Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

[danilw]

However, I don't think anyone will do it anymore. Probably because of the license.
So all you have to do is buy a new card.
or
Use a repository where old Nvidia driver binaries are modified to use with the latest kernel.

Maxwell - generation Nvidia GPUs still supported by their latest driver, while Maxwell is 10 years old generation.
Pre-Maxwell - integrated GPU in cheapest Ryzen CPU - is faster than those 10+yo GPUs - there no point to support old PC hardware, literally.

Maxwell to RTX - there no much difference in RTX, maybe RTX and Maxwell will get support for next 10+ years because it similar architecture.

[bug77]

That seems like a claim that needs proof. They have a wide and varied history that is well documented. Claiming that nVidia wants a good open source driver for their enterprise customers sounds asinine to me... Every move they've ever made contradicts that intention.

EDIT: nVidia -did- have an in house open source driver and by every single metric it was bad. It was the entire reason why nouveau was forked from it in the first place. Nvidia has spent every possible opportunity to sabotage it since then. Lately nVidia has been failing to do so...

EDIT: The actual truth is, and facts back this up, if nVidia had their way there wouldn't be any open source nvidia driver at all. Hence why they hired Ben Skeggs...

EDIT: If nVidia actually wanted good open source drivers for compute, then they would document their architecture and release the souce for hardware compilers.... But that'll never happen... Not ever...

Nice history lesson there.
The history I know says Nvidia provided pretty much the first useful GPU driver for Linux, back when Mesa was still on the drawing board. Yes, it was closed source and once they went that route it was hard to go back on that decision.
I suspect Nvidia doesn't really care about the driver's license (they don't sell drivers).

[mrg666]

Nvidia already dominates GPU computing and majority of those servers already run on Linux. And Nvidia GSPs are already functional in Linux. But Nouveau development is a certainly a growing threat for Nvidia in their pursuit to dictate direction for open source. But there is actually ZLUDA project Nvidia should be more concerned about.

Whatever the reason, good luck to Skeggs.

Open source will be fine. I use Nouveau driver with a GTX 1650 for only 2D. For everything 3D, AMD is working great. Also, planning to use ZLUDA.

[patrick1946]

Nice history lesson there.
The history I know says Nvidia provided pretty much the first useful GPU driver for Linux, back when Mesa was still on the drawing board. Yes, it was closed source and once they went that route it was hard to go back on that decision.
I suspect Nvidia doesn't really care about the driver's license (they don't sell drivers).

Mesa is much older. First release was in 1995. I used it on some Unix workstation but to this time it was software only. So I think it is even older than the NVidia OpenGL driver.

[Quackdoc]

Very exciting stuff. I still hope that one day proprietary and NVK will be able to play hapily with the same kernel driver to avoid needing to unload and load the other driver. Hopefully this is a step in that direction

[duby229]

Nice history lesson there.
The history I know says Nvidia provided pretty much the first useful GPU driver for Linux, back when Mesa was still on the drawing board. Yes, it was closed source and once they went that route it was hard to go back on that decision.
I suspect Nvidia doesn't really care about the driver's license (they don't sell drivers).

It's plainly obvious nVidia cares DEEPLY about the license their customers use...

[rabcor]

I'm a bit hopeful that nvidia might be planning to make an official open source driver, or support nouveau development officially.

But I also strongly doubt it given their history...

However, if we consider the article.

After months of being absent in Nouveau driver development happenings, last night he posted a set of 156 patches. This massive patch series is a follow-up to the Nouveau GSP firmware enablement work and cleans up the code. The focus on the series is replacing the ioctl-like interface between the NVKM and the Nouveau DRM driver to now leverage more direct calls for reducing the driver overhead and call chain complexity. In the process there's also a fair amount of code cleaning. The 156 patches affect around ten thousand lines of code.

If he's been working for Nvidia this whole time (likely, this is a classic case of poaching), I doubt he'd have had time for all this while working a full time job for Nvidia, unless he was allowed to do this at said job. I mean he'd have had to spend almost all his free time on this.

