Phoronix Readers Are Still Mostly Relying Upon Proprietary Linux GPU Drivers

[boxie]

Hey Michael, when you do your poll make sure that you ask 2 questions - "How many systems do you have using open source drivers" and "How many systems do you have using proprietary drivers" - This would allow a better reflection on usage I think.

[SystemCrasher]

Care to elaborate on what you mean by nouveau devs being strange?

Development process of nouveau looks chaotic and strange to me. I'm aware most devs are doing it just for fun, and I can't expect much, etc. So I can't blame anybody personally for it. It's rather description of process as whole - do not take it as personal offence.

If I would take a look on nouveau development process, I'm going to describe it as "random/unorchestrated efforts". Say, nvidia reclocking if fucked up for... "forever"(?), yet it seems at the end of day nouveau devs are better at bolting new GL 4.5 extensions and so on. This leads to strange scenario, where driver contains fairly good code, nice in terms of features and ... virtually unusable from user's standpoint.

This in turn leads to the fact most users are not in mood to use it, nvidia ends up with community who is mostly about consumption and would not even file bug reports. Most nv users would just "ditch this stuff" and install NV blob. Furthermore, some of them are getting very negative views about "opensource crap" and starting to praise blobs. Darn.

This backfires even further. So when I run nouveau, it is really chaotc, random experience. Obviously, reversing leads to bugs, and thanks to driver properties and strange priorities there are very few users to catch bugs. So it is not unusual to face odd bugs like if it was first code run.

This all leaves me wondering: are nouveau devs actually using nouveau for themselves? And if yes, are they ok with VGA era graphics, or what? How it comes to the fact devs are okay to run GPUs on 20% of rated frequency for years and years?

Also how does developer personality affect driver adoption?

Obvious example: I've been offered to change my distro, etc in quite aggressive and conuterproductive way. Uhm, well, good luck with this approach. For me it just means I've got indication development process is fucked up and I'm better not to count on outcome. This easily scored like a TOP10 of weirdest replies from devs I ever seen. So, speaking for myself I would have hard time countnig on such development process.

Hopefully time would prove I've been dumbass who is really wrong about such perception of nouveau development process.

[Awesomeness]

That poll is obviously BS. Intel is the GPU market leader and Intel only does open drivers. No way all Intel users + FOSS Radeon and Nouveau users combined make up less than 50%.

[eggbert]

Nouveau makes the fan on my card run constantly at full speed. I have no choice but to use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Well, I suppose I -could- run nouveau if I was deaf and didn't mind replacing my graphics card every couple of months due to a burned out fan motor.

[profoundWHALE]

@buzzrobot

Do you use installers or use distribution provided packages. Those are relatively simple to uninstall!

Btw. if somebody needs binary Nvidia 340, 352 or AMD Catalyst 15.9 drivers - even live - try Kanotix 64 Spitfire KDE Special with active gfxdetect.

http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/pxe/iso/

Thanks! You know, I could never find up to date links for the ISOs on your website.

[Nille_kungen]

That poll is obviously BS. Intel is the GPU market leader and Intel only does open drivers.

I think many Intel users also use another GPU like nvidia and there they use the blob and since thats the GPU they use the most they forget that they also use open source drivers.
In an laptop with Intel+nvidia i don't think many knows that even the blob needs the open source Intel to show things on the screen on most setups.
My point is that some answer only blob when it should be open source+blob.

[Luke]

Two reasons I use open drivers and AMD graphics: I do not want to see the hard work of open source developers go down the toilet, and keeping out a 50+MB blob is one less place for corporate America to drop a back door.

It's a hell of a lot easier to drop say, a networked keylogger into a 50MB closed blob than to hide the same code in underhanded C, or to squeeze the same functionality into a tiny firmware blob and make sure it works on the firmware for every possible card. Not saying this has been done, only that it COULD be done and we have the example of Lenovo and "Superphish" to remember. How do we know Nvidia is not another Lenovo, short of having people watch hundreds of systems with Wireshark while hitting every possible card with every possible load? The random risk of being found by a Wireshark user would probably deter Nvidia from playing with "telemetry" and telling nobody, but you have to allow for things like a cokehead on the team who needs a little extra cash from the NSA, MSS, FSB et all as well.

[spiteful]

For me, I don't even have a choice... I have a Radeon 7870 XT, which is based on the Tahiti chip. The open source drivers do not work with any Radeon 7870 XT card. The brand does not seem to matter at all. The report was Bug 92518: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92518

Is anyone getting a similar kind of problem with the RadeonSI drivers? It looked like Michael had resource stallings when he was testing one of his cards a while back as well.

[SXX⁣]

This backfires even further. So when I run nouveau, it is really chaotc, random experience. Obviously, reversing leads to bugs, and thanks to driver properties and strange priorities there are very few users to catch bugs. So it is not unusual to face odd bugs like if it was first code run.

People that care enough to report bugs properly don't care about developer priorities. And mass users usually don't have enough knowledge or time for proper bug reporting and testing anyway. They'll likely post bug report and will never go back to it while bug investigation take hours.

I personally have programming experience and plenty of time, but when I attempted to investigate few issues related to R600/Nouveau just for fun I spend several hours with freezes/reboots and then give up. So none of people that may think "blob is cool, nouveau suck" going to report anything useful.

How it comes to the fact devs are okay to run GPUs on 20% of rated frequency for years and years?

You missing the point that reclocking and OpenGL implementation is two completely different expertise areas. This mean that if it's possible to implement OpenGL extension each months this doesn't mean that if developer would work on kernel driver he'll succeed.

Also even if developers were able to work on everything things like reclocking are super complicated. If you haven't seen last AMDGPU code drop it's more than 45,000 lines of kernel driver code for power management for very latest GPU generations only. Now think what would it take to create same amount of code with nearly zero documentation available.

[Jonathan Silverblood]

I'll fix that for you:

I'll fix that for you: "Friends, family, coworkers and strangers who may or may not be Phoronix Readers using Twitter Are Still Mostly Relying Upon Proprietary Linux GPU Drivers".

I'm using the open drivers, and have switched back and forth alot in the last 5 years or so, but finally settled for the open ati driver since it "just works" nowadays.