Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

[smitty3268]

It's only legal so long as his exposure is carefully documented. Even talking to someone that saw it about it exposes him. It's tenuous and there is plenty of legal gray area.

It's also perfectly legal if Nvidia just gave him permission. They can choose to contribute anything they want. It's not crazy to assume he asked for that as part of his contract when he was hired.

[piotrj3]

I can't believe so many Phoronix "wise guys" have missed this. NVidia could have easily hired him in a separate department that has zero access to any of the source code for the binary drivers and if there are any legal issues its NVidia shooting its own foot then since hes employed there.

Thing is, Nvidia in that area is better than one might think. People forget that a lot of USA companies are really protective for things they do and often will not want you to maintain something or will count attempts of contributing to certain projects as things they own or as competition.

LKRG developer, tried to be hired in few places, and they didn't want to agree with what he wants to do with LKRG moving forward. Nvidia actually agreed.

Few nvidia developers have certain open source projects on side, like Rasberry pi vulkan driver etc. And nvidia doesn't mind.

[duby229]

It's also perfectly legal if Nvidia just gave him permission. They can choose to contribute anything they want. It's not crazy to assume he asked for that as part of his contract when he was hired.

I know that's exactly what AMD does, it's contractual. But this is nVidia, I have a hard time believing they would. I'm more likely to believe his contract prohibits him from even thinking about it, or ever acknowledging the color green exists ever again. Although, let me put my bias to the side for a minute and agree with you that of course you are correct 100%.

[sarmad]

Does this mean nVidia is officially embracing Nouveau?

[piotrj3]

I know that's exactly what AMD does, it's contractual. But this is nVidia, I have a hard time believing they would. I'm more likely to believe his contract prohibits him from even thinking about it, or ever acknowledging the color green exists ever again. Although, let me put my bias to the side for a minute and agree with you that of course you are correct 100%.

Keep in mind some nvidia developer was for example developing vulkan driver for rasberry pi broadcom devices. Working on drivers on competition (keep in mind Nvidia has devices in that area with Jetson series like Jetson nano) could be seen very easly be seen as helping competition. Yet nothing happened.

[NotMine999]

I stopped using the Nouveau driver when Debian posted that it was dropping support for my chip after the 470xx driver.

The currently available nouveau driver for Debian 12 does not support my card (GK 208B chip) AT ALL.

Debian 12 only has the 525.105.17 driver: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphi...s#bookworm-525

That Debian link comes from the Debian Wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

And that Debian Wiki page references the supported devices for this driver release at this link: https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree...rtedchips.html

So if I want to run the latest regualr release version of Debian I have to trash my Nvidia grafix card or lock my system back to an older kernel (5.19 in my case). Otherwise I get nothing but a black screen if I attempt to update the kernel to the current release in Debian 12. So what I did was a quick workaround, but now I have had enough with my Franken-Build.

So somebody tell me again how great this nouveau driver is?

My next PC (hardware is here now), if it needs a graphix card, will use AMD, assuming the integrated GFX on the CPU chip is not adequate.

Nvidia & nouveau are now nothing but "s*** shows" to me that deserve absolutely NO RESPECT ... unless the blame needs to rest on the Debian package maintainer for stripping out the support (an exercise I will leave to the 'more skillful than I' folks that are curious).

F*** Nvidia and F*** nouveau

[cend]

I stopped using the Nouveau driver when Debian posted that it was dropping support for my chip after the 470xx driver.

The currently available nouveau driver for Debian 12 does not support my card (GK 208B chip) AT ALL.

Debian 12 only has the 525.105.17 driver: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphi...s#bookworm-525

That Debian link comes from the Debian Wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

And that Debian Wiki page references the supported devices for this driver release at this link: https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree...rtedchips.html

So if I want to run the latest regualr release version of Debian I have to trash my Nvidia grafix card or lock my system back to an older kernel (5.19 in my case). Otherwise I get nothing but a black screen if I attempt to update the kernel to the current release in Debian 12. So what I did was a quick workaround, but now I have had enough with my Franken-Build.

So somebody tell me again how great this nouveau driver is?

My next PC (hardware is here now), if it needs a graphix card, will use AMD, assuming the integrated GFX on the CPU chip is not adequate.

Nvidia & nouveau are now nothing but "s*** shows" to me that deserve absolutely NO RESPECT ... unless the blame needs to rest on the Debian package maintainer for stripping out the support (an exercise I will leave to the 'more skillful than I' folks that are curious).

F*** Nvidia and F*** nouveau

You linked to the Nvidia proprietary driver info, not nouveau.

[oiaohm]

I stopped using the Nouveau driver when Debian posted that it was dropping support for my chip after the 470xx driver.

The currently available nouveau driver for Debian 12 does not support my card (GK 208B chip) AT ALL.

That odd. GeForce GT 720 has been supported by nouveau for a long time and that what a GK208B is.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/nouveau-kepler-2021/2

Performance has been classed garbage even with kepler manual reclocking but with the manual reclocking it is somewhere usable.

Nouveau is not the Nvidia made driver. Nouveau is in the mainline kernel source. The debian kernel does include nouveau that support GK208B/GT 720 that what you use to use during the debian installer process.

The 2021 figs have using GeFerce GT 720 without doing the manual reclock you are running at 1/6 of the closed source nvidia drivers with re-clock about 1/2..

Yes without the re-clock on your card having it run at less than 14fps kind of does make it appear unsupported. Yes most people would miss they need to manual switch the pstate to get the kepler cards out of power on safe mode into I know how to process stuff.

Having to deal with the manual reclock and the poor power effectiveness to performance would make card replacement temptation.

Yes the installer of debian does not have the Nvidia closed source drivers listed on that Nvidia page of debian installed. The debian install of the process runs on nouveau the open source third party Nvidia driver built into the Linux kernel.

Basically Nouveau and Nvidia is not the same thing.

[mdedetrich]

I know that's exactly what AMD does, it's contractual. But this is nVidia, I have a hard time believing they would. I'm more likely to believe his contract prohibits him from even thinking about it, or ever acknowledging the color green exists ever again. Although, let me put my bias to the side for a minute and agree with you that of course you are correct 100%.

Thats the problem, clearly you have no idea what NVidia is. NVidia does a fair amount of open source work, its just that they pick what they think should be open source and what shouldn't be.

It can also be argued that the main reason NVidia doesn't have an open source driver is that their current driver has so much IP/copyright and is at such massive scale that they would basically have to re-hire and entirely brand new and separate team clean room develop the driver, something that requires massive expense and from their perspective largely redundant given they have a working driver, however Ben Skeggs might be the genesis of that.

People also have a warped sense of history, AMD also used to have a binary blob (i.e. fglrx). The only reason they made their drivers open source wasn't out of good will, it was a clutch at a time when they had to rebuild their drivers and the company was almost bankrupt. Obviously it paid of, but NVidia never had the (non) problem of having completely shit drivers unlike AMD.

[TemplarGR]

This smells very weird. I always felt Nvidia is another (evil) megacorp. No Corp is "good" at all, anyway.

I really hope someday very advanced chip manufacturing would be as easy as cooking an omelette. Then this worldwide oligopoly will end.

I hate Ngridia as much as the next guy, but this view of the world is naive at best.

No corporation is evil, megacorps included. Corporations are legal constructs that oblige management to maximize profit for the shareholders under severe penalties. They are not charities. And it is not the responsibility of a corp to limit their "evil", it is the government's job.... So in reality, politicians and bureaucrats are evil for not monitoring and restricting the evil of corporations, and instead accepting bribes from them... The government should have broken up Nvidia ages ago, but they refuse to do so....