NVIDIA + Nouveau: "Hopefully More Surprises To Come"

[Gusar]

You're wrong. I tested Fedora 23 and it doesn't work with nouveau OOTB

That's because of two things: One, Nvidia's licensing, which is something only Nvidia can change. And two, the distro - you dismissed this being a distro problem, but it's a distro's job to provide packages, so it *is* a distro problem. In this case the licensing might get in the way of seeing a package in the main Fedora repos, but that's what rpmfusion is for usually.

The biggest hacker fallacy I've seen in open source community is that if a problem can be fixed by the user - it's not (really) a problem, a variant of ostrich policy.

No one is pretending that the problem doesn't exist. But you fail to realize where exactly the problem is - in Nvidia's licensing. You also don't want to accept the possible solution to the licensing problem - instead of complaining here, press your distro to provide a package. It's not entirely OOTB, but it's the next best thing and is certainly more user-friendly than requiring that users perform the installations steps manually.

[imirkin]

You're wrong. I tested Fedora 23 and it doesn't work with nouveau OOTB, that's a problem that needs to be fixed

So use a less retarded distro? One that works OOTB? Or mention it to your preferred distro maintainers? This is a packaging/distribution issue.

when it gets fixed people will not complain about this problem anymore.

There are people who complain and people who do. People who complain will always find things to complain about, and people who do will always find things to do. No amount of doing by the doers will cause the complainers to complain less, it'll just shift their complaints.

Sadly this forum seems to attract quite a few complainers... perhaps that's true of all forums, or it's a result of Michael's article writing style. Either way, very unfortunate.

[cjcox]

emerge nvidia-firmware

Seems easy enough.

How about:

emerge good-graphics-from-somebody-not-nvidia-amd

(notice Intel is implied at being "out" because of the word "good")

[dungeon]

Say "nVidia Fuck You" mantra and then run the extract_firmware script

edit: Or maybe instead of "nVidia Fuck You" user can use "Open Sesame" phrase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sesame_%28phrase%29

[SystemCrasher]

TL;DR: it seems article is overoptimistic and nvidia still wears "worst company ever" title.

emerge nvidia-firmware

Seems easy enough.

Do you mean this stuff would download huge blob, extract firmwares, and then...? Well, sorry, but I have very different idea how it should work. Good hardware support? It's like this: you can grab live ISO of some popular distro, boot it, and woo-hoo, it gets first-class deskop experience right after boot. More or less works for Intel, AMD and, actually, most hardware. Nvidia is a really unfortunate exception to my taste. So if nothing changed, I would consider it still deserves middle finger and "worst company ever" title.

NVIDIA does not care about Nouveau any further than Tegra K1+.

Thanks for confirming what I've suspected. So it seems this news article is a wishful thinking of Michael rather than something else

The android tree does not support video decoding, so you won't see the firmwares, as simple as that.

Sounds very odd to my taste. Android is probably what needs hardware decode most. Full blown PCs can decode video in software, after all. But in android one haves weaker CPU and limited battery charge. This makes software decode far more troublesome. I really do not get NV's logic.

Engineers are pretty keen on helping nouveau and do so when they can. Legal is another story. Unless there is a ROI, there won't be any change.

Sounds like just one fuck wasn't enough...

If you care about fedora and ubuntu, just make a fucking package for it. Why should *we* care about *your* distro?

Sure, it's not really up to you. It's up to nvidia fags to release firmware properly and license it in ways one can redistribute it. Just making package ... well, I think downloading blob and parsing it is a fundamentally wrong approach. It does not leads to plug-n-play experience. So its "defective by design" IMO.

TLDR? Nouveau devs found ways to extract firmwares but for legal reasons, can't redistribute them. NVIDIA does not see the value of distributing their video firmwares, so users have to do it on their machine. Nouveau devs made packages for their distros of choice to automate this but they have other stuff to do than care about your laziness.

