Linux 5.9 Brings Safeguard Following NVIDIA's Recent "GPL Condom" Incident

[Danny3]

I could never understood why so many users and kernel developers were so prone to bend over for Nvidia and the only one that clearly stood his ground was Linus.
I'm glad to hear that more developers are joining the fight with this bullshit company that want total control and actively fights against open source.
In a world where privacy and security matter, but also planned-obsolence should not even exist because it ruins the environment with so much unnecessary garbage, Nvidia should be banned from as many places as possible.
As for Nvidia users, guys if you don't care are about privacy, security and freedom, just use Windows and stop complaining that not all developers bend over to the company of your choice.
The whole Nvidia can't open source their driver is bullshit, have a look at Intel and AMD, which has 2 open source drivers and a closed-source one.

So, from my part, Nvidia and its users had really a lot of time to change.
I myself I ditched Nvidia on the desktop and on the laptop years ago
There's no "My way or the highway" with me when I buy a product.

Congratulations for Linux developers for taking a stand against the freedom abusers!

[Ipkh]

I'm just a little confused.
The patch was put forth by Facebook.
Is there any info about the Nvidia driver doing this or just evil Facebook code.
As far as I can tell, this is about GPL exports from the Net code and has very little to do with Nvidias proprietary driver.
Only Facebook would be dumb enough to do this publicly. That developer must feel really dumb as now that it is out in the open it can be blocked in the future.

[patstew]

I'm just a little confused.
The patch was put forth by Facebook.
Is there any info about the Nvidia driver doing this or just evil Facebook code.
As far as I can tell, this is about GPL exports from the Net code and has very little to do with Nvidias proprietary driver.
Only Facebook would be dumb enough to do this publicly. That developer must feel really dumb as now that it is out in the open it can be blocked in the future.

Exactly, the title of the article is just clickbait to trigger the predictable 'debate' on the forums. This has nothing to do with nvidia.

[xxmitsu]

Meanwhile I've recently got rid of the RX 5600 XT and bought the GTX 1660 Ti instead because AMD open source drivers suck ass (unstable, very high temps in idle, have serious bugs) and don't even support HW accelerated video decoding. So much for AMD being open source "friendly".

I prefer to use a GPU which has high quality drivers vs. a GPU which has open source drivers because open source is not a freaking magical pill which provides quality.

Birdie, I think you might be some peculiar case, that had the bad luck to get a bad GPU or some strange interaction happened with your other components or perhaps overclock ?!.
I'm saying this because I've heard so many success stories with AMD GPU.
I am using 2 Polaris class dGPUs myself + a Ryzen APU laptop. All work flawless. Before switching to AMD GPU I was using NVIDIA. That worked fine also.
So no complain here on either side.
On Nvidia was ok if I sicked with a distro with somehow LTS kernel.
But on AMD, this is no longer an issue and I can use latest bleeding edge packages and everything works. Video decoding works, too.
Perhaps I'm just lucky, I don't know. It might be also because I don't overclock, and I am not a hardcore gamer. So whatever I throw at it, it just works.

[birdie]

Birdie, I think you might be some peculiar case, that had the bad luck to get a bad GPU or some strange interaction happened with your other components or perhaps overclock ?!.
I'm saying this because I've heard so many success stories with AMD GPU.
I am using 2 Polaris class dGPUs myself + a Ryzen APU laptop. All work flawless. Before switching to AMD GPU I was using NVIDIA. That worked fine also.
So no complain here on either side.
On Nvidia was ok if I sicked with a distro with somehow LTS kernel.
But on AMD, this is no longer an issue and I can use latest bleeding edge packages and everything works. Video decoding works, too.
Perhaps I'm just lucky, I don't know. It might be also because I don't overclock, and I am not a hardcore gamer. So whatever I throw at it, it just works.

I had zero overclocking. My bug reports have been confirmed by other people as well.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207441

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207735

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207881

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207637

Of course it's all OMG AMD OPEN SOURCE RULEZ, NVIDIA CLOSED SOURCE SUCKZ until you start working with a product and realize that Open Source means crap in terms of proper support.

LOL

vainfo
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.8 (libva 2.8.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 20.1.5 for AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.37.0, 5.7.12-arch1-1, LLVM 10.0.1)
... loads of crap ...

Which part of the RX 5600 XT have you missed? The RX 5000 series does not support HW accelerated video decoding yet via the open source Mesa stack. End of freaking story. AMD fans cannot even read - they can only posture.

