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

[bridgman]

Mesa or AMD opensource? Mesa is stable and fast - only had issues when running git snapshots - it also supports video acceleration on both encode and decode. The NVIDIA driver isn't high quality - if they did what AMD did, then we could talk. Currently the best driver you can use is RadeonSI on Mesa....

I may be misreading your post, but AMD open source OpenGL and video drivers have *always* been in Mesa. The only exception is Vulkan.

We use the same video drivers even with the hybrid workstation drivers (closed source OpenGL/Vulkan plus open source everything-else).

[HighValueWarrior]

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.

I am loathe to agree ..... but facts are facts. I also switched to a nvidia1660 because of thermals, power management and a host of performance issues.
Would love to support AMD and do so with their cpus but when you need something to just work. Right now its Nvidia.

Do very much support backhand bitch slapping Nvidia though. They do deserve it.

[noQaPLvxLF1c]

If you want 2080Ti levels of performance, then you have to go team green. If you are happy with 2080 levels of performance, there is the 5700XT that matches it (for far less money) on MESA+ACO.
But as you talk ~1050Ti levels of performance here, there are several options which are also extremely silent. (Sapphire) And if you don't want to consider AMD at all - welp, thats a you problem.

I said... PASSIVELY cooled. Read more carefully next time.

nVidia's GPUs are the only ones capable of performing that level of performance while still allowing for completely passive cooling. You will not find 1050Ti or equivalent level performance on AMD GPUs that are completely passively cooled. You simply will not. And by now, that bar has been raised to 1650Ti even. Again, you will not find that.

The passive cooling is a hard requirement for me. There is no backing down from that. Full stop, end of story. So, it's nVidia there or bust. Which, due to this GPL Condom decable, is almost forcing my hand back to Windows. Which I would much rather avoid.

This is the point I was trying to get across -- This whole debacle is funneling hardware choice into a very, very narrow corridor indeed.

[Jabberwocky]

Please don't support Alexmitter. If you do, you actually want freedom dead (I'm not getting into it though as this is not the thread).

NVIDIA is a horrible company with shady practices, but supporting Alexmitter is a very, very bad idea.

I feel like I commented too quickly earlier, could you provide me with extra reading material? I'm not getting good search results.

[aufkrawall]

I'm seriously thinking we are doomed...

If more people argued like you and fail to see what's wrong with the implications of tolerating parasite behavior: Yes, definitely.

[noQaPLvxLF1c]

And yet, here we are... with the possible outcome of nVidia just abandoning Linux altogether, people being forced back to Windows over that. No, we're not going to start spending more money on more hardware that did not even need replacing just because the GPL is offensive to corporate interests. Sorry, some of us truly fell on hard times thanks to COVID-19, not all of us are made of money.

And in doing so, in moving back to Windows... well... speak of parasitic behavior. If people think Google's and Facebook's invasion of privacy is bad, they should take another look at what Microsoft is doing on that front. Largely thru Windows 10.

So, yeah... the constrictive GPL, ironically... is promoting parasitic, privacy invasive behavior by pushing people away from Linux. Or is, at the very least, doing nothing to prevent or push back against such parasitic, privacy invasive behavior.

The world is neither black nor white, it is a collection of various shades of grey. This is one such shade of grey. nVidia isn't entirely in the wrong nor is it entirely free of responsibility. The Linux developers aren't entirely in the wrong either but neither are they entirely free of responsibility. Various people, on various level of authority, contributed to this mess we're seeing unfold.

And unless all those people involved are willing to acknowledge that responsibility and do what is necessary, well, then we truly are doomed. Mozilla cutting a third of their total staff this year alone is basically ensuring a victory and absolute monopoloy for Google on the browser front. nVidia being forced out of Linux is going to guarantee a repeat of the 90s with a complete and undeniable monopoloy of Microsoft on the desktop front. And I hope I do not need to remind what kind of a mess that monopoloy resulted in -- hopelessly poor but entirely unavoidable products.

Good job to all involved. Really, good job. And no, none of this can be denied. Denying responsibility, either for one's own actions or for the actions of another is childish at best and just downright malicious if I'm being honest.

