Don't Expect An Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver Anytime Soon

[vw_fan17]

more bullshit propaganda
except when it does not work at all, like in modern linux

Funny, I haven't had "it doesn't work" issues with nvidia for probably 10 years now. Just download the latest tarball, and compile/install it.. I don't mind if you prefer AMD, but don't tell me I'm wrong for preferring nvidia..

[fuzz]

Funny, I haven't had "it doesn't work" issues with nvidia for probably 10 years now. Just download the latest tarball, and compile/install it.. I don't mind if you prefer AMD, but don't tell me I'm wrong for preferring nvidia..

I take it you haven't tried Wayland?

[aht0]

If you would look past "AMD is our saviour, Nvidia is evil", you'd see I said mostly the same thing. AMD is open source friendly, but they still don't have open source Vulkan, thus expecting open source Vulkan for Nvidia is downright unrealistic at this time.

AMD became open source friendly when it's cash flow started showing signs of diminishing and it needed to looking into all the additional niche markets it could get. Until then (ca II half of the 2007), they provided binary graphics driver which was often quite a pain to get working. Had AMD had continuing good financial situation, doubt it would have cared about open-source-friendliness at all. Remember that AMD had bought out ATi Technologies Inc by 2006 and it did not go to "lets open source our drivers"-mode immediately.

[bridgman]

AMD became open source friendly when it's cash flow started showing signs of diminishing and it needed to looking into all the additional niche markets it could get. Until then (ca II half of the 2007), they provided binary graphics driver which was often quite a pain to get working. Had AMD had continuing good financial situation, doubt it would have cared about open-source-friendliness at all. Remember that AMD had bought out ATi Technologies Inc by 2006 and it did not go to "lets open source our drivers"-mode immediately.

Have to disagree with this in a number of places.

ATI supported open source driver development until ~2002 when we acquired FireGL, who had a ready-to-go binary workstation driver running on their current (IBM-based) hardware. That driver was ported to ATI GPUs (starting with R200 IIRC) and became our standard Linux driver. It replaced the open source driver effort partly to avoid having to support two different driver development efforts and partly because DRM (content protection, not direct rendering) was becoming a much bigger thing and so the costs/risks associated with open source driver development went up considerably.

AMD acquired ATI in 2006 and started to get feedback from some of their server CPU customers that they really wanted open source graphics drivers. Internal discussion started in ~April 2007 and planning ramped up in ~May 2007, but open source driver development was a separate effort in addition to the ongoing binary driver development, ie it cost us *more* not less. Nothing to do with financial situation.

Development of the FireGL workstation driver (fglrx) continued at full speed until ~18 months ago, when we started moving developers from the binary-only fglrx codebase to the new amdgpu-based stack.

[aht0]

Ok, thanks for clearing it up. I remember having bunch of a problems with my Radeon 9800Pro and Linux.