Open-Source Nouveau Linux 4.10 + NvBoost vs. NVIDIA Proprietary Linux Driver Performance

[DMJC]

Imirkin: What are the holdups on the 7** series hitting the same performance as the binaries? Do we actually have information on that now? Aside from re-clocking, are there other areas of the codebase which need improvement and what level of difficulty is this to work on? What sort of things can be done to improve the performance on the cards which do have working reclocking? I've got a 770GTX here and a pair of 460GTXs. I'd be happy to provide remote access to a machine if a developer wants it for working on performance.

[totoz]

NVIDIA driver has probably a lot of per-process specific code paths and profiles in order to get better performances than the "generic OpenGL" code path.

[DMJC]

A longtime friend of mine who's an open source contributor has actually worked with the closed driver's source code. I could ask him if he has any insights into that. He doesn't contribute to Nouveau because he was an intern at NVIDIA and is subject to NDAs on the code itself.

[MoonMoon]

In the meantime, hackers are breaking into social media, doing troll posts, instead of stealing nvidia driver code and making it public.

And that is a good thing. Leaked code from Nvidia drivers would open up nouveau for all kinds of lawsuits if they have code that even very losely looks like anything in the leaked code. A developer that has looked at that leaked code will never again be able to work for nouveau.

[karolherbst]

In the meantime, hackers are breaking into social media, doing troll posts, instead of stealing nvidia driver code and making it public.

stealing code is very stupid idea, because nobody would be able to use it, and if you would read it you aren't allowed to work on nouveau anymore due to legal issues. Read up on wine what consequences it has just to have worked for microsoft at one point.

[karolherbst]

Imirkin: What are the holdups on the 7** series hitting the same performance as the binaries? Do we actually have information on that now? Aside from re-clocking, are there other areas of the codebase which need improvement and what level of difficulty is this to work on? What sort of things can be done to improve the performance on the cards which do have working reclocking? I've got a 770GTX here and a pair of 460GTXs. I'd be happy to provide remote access to a machine if a developer wants it for working on performance.

random stuff. Shader compiler needs to be improved, pipeline stuff, other random opengl related things. It's not so easy to know what we have to do to get perfect performance out of the card. The current goal is something to get around 80% performance compared to nvidia across all applications and then do the last fine tunings later.

[GreenByte]

stealing code is very stupid idea, because nobody would be able to use it, and if you would read it you aren't allowed to work on nouveau anymore due to legal issues. Read up on wine what consequences it has just to have worked for microsoft at one point.

But couldn't one write some unofficial documentation and the other implement based on that documentation? I am not a legal expert but that seems to be fair enough, since one who implemented the code did not see the source code.

[Nille]

In the meantime, hackers are breaking into social media, doing troll posts, instead of stealing nvidia driver code and making it public.

That killed almost reactOS. After the Win2k leak there was rumors that reactos use that code. Because of this imputation a massive Code Review has started and the Project lost most of his contributors.

[karolherbst]

But couldn't one write some unofficial documentation and the other implement based on that documentation? I am not a legal expert but that seems to be fair enough, since one who implemented the code did not see the source code.

maybe, maybe not. I would say it isn't okay, because you make use of company secrets. I don't want to risk it finding it out.

[Hi-Angel]

stealing code is very stupid idea, because nobody would be able to use it, and if you would read it you aren't allowed to work on nouveau anymore due to legal issues. Read up on wine what consequences it has just to have worked for microsoft at one point.

Could you link an article? Keywords "wine microsoft problems" didn't come up with anything relevant.