[zexelon]

Gotta be honest... I dont think Nvidia is going to go anywhere or dump Linux. I also dont think they care at all about the religious flame wars between the Greens and the Reds here.

The patch in question in the original article was submitted by a Facebook employee... NOT Nvidia, so nothing to do with Nvidia doing anything different then they already are in the kernel.

To all the Nvidia/AMD/Intel users on Phoronix, I dont think any argument will be won on these forums, we all die on our own hills.

Here are a couple of links of interest though:

Krita hardware survey: https://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/kde...April_2017.pdf
- Nvidia dominates their user base.

Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsur...lcome-to-Steam
- Nvidia obviously dominates everyone else on this. Even if you argue about the "error bars" in the Steam survey data its still to big of a gap to think AMD matters...

Machine Learning Instance: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultei.../#57b44e715edb
- Nvidia generates an astronomical amount of revenue from this market.... and AMD basically as 1% of it... probably the developers of ROCm
- This market is pretty much entirely run on Linux in one way or another and is probably the best recent Linux success story

So to all the AMD fan boys, you can keep your open source (except for the pro version) AMD drivers... The market is spending its money on quality and up to date features.

[oiaohm]

And yet, here we are... with the possible outcome of nVidia just abandoning Linux altogether, people being forced back to Windows over that.

If this is the case the person will make excuse to leave Linux over items like printer support as well.

No, we're not going to start spending more money on more hardware that did not even need replacing just because the GPL is offensive to corporate interests. Sorry, some of us truly fell on hard times thanks to COVID-19, not all of us are made of money.

I have been more realistic that AMD cards are not the best but when it comes to long term Linux support AMD and Intel has been better than Nvidia when running current distributions with old cards.

I build and run systems for 10+ years. Nvidia you will normally run into card support trouble a 5-7 years. AMD and Intel its fairly much until the card/cpu fails that is on average with AMD cards 12 to 14 years. So there could be a cost reason to go AMD over Nvidia.

[birdie]

I build and run systems for 10+ years. Nvidia you will normally run into card support trouble a 5-7 years. AMD and Intel its fairly much until the card/cpu fails that is on average with AMD cards 12 to 14 years. So there could be a cost reason to go AMD over Nvidia.

Honestly I don't see a single reason of keeping a GPU for longer than six years. In six years time any of your GPUs can be replaced with a GPU which consumes a half or a fourth of power and runs graphics applications much faster and better, and supports HW video decoding not available on your old GPU. And if we're talking about servers, there's no need to have anything other than the cheapest passively cooled GPU.

Replacing a GPU on a laptop might be impossible but then I've never seen any reasons to buy a laptop with discrete graphics anyways. Laptops are not meant for any serious gaming and built-in Intel/AMD graphics are sufficient for most desktop tasks and light gaming.

[oiaohm]

Krita hardware survey:

That 2017 survey. Yes back in 2017 I would have been using a Nvidia GPU. But I am using AMD now. There has been a few shift

Steam hardware survey:
- Nvidia obviously dominates everyone else on this. Even if you argue about the "error bars" in the Steam survey data its still to big of a gap to think AMD matters...

The Steam survey is showing slow trend in Nvidia market share reduction. So more people are buying AMD cards than Nvidia at the moment. So steam survey tells you two things. 1 Nvidia is the current dominate for gamers at over 70 percent. But Nvidia is also losing market share so long term support may not be as important as it first appears..

So to all the AMD fan boys, you can keep your open source (except for the pro version) AMD drivers... The market is spending its money on quality and up to date features.

No you Nvidia fanboys need to wake up that things are shifting.

https://www.aldec.com/en/company/blog/167--fpgas-vs-gpus-for-machine-learning-applications-which-one-is-better

Machine Learning is split into 3 different camps. Nvidia dominates the GPU version of Machine learning. Intel is the dominating in the FPGA version of machine learning and the final group is the custom silicon camp.

If intel is able to make a somewhat decent GPU and combine it with their FPGA know how that market could serous-ally go on bell up for Nvidia.