Well, it's not my laziness. Just some simple wish to see Linux distros with decent UX. Guys, its 2015 and all this clusterfuck with installing setup.exe-like drivers is so MS-DOS-aged...

You see, rest of hardware would just get operational on boot. Even from some live ISO, etc. That's what I call proper hardware support. And you see, nobody in sane mind would offer to use crap like rndis or to extract firmwares for wireless card from blob in 2015. Most vendors just settled it down and allow to redistribute firmwares (if their hardware needs it). Nvidia are the only fags who think such clusterfuck is okay.

[SystemCrasher]

So use a less retarded distro? One that works OOTB? Or mention it to your preferred distro maintainers? This is a packaging/distribution issue.

Now imagine simple use case: I have bare PC, without OS. I want to evaluate how distro would perform with this particular computer before actually installing it, to get idea if it worth at all. So, do you claim I can grab some ISO, boot it and get first class desktop experience on that PC at first boot? That's how I define "less retarded" and "good hardware support".

[imirkin]

Now imagine simple use case: I have bare PC, without OS. I want to evaluate how distro would perform with this particular computer before actually installing it, to get idea if it worth at all. So, do you claim I can grab some ISO, boot it and get first class desktop experience on that PC at first boot? That's how I define "less retarded" and "good hardware support".

Sure, if the packager of that distro cared to spend time to cover all the use-cases that you happen to care about. Difficult to please everyone of course.

[dungeon]

Now imagine simple use case: I have bare PC, without OS. I want to evaluate how distro would perform with this particular computer before actually installing it, to get idea if it worth at all. So, do you claim I can grab some ISO, boot it and get first class desktop experience on that PC at first boot? That's how I define "less retarded" and "good hardware support".

And now imagine old? school people, who wants to install drivers after OS installation... For them it is retarded for OS to install driver (or version of the driver) which they don't want to use, so they will replace it anyway. Also most of the time default driver does not mean good hardware support is always there, many times one need to use more recent (or even older) driver then what distro provide... or whatever, basically you need to do something about it.

I mean i am the one like this i never ever getting idea about what distro is, because some default GPU driver might be borked

Imagine that Ubuntu most people use, you have one default driver there OK. But then you have at least two branches of propertiary drivers and you have mesa ppa afterwards (which is again something that require user intervention) . Ask yourself, why those afterward drivers exist? Those are not invented for nobody. With that, even if distro didn't install any GPU drivers at all by default is still good.

[chithanh]

As some interesting forum fodder for discussion, what do you hope NVIDIA does next for Nouveau?

I am not directly interested in that, but I sometimes see our users struggle with the older Tegra 2/3/4. I feel a bit bad for those users (but not too bad, as they should have known what they were getting into).

There was the OpenTegra driver, but its author got employed by NVidia and on that day all his commit activity on OpenTegra stopped. NVidia's proprietary driver for older Tegras is unmaintained and doesn't support newer X servers.

If a solution could be found, either inside Nouveau (less likely) or separate from it (more likely), that would be a nice gesture from NVidia towards these users.

[chithanh]

Well, it's not my laziness. Just some simple wish to see Linux distros with decent UX. Guys, its 2015 and all this clusterfuck with installing setup.exe-like drivers is so MS-DOS-aged...

But that problem is already solved by at least one distro. In Gentoo there is the nvidia-firmware package which automates that for you. Other distros don't have such a package due to lack of developer interest, or self-inflicted reasons.

And you see, nobody in sane mind would offer to use crap like rndis or to extract firmwares for wireless card from blob in 2015. Most vendors just settled it down and allow to redistribute firmwares (if their hardware needs it). Nvidia are the only fags who think such clusterfuck is okay.

Maybe you are confusing RNDIS with ndiswrapper?
Anyway, looks like the Broadcom Wi-Fi firmware fiasco, where that company's open source brcm driver raised hopes that b43 would now get legal to redistribute firmware for older chipsets. But Broadcom didn't budge.