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

[oooverclocker]

Agree that there does seem to be some potential for lowering voltages while maintaining reliable operation

Ok I have to intervene in this point. The reliable operation is worth so much more than some watts that it's not a point we should argue about. The goal must be a reliable operation with all drivers a broadly adoption of techniques like FP16 etc. and that's a point that every AMD employee helps. So the distribution of the products' features is something everyone is asked to improve.
There is no reason to hide - everything in the last two years went nearly perfect for AMD - even this article shows that AMD has done completely right. But perfect means in this case denying a total disaster... However the current situation looks very promising and is mostly dependent on the promotion of advantages over Nvidias' Pascal architecture. And this is something to keep going beside the improvements of the reliability of drivers etc.
As you see Nvidia is giving you many opportunities to show that you are better. Just use them happily instead of complaining about things

[Guest]

it is fun

So I have a question. Hypothetically speaking, if NVIDIA (or another GPU manufacturer) offered you employment for a very generous salary as recognition for your proven skills in nouveau development, would you accept their offer or is it simply the RE process that motivates you?

[pcxmac]

if you are willing to build the amd staging kernel you can run the vega stuff on the amdgpu ko. don't buy nvidia products they are slowing down real open source development/adoption with things like wayland. Eagerly waiting for the DC code to get ported to the official kernel source.

[karolherbst]

So I have a question. Hypothetically speaking, if NVIDIA (or another GPU manufacturer) offered you employment for a very generous salary as recognition for your proven skills in nouveau development, would you accept their offer or is it simply the RE process that motivates you?

Well it depends actually on the job. If it would be Nvidia and they disallow me to work on Nouveau (which would be quite likely), then I would say no. I see OpenSource as the only way critical drivers should be written, especially from a security and privacy point of view. And there is no way I would give up this thinking.

[lejeczek]

I feel sorry for the Nouveau developers working so hard to support the hardware from the shittiest company on earth.
I hope that, when they give up on supporting the assholes, they will start directing their efforts into improving AMD open source drivers.
I, at least, I'm choosing with my wallet and I will not buy any Nvidia desktop or mobile GPU and no game "meant to be played" on Nvidia.

I wonder similar but... I do not feel sorry for them, you should not neither.

They must be very smart folks, intelligent and in possession of great technical knowledge, the developers. For whatever reasons we do not understand, the decisions Nouveau developers make are informed and calculated and what they want to work on and for what goal is also thought through.
Developers themselves must know that there probably is not even a handful of people gracious for what they do, everybody else use Nvidia's proprietary soft stack and do not care, so.. you see.. only thing we OSS supporters should feel sorry about is that waste of both, precious talent and precious time.

greetings.

[karolherbst]

For whatever reasons we do not understand the decisions they make are informed and calculated and what they want to work on and for what goal is also thought through.

uhm... for me it is because it is fun.

[microcode]

I think I agree: AMDGPU offers good performance for gaming, but it lacks of other features (OpenCL or DC/DAL).
The NVIDIA driver is non-free, but all features are working.

If you want really quite good OpenCL performance alongside the AMDGPU graphics drivers, you can install the amdgpu-pro OpenCL runtime separately. (there's an AUR PKGBUILD for this too)

[aht0]

This thread makes funny reading.. All the indignant outcries, wide-eyed radicality.. like watching teenage kids bashing the 'hated authorities'..

Give it a decade or two and you might suddenly notice being the target yourself.. undeservedly in your own eyes.

I'd be curious to see how many of you would really care about open-source from the second it would threaten IP your economic well-being depends from. Then you would perhaps see the open-source die-hards as a pack of vultures trying to get for free what you worked your ass off to achieve.. All things are relative, like Einstein proved..

[finalzone]

Lack of packages.

Nobody is building the distro-specific packages which would make it easy for people to make use of the not-yet-upstream code. There are some userspace packages but for example I don't think anyone is building packages with latest amdgpu staging code merged into distro kernel tree of the same vintage, same for ROCm kernel trees with the KFD open source you need to run open source OpenCL.

In the case of Fedora, it is possible. Simply inform the kernel team and let them know you would like to run not-yet-upstream code. Set a test day so you can get as many bug reports possible.

Mystro256 has repository with amdgpu staging code, the issue is Fedora often release the latest stable kernel release while in sync with upstream through Rawhide while current amdgpu staging trailed. ROCm superseded KFD which was in Fedora repository but lacked support for both SI and CIK cards. OpenCL is in terrible shape at the moment limited to 1.1 on Mesa and cannot be used on applications from Blender to Darktable. RADV still fail as well. In my knowledge, I am one of only Phoronix memberr to own an AMD A10-7400P with Radeon R7 M265DX (R6 Kaveri + R5 M230 Hainan) laptop.

AMDGPU-Pro often trailed in term of xserver requirement. Someone from Fedora tried to package it but dependencies are too old. Perhaps providing source RPM will help improving the experience.

Users even those lacking knowledge how to code are willing to do the requested tasks like building distro-specifc. The problem is coordination..

[timofonic]

I think I agree: AMDGPU offers good performance for gaming, but it lacks of other features (OpenCL or DC/DAL).
The NVIDIA driver is non-free, but all features are working.

That's not true at all! Nvidia Optimus lacks really proper support compared to Microsoft Windows, the current one is a hobbyist crap and a poor attempt by Nvidia to solve it in certain way. On GPUs supporting Nouveau, things are a lot better but I agree 3D support is inferior.

About Nvidia...

(if you didn't see that video, please watch it. It's A LOT MORE THAN SAYING "FUCK YOU" to "NVIDIA".)

FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!