Nouveau Developers Remain Blocked By NVIDIA From Advancing Open-Source Driver

[shmerl]

This kind of attitude will be Nvidia's demise on Linux (given that Mesa continues to improve for AMD with great pace).

[oooverclocker]

Also they even published stuff with their NVGPU driver, which we asked for, but never got an answer. So "IP" doesn't really seems to be the problem here, does it?

As you can see - it's all about taking and giving nothing in return. I am kind of fascinated that you guys still spend your (spare) time to improve the drivers for a company that show you this clearly how valuable you are for them...

[eydee]

Most distributions aren't even bundling any recent Nouveau components. You can't even boot a Manjaro or Fedora install media with open source drivers on a Pascal GPU, they die with "Nouveau: unknown chipset" error. Nvidia probably isn't in a hurry, as distro maintainers don't seem to be interested in shipping even mode setting support, except for Ubuntu. Maybe when Debian decides to ship it sometime in 2037, Nvidia might think it's time to release firmwares, and let things progress.

[ElderSnake]

Glad I got an AMD GPU during my last upgrade.

[Kendji]

This is really sad, look at the open-source AMD drivers, the potential is there if nVidia stopped being dicks.

[onicsis]

Unfortunately struggling to write a decent OpenGL driver for newer NVidia cards is like fighting against an army of windmills, a complete NON-sens. Why?
They will never succeed. At least legally. NVidia forcing Nouveau devs to cross to a invisible border between what is acceptable and what is not.
And ofcours NVidia deserve many middle fingers. I will never by an NVidia video card again, or a any device containing NVidia video hardware. Until a complete change of attitude toward OpenSource Software.

[spike411]

There are many reasons, but the most important ones are:
1. there won't be two drivers supporting the same devices
2. NVGPU only supports a small subset of what Nouveau supports, it's mainly for Tegra
3. There is no Community behind NVGPU

and I don't see Linus or the drm maintainers even thinking about merging nvgpu even if it would be in a better shape.

I'm (unpleasantly) surprised they started developing a separate driver when they already used nouveau for Tegra/Android. :/

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Pixel-C-Default

[duby229]

I'm (unpleasantly) surprised they started developing a separate driver when they already used nouveau for Tegra/Android. :/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...ixel-C-Default

It's obviously a farce. There is nothing that uses that driver at all. And this article indicated that in past circumstances the nouveau devs requested documentation from nvidia and then some time later the obfuscated code pertaining to the documentation request showed up in that driver. To me it seems plainly obvious that nvidia thought they could get away with obfuscating nouveau through nvgpu. It's the same shit they tried years ago. They did used to have an obfuscated open source driver that got removed long ago. Nvidia knew it didn't work, but they thought they could get away with that same tactic again, just so that they could obfuscate nouveau. My opinion at least.

[carewolf]

Well nouveau could try working on multi-threading and making that work without crashing. There are even a few patches around already that does most of the work, but just needs tuning to have fewer expensive mutexes.

[rene]

until the open amd drivers are the same level in gaming opencl and vulkan the only choice is Nvidia

the only true choose since Matrox stopped producing competitive chips, was ATi/AMD. Boycott Nvidia and avoid it like the plague.