NVIDIA Wants To Be A Better Linux Patron

[droidhacker]

Linux users are pretty satisfied with what the proprietary drivers offer.

No.
A WONDOZE user who happens to be sitting in front of a Linux computer is satisfied with the useless blob.
A LINUX user is totally unsatisfied with dealing with bullshit 3rd party closed drivers that could very easily be SPYING on them. I dare you to PROVE that they aren't.

A Linux user is mostly unsatisfied that Optimus is not supported on Linux.

I couldn't care any less about "optimus".

Developers are mostly unsatisfied that they have to reverse engineer the proprietary drivers in order to get something working in the open source drivers and that nVidia developers don't help to improve the open source drivers like the AMD developers do for AMD open source drivers.

I doubt that. Those developers doing that are PAID to do that. No, sorry, the developers LOVE it.
Those developers who are NOT INVOLVED in nvidia bullshit dispise nvidia because nvidia shit doesn't work.

[patrik]

Thanks for clarifying this. I wasn't that sure as my post might imply.

I'm not sure what a 'shim driver' is, though. If someone creates a new closed-source DDX for radeon that
interacts with the existing libdrm kernel implementation - would that be a 'shim driver'?
If so, how would the kernel devs be able to reject them? It's userspace like the mesa bits.
And they surely had to stick to the kernel drm part if there is at least one OSS userspace driver that needs it, right?

Basically it comes down to not allowing kernel code that nobody (in the open) can say what it does. If you can't test kernel features openly, then it's not possible to say if it's stable or secure. So for technical reasons it is not allowed to have kernel code that is _only_ used by a closed userspace driver, even though it is bundled with code that is open.

If an open and a closed userspace driver both uses all the available kernel functionality, things should be fine. But if the closed userspace parts need some extra stuff, this would probably be rejected. It's certainly a gray area and it needs to be decided by those with the most technical insight. Nvidia might need to give Nouveau a few bits and pieces in order for the things their driver requires to be included in the kernel. But as Matthew says, most of the Nvidia "secrets" aren't in the kernel parts of the driver (assuming the blob is similarly kernel/userspace divided as the available open drivers). Only Nvidia can tell if this is true.

[AlbertP]

Basically it comes down to not allowing kernel code that nobody (in the open) can say what it does. If you can't test kernel features openly, then it's not possible to say if it's stable or secure. So for technical reasons it is not allowed to have kernel code that is _only_ used by a closed userspace driver, even though it is bundled with code that is open.

I'm sure Matthew Garrett (http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pi...ne/000336.html) knows what he's talking about and tries to find a workaround to use open kernel with closed userspace. Let's hope NVIDIA management takes his suggestions seriously.

[M1AU]

That's actually what Matthew Garrett suggested in his reply:



http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pi...ne/000336.html

This sure sounds like a good trade-off!

[madjr]

Sorry about that, but you were also offending and immature by calling us "zealots". There's nothing about zealotry with this, and I still disagree with your "there's going to have to be compromises" comment. We don't need compromises, we want things to work well for everyone.

I wasn't offended by him calling the zealots, what they are.

You can only get offended if you consider yourself that.

I believe this quote sums it up:

“I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended.” - Linus Torvalds

http://linuxologist.com/01general/linus-torvalds-to-nvidia-fck-you/

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Microsoft has no future in China, Russia and India

Just to let you know: MS working really hard to not lose at least Russia market (I doesn't have information about their activity in China and India). For example they push their solutions to Skolkovo and Sochi Olympics data centers. This data centers is not ready yet, bet when it will be ready - it will be Microsoft-based. Sad news, I know.

[XorEaxEax]

I wasn't offended by him calling the zealots, what they are.

You can only get offended if you consider yourself that.

I believe this quote sums it up:

“I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended.” - Linus Torvalds

http://linuxologist.com/01general/li...vidia-fck-you/

It's ironic that you quote Linus as the original 'FOSS Zealots...' statement made by the troll FuturePilot is in effect directed at the Linux kernel developers as it's THEY who do NOT compromise with proprietary drivers. They don't want proprietary drivers, they refuse to let proprietary drivers link directly to the kernel, they want OPEN SOURCE drivers which they can verify/debug/update.

And the whole 'you need to compromise if you want to get anywhere' bullshit just flies as by using this policy Linux has amassed huge hardware support right out-of-the-box, which in turn is a LARGE reason for Linux success as it can run on just about anything while carrying with it it's huge hardware device compability meaning you don't have to pray that the hardware vendor sees it fit to produce a proprietary driver for whatever architecture you want to run.

It's also telling that those here who complain about the Linux developers aversion towards proprietary drivers generally are people who has no interest in Linux whatsoever, it's almost as if they had an agenda...

[johnc]

It's ironic that you quote Linus as the original 'FOSS Zealots...' statement made by the troll FuturePilot is in effect directed at the Linux kernel developers as it's THEY who do NOT compromise with proprietary drivers. They don't want proprietary drivers, they refuse to let proprietary drivers link directly to the kernel, they want OPEN SOURCE drivers which they can verify/debug/update.

And the whole 'you need to compromise if you want to get anywhere' bullshit just flies as by using this policy Linux has amassed huge hardware support right out-of-the-box, which in turn is a LARGE reason for Linux success as it can run on just about anything while carrying with it it's huge hardware device compability meaning you don't have to pray that the hardware vendor sees it fit to produce a proprietary driver for whatever architecture you want to run.

It's also telling that those here who complain about the Linux developers aversion towards proprietary drivers generally are people who has no interest in Linux whatsoever, it's almost as if they had an agenda...

There is no Linux success outside of supercomputers, marginal server success and super-proprietary Android devices.

Linus might not want proprietary drivers, but he was sure quick to brag about those 900,000 daily Android activations.

[jvillain]

You FOSS zealots are going to have to realize that there's going to have to be compromises if you want Linux to go anywhere

Say what? Linux is probably the most successful OS on the planet already. It runs on almost every architecture there is. First there is the massive server farm deployments. Then the fact that half of all smart phones run a Linux kernel, the other half not being Windows. Then almost every TV being sold has a Linux OS in it. How many set top boxes have Linux in them? Point of sales systems? My Yamaha receiver has a Linux OS. Appliances. We can go on and on and on. It is every where except the desktop. The fact that so few people realize that they use it multiple times a day is a tribute to it's success. The fact that it is having such a hard time getting traction on the desktop can be attributed to the lousy graphics support from the companies like NVidia as we have seen in pole after pole.

[artivision]

Is an idiotic thing to have open/free or any other ASIC drivers. Do you want to translate to you what Unix means? Well, just develop a Multilevel LLVM Software Rasterizer with OGL3 support under GPL and LLVM back-ends for Radeon, Geforce, CPU, and others. That way all of you will work for the same think, and you will have 80%+ the frame-rate of the closed drivers, and thats because LLVM is a program that writes programs and can replace human code and intelligence to the minimum. OGL has the ability to run on different processors, so if you have an IntelHD4000 back-end and an AVX back-end, you will have double the frame-rate. This way PS3, XBOX360, ARM-graphics and others work (automatically.yyyyyyyy).