Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

[Rabiator]

Yeah, this is becoming a necessity especially when you see things like these: https://github.com/google/jax/issues...ment-760236170

It's high time that AMD and Intel come up with competitive hardware, ecosystem will move to the more open software stack in a few years. We're getting first AMD GPU boxes this year just to start this move ...

We're getting there, and pretty fast. AMD is overall competitive now. Only in ray tracing they lag behind, and they are catching up it seems. If you are not completely addicted to the ray tracing features, it is an easy enough decision to go with AMD.
Intel is about to release discrete GPUs, we should see them in mobile devices a few weeks from now and on the desktop this summer.

Isn't what Fedora project leader said kind of potentially illegal?

I mean, most reverse engineered drivers are supposed to be *like* clean room implementation. The moment nvidia employee who saw that specification or code starts working on it, it is no longer clean room implementation.

I guess that depends on what Nvidia's management has to say about it. If they allow it, then it would count as official contribution by Nvidia and be legal. If they don't I would agree about the illegal part.

[reba]

Thank you Fedora-guy. Eventhough I don't use your distri I salute you. o7

[qlum]

I sadly find it highly unlickly that nvidia is going to open up their drivers. Techniques like LHR cards simply will not work when open drivers are available.

Denying modifications to the driver side is just too important for them.

Given the choice I will most certainly try to avoid Nvidia for future systems.

[clockwork]

AMD GPUs are much better than Nvidia's concerning performance per Watt - Nvidia just mixed different terms (aka FUD) to 'proof' right to be wrong and wrong to be right.
AMD CPUs are much better than Intel's concerning performance per Watt and parallelization - not to mention the extreme mitigation problem Intel does not want to address.
So concerning Linux AMD systems got standards some time ago. Phoronix readers should get it since several years, right?

Nvidia GPUs and Intel CPUs had due to big wallets of said companies the lead in very special benchmarks which are not relevant for real work / real gaming.
But as technical knowledge is no longer important - the stakes are high.

So current AMD HW is superior (since introduction of Zen2 and RDNA1 in all respects, which I have experienced) - at least if you care for the environment and
thus avoid head spreaders wasting a big deal of Watts.

I'll give you the AMD CPU's beating Intel in performance per watt, but that is absolutely not true for Nvidia vs AMD GPU's. Of course, you're also very much generalizing what "performance" is. There's many kinds of performance. Nvidia is absolutely king in the 3D Graphics Design performance per watt. Nvidia is also light years ahead in Ray tracing performance. The only space AMD comes close to Nvidia is in raw compute. The proof is on this very site if you want to look at actual benchmarks.

[Rabiator]

Some difficulties, I do understand, exist:

• I notice that many games developers are still a bit old fashioned (or inexperienced?) in that they seem to love big names. It is fairly common to see "Proprietary / official drivers" in the requirements. I think UE4 and Unity as underlying engines are also unfortunately involved in this kind of nonsense (for some reason they are unable to understand or test against the open-source drivers like everyone else?).
• Places like CEX (a second hand gaming store in the UK) seem to be saturated by Nvidia cards. This might be biased by the crypto-fans or it is simply that Nvidia is able to churn out their hardware much faster than AMD. So many people end up with one of these and can be disappointed if it didn't work. However Nouveau has solved this to some extent. It *does* work, just enough to learn Linux and keep you going until you buy a replacement. FreeBSD is in a worse position here.

Some of that may be an attempt by the developers to simplify support. A personal anecdote:
Until a few months, War Thunder would not run on my old GPU (Radeon HD 7850, running on open source drivers). It always crashed with an error message that demanded a current proprietary driver, not older than 6 months. Apparently the developers simply put the same error message on all driver problems, rather than trying to be helpful with troubleshooting. I found no detailed requirements on the web site either, except that the graphics are running on Vulkan now.

When I tried again a few weeks ago, it simply worked. I had not made any changes to my hardware, but there were a lot of Mesa updates over the last months. Apparently one of them fixed a feature that War Thunder needed.

[jTCEaWfXwvBd]

Don't buy nVidia hardware. It's that simple.

If only it were that simple. There really are segments where no one but nVidia actually has interesting offerings. I'm talking about passively cooled cards mostly. Or, in the case of my PC, a passively cooled card powered completely thru the PCIe slot (ie: <75 W consumption). At the moment, there's a 1050Ti in there (Palit KalmX 1050Ti, I'd replace it with the KalmX 1650 but, well, discontinued and out of stock everywhere).

Really, you try finding something by AMD that performs as well as, or better than, a 1050Ti and that is also passively cooled. You can't do it. Really, you can't. It simply does not exist.

So, yeah... I'd be happy to let nVidia go. I already let Intel go, there's a Ryzen in this PC. I'd be more than happy to also let that other behemoth of a monopolist (nVidia) go but, well, it's going to take AMD finally getting off its lazy ass and creating a product that performs reasonably well and that does not consume a quadrillion Watts, needing 2 aircos to keep it cool. And, no, Intel's venture into GPUs isn't an option either. Given just how many corners they cut creating CPUs (see the endless list of recent vulnerabilities to which no Intel CPU was found to be immune), I doubt they'd do any better creating GPUs.

[JMB9]

I unfortunately don't think users can be trusted to make the right choice (and avoid Nvidia hardware).