And the reason he resigned as a nouveau maintainer was because he left red hat. Although he did make it sound like this was probably gonna be largely the end of his story with nouveau... This kind of massive patchset is not what I'd call "poking his nose in every so often".

So it's making me somewhat hopeful that nvidia is seeing the merit of this stuff now that amdgpu has been around for a while (not to mention mesa).

Their main given reason for keeping the driver closed is because they wanted feature parity with the windows driver (which was always bullshit because it's never had that, it was like they originally made that decision to actively prevent the linux driver from being better than the windows one, there were even actual cases where that happened, and they updated it to make it slower again). A lot of time has passed though, enough time maybe to change their focus and direction here. These drivers aren't just about gaming anymore, and it would do great things for the size of their customerbase to have good open source drivers (at least the customerbase they seem to care most about thesse days, the HPC/AI customer base)

[EphemeralEft]

This is Nvidia adopting EEE, specifically the Extinguish part being amplified significantly.

Now being an insider and over time will gain inside knowledge, he can never contribute to Nouveau again without certain legal troubles which Nvidia is assuredly to use to enforce compliance. It's setting the stage for lawfare - use of the law in what is an otherwise perfectly legal way but to stifle innovation.

Let them hire a few more Nouveau devs, this is check mate.

Personally, I wish him the best of luck, I hope it is worth it for him in the long run.

Am I the only one who doesn't think he resigned with the intention of working for Nvidia? Being employed by a for-profit company to work on open-source isn't a bad thing, and there would have been no reason to keep that a secret.

I don't know what Ben's situation was, but there are plenty of reasons why someone would stop contributing. If he was previously doing it as a hobby, then stepping away for financial reasons and returning when it started paying the bills would be a reasonable explanation. If that's the case, then I think this is still a net positive; the alternative would have been that he doesn't contribute in any capacity.

[duby229]

I'm a bit hopeful that nvidia might be planning to make an official open source driver, or support nouveau development officially.

But I also strongly doubt it given their history...

However, if we consider the article.



If he's been working for Nvidia this whole time (likely, this is a classic case of poaching), I doubt he'd have had time for all this while working a full time job for Nvidia, unless he was allowed to do this at said job. I mean he'd have had to spend almost all his free time on this.

And the reason he resigned as a nouveau maintainer was because he left red hat. Although he did make it sound like this was probably gonna be largely the end of his story with nouveau... This kind of massive patchset is not what I'd call "poking his nose in every so often".

So it's making me somewhat hopeful that nvidia is seeing the merit of this stuff now that amdgpu has been around for a while (not to mention mesa).

Their main given reason for keeping the driver closed is because they wanted feature parity with the windows driver (which was always bullshit because it's never had that, it was like they originally made that decision to actively prevent the linux driver from being better than the windows one, there were even actual cases where that happened, and they updated it to make it slower again). A lot of time has passed though, enough time maybe to change their focus and direction here. These drivers aren't just about gaming anymore, and it would do great things for the size of their customerbase to have good open source drivers (at least the customerbase they seem to care most about thesse days, the HPC/AI customer base)

Given what Cuda is and how nVidia licenses its EULA, I personally believe nVidia has ZERO intention of allowing their customers to pursue compute on an open source driver. I agree that they seem to care most about HPC and AI, but I'm 100% sure Cuda will never be officially supported on an open source driver.

[a5ehren]

Nvidia already dominates GPU computing and majority of those servers already run on Linux. And Nvidia GSPs are already functional in Linux. But Nouveau development is a certainly a growing threat for Nvidia in their pursuit to dictate direction for open source. But there is actually ZLUDA project Nvidia should be more concerned about.

Whatever the reason, good luck to Skeggs.

Open source will be fine. I use Nouveau driver with a GTX 1650 for only 2D. For everything 3D, AMD is working great. Also, planning to use ZLUDA.

ZLUDA is so awesome that Intel and AMD gave up on funding it. Real threat, there.