linux there is no big difference in performance between a 3090 and a 6900XT... most linux users right now would buy the 6900XT because of the opensource drivers. even more if they want to use the lastest upsteam kernels. also wayland support really make many people make people think to better buy the 6900XT...
also in compute soon we will have Vulkan compute everywhere and OpenCL and CUDA will be death.
some people even work on many OpenCL kernels to make them run with vulkan instead of openCL.
Because of this apple already mark the OpenCL support as legacy means they drop it.

now nvidia has no other choice if they do not want to lose customers to AMD to improve wayland support and also improve upstream kernel support. and the only way to perform this is what you said: "nVidia following AMD's route in open-sourcing their kernel driver part"

i wrote about nvidas opensource plans for many years but in the past the had no pressure to do so because they had the faster hardware and their driver worked. but this changed now.

as you correctly said AMD won some big customers by this and nvidia lost big: "Again, the main driver forcing nVidia to take this route is not because of our miserable desktop marketshare, but the big money of enterprise & AMD's recent supercomputer wins with their inferior but open-source compute stack."

intel has the same problem in the past intel had all the big data center /super computer sales and now everyone buy amd because a 5950X is much better than a intel 11900K ...

right now it is really the best to buy amd CPU and AMD GPU this way the closed source and walled garden competition lose big.

[qarium]

Michael
…especially since AMD support is very good on anything but OpenCL but people are waiting for OpenCL in Mesa, not waiting for OpenCL in ROCm.
AMD just removed GCN2 and GCN3 support in ROCm.

• proof GCN2 support is dropped from ROCm: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute...ment-755272927 (in fact it was broken since years)
• proof GCN3 support is dropped from ROCm: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute...ment-753772733

Linux market is just waiting for a working OpenCL stack on AMD hardware to ditch Nvidia completely.
OpenCL is the only reason to buy an Nvidia (with a proprietary driver) today.
I can see why Nvidia can benefit from having Mesa supporting OpenCL on Nvidia hardware before AMD hardware.

nothing of this OpenCL bullshit will happen... because soon we will have Vulkan Compute everywhere.

[piotrj3]

nothing of this OpenCL bullshit will happen... because soon we will have Vulkan Compute everywhere.

First Vulkan compute does not replace OpenCL, true for most stuff you can use Vulkan Compute as replacement and it will be better....

But you need first to make all libraries/tools/support for Vulkan. That is biggest reason why CUDA also wins vs OpenCL, but Vulkan has almost nothing there.
Vulkan is actually harder mostly.
Adaptation of industry is slow (people will abuse whatever is existing to speed up development process).