[patstew]

As for Nvidia users, guys if you don't care are about privacy, security and freedom, just use Windows and stop complaining that not all developers bend over to the company of your choice.

Shockingly, there are more benefits to Linux than just being able to edit your graphics card driver. If you think you can run a completely free x86 system, then read up on Intel ME/AMD PSP, then look in /lib/firmware and weep.

The whole Nvidia can't open source their driver is bullshit, have a look at Intel and AMD, which has 2 open source drivers and a closed-source one.
!

While I'd like open source graphics drivers with excellent performance on day 1, you can't have everything. Personally, the how well the drivers work is more important to me than source access. Having multiple drivers where each supports different things is useless. I want to buy a new graphics card when the new ones are out but it's going to be hard to justify AMD given that 5xxx series users still seem to be having problems a year on from release.

[JMB9]

Semantically it's the reverse. They want to f**k the kernel without getting infected by GPL.

No, it's the other way around - it's a fight for Linux to get not contaminated by malicious code (all proprietary code with full access to basic kernel structures can open backdoors, vulnerabilities and also crashes). Or in that metaphor: the infection is malicious binary code and GPL is on substance used for the condom.
[The depicted view in the quote is that of M$ calling GPL a cancer - which it is not as everyone can see ... but the monopolies are.]

It has nothing to do with not getting contaminated by GPL - as Linus and most others won't sue or exclude from future kernel use even when they broke license but just fighting getting the code built by misusing the kernel code to get it mainlined and improved by all - so it is not the normal range of GPL - which is enforcing the users freedom which is not fully done by Linux - but just for getting Linus Torvalds rule in place:
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
So if code is not shown, it is to be expected that it has a lot of bugs - while code inspected by a lot of capable programmers will ripe really fast.
That is one of the quality advantages Linux has inbuilt by the development process - and all parties can participate in getting the code better and using it for what ever use cases they have.

Thus the Linux kernel (and with it all users) are shielded by this new condom code so that no inspected code (i.e. not being part of the process of Linux development) can gain privileges no reasonable being would want it to get (some learnt from the ME/CSME disaster with unpatched old rotten Minix code running on the isolated and protected coprocessor of Intel systems more privileged than the main Linux kernel ). And Nvidia is "the worst company we ever dealt with" after THE prominent developer - and this is still true till today. Only vapoware and announcements to get more open source friendly - just to get: NOTHING.

Would you help people who do you harm? Wouldn't that be idiotic???

So to the point - Nvidia does not want to contribute basic code how to deal with their HW - they could help Nouveau driver development and ensure that structures they need for the proprietary kernel to work - for the special cases they think to have an advantage - which does not seem valid these days.
They are no longer superior - but concerning the driver are clear inferior on Linux.
And Nvidia as a company knows how to work with Linux development - but only on limited fields where they have huge competition - not concerning desktop graphics (where they are about losing it's superiority).
Sometimes, consequences are necessary - this is a clear one.

But the scope of this new code is more general - and the misusing code was for Nvidia HW - but not officially by Nvidia (AFAIK) - but the problem is valid and should be addressed.
It is about participation ... and against clear misuse of Linux.

[birdie]

Birdie, I think you might be some peculiar case, that had the bad luck to get a bad GPU or some strange interaction happened with your other components or perhaps overclock ?!.
I'm saying this because I've heard so many success stories with AMD GPU.
I am using 2 Polaris class dGPUs myself + a Ryzen APU laptop. All work flawless. Before switching to AMD GPU I was using NVIDIA. That worked fine also.
So no complain here on either side.
On Nvidia was ok if I sicked with a distro with somehow LTS kernel.
But on AMD, this is no longer an issue and I can use latest bleeding edge packages and everything works. Video decoding works, too.
Perhaps I'm just lucky, I don't know. It might be also because I don't overclock, and I am not a hardcore gamer. So whatever I throw at it, it just works.

r/AMD is choke full of people who have got rid of their RX 5XXX cards which don't even work properly under Windows (black screens, BSODs, random reboots, very high temperatures, horrible fan curves, crashing games, etc). Sorry, it's not me who got a bad GPU, it's AMD which released a bad GPU series (the entire 5XXX series so far) along with atrocious drivers both for Windows and Linux.

[Stefem]

I found quite revelatory that so many are bashing NVIDIA while it was actually a guy from Facebook...

[birdie]

contaminated by malicious code.

Sanity is not strong with this one. You may want to look up in the dictionary what these words actually mean. Open Source fans are exactly the reason why many people skedaddle from everything related to Open Source.