It should really be down to the kernel and distros to make life hard for these kinds of "out of tree" vendors. Linux is more and more becoming into a position of power and is able to do so. For example:

• blobs should be removed from official package repos
• nouveau should be made very difficult to interact with the blob when they are installed (similar to the early days)
• people using the old blobs should be seen as pariahs and newbies should be automatically using the nouveau drivers until they purchase AMD / Intel.
• A harder stance should be taken by compositors(?) to not dick around Nvidia. For example Sway/wl_roots and Gnome did quite well earlier on.

Note: This is not a hate of Nvidia and is not a permanent thing. These steps should only be to encourage Nvidia to grow up and join with the rest of the industry and open up their drivers. There isn't all that much IP in there that needs protecting these days.

OpenBSD has made the right decision against Nvidia, long before anyone else but they are just a little bit too unknown (in the area of gaming) to make serious difference. This really is for Linux to step up and solve this problem.

Some difficulties, I do understand, exist:

• I notice that many games developers are still a bit old fashioned (or inexperienced?) in that they seem to love big names. It is fairly common to see "Proprietary / official drivers" in the requirements. I think UE4 and Unity as underlying engines are also unfortunately involved in this kind of nonsense (for some reason they are unable to understand or test against the open-source drivers like everyone else?).
• Places like CEX (a second hand gaming store in the UK) seem to be saturated by Nvidia cards. This might be biased by the crypto-fans or it is simply that Nvidia is able to churn out their hardware much faster than AMD. So many people end up with one of these and can be disappointed if it didn't work. However Nouveau has solved this to some extent. It *does* work, just enough to learn Linux and keep you going until you buy a replacement. FreeBSD is in a worse position here.

Well, some parts I do like ... I am a GNU fan, but would never use a kernel stripped from its blobs - as I have to work.
WLAN, GPUs, .... are mostly not working - the GNU effort of stripping the kernel shows how deep this goes - incl. Intel and also AMD (from my feeling the latter being concerned to smaller extent).

A second thing is that you may get old HW which may not work without proprietary drivers - in a GNU vision (which I do like) - those devices are just trash.
And as Intel showed with ME/CSME, we sooner or later should consider the full GNU vision of complete open HW and SW - only these
can be secure in a reasonable way, i.e. no espionage, no lost control, no blackmailing of individuals or companies possible.
But there are (criminal) parts of government who want to get data which is thus also available for criminals.
So today the landscape is different.

Here Nvidia is not willing to at least make their current GPUs run on Linux with free drivers - on purpose.
It is not about keeping their advantage or having one solution for all OSs - this is a stupid excuse - only a minimum is neccessary
to just make a free driver work!
Without reclocking, there is no performance - we are not talking about 10% to 30% less, which would be ok for most working and even gaming.
And Nvidia stops creating drivers for current kernels with GPUs too old ... so 'legacy HW' is just trash (I experienced this about 2002 - and
never bought anything having Nvidia GPUs - no desktop, no laptop - and with excellent free drivers one must be stupid to use Nvidia GPUs
when using GNU/Linux and taint the experience with proprietary drivers).

So Linus was right (as usually) ...
But it is new that Red Hat environment makes this statement as Red Hat is backer of Nvidia for professional workstations
(at least it was the case around 2006 - and I have not seen any announcement to stop that).
So Red Hat is not the solution but (at least in the beginning) part of the problem. But this may have changed.
From my perspective Red Hat did a lot which is technically inferior (flatpak {same problem as snap on Ubuntu} are both stupid ideas
to be used for parts of GNU/Linux [i.e. Linux distros]), while maybe acceptable for proprietary programs or on smartphones (with no
real security at all - so nothing to lose ).
But this is not as it turns out ... a standard browser to be packed with own libraries - so no longer fixable by distros updating those libs - just
a nightmare.

So distros aiming to make money do really strange things these days ...
And using binary blobs is not the worst they do ...
Currently most HW vendors do use binary blobs - as this is acceptable in most cases for open source software and only unacceptable
for free software (i.e. GNU as founded by Richard Stallman - not sure about the current organization - with shares of GNOME - where
freedom of users is definitely not on their agenda, of cause - customer retention and DRM is the opposite of free users / customers).

[CochainComplex]

Everyone wanting a smooth Linux experience go for Intel or AMD. NVidia kinda works but you will have to struggle soon or later with an issue related to the driver.

[birdie]

Proprietary NVIDIA drivers work perfectly in major operating systems: Windows and MacOS (that was in the long past; Apple has long stopped using NVIDIA GPUs).

If Linux with all its "inclusiveness" doesn't play well with NVIDIA drivers that doesn't say "NVIDIA is bad" it says Linux is not really inclusive and welcoming: it's either our "open source way" or "F you NVIDIA" and "F everyone who dares not share our philosophy".

Open Source fans however doesn't quite notice the amount of hypocrisy at all. In Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS both proprietary and open source software works perfectly.

In Linux only 1) actively maintained 2) included in the main repos if your peculiar distro 3) open source software works.

Good luck using something which is not all of these three.

Keep on fuming over but do sometimes look in the mirror.

Also please do reflect on your market share on your demands. Maybe have some modesty or tomorrow HaikuOS, NetBSD and other peculiar OSes will demand open source drivers from NVIDIA as well.

Oh, and do remember that AMD and Intel actually spend a ton of money developing the two versions of their drivers (open source contributions are minimal). NVIDIA avoids that.

[DanL]

Expecting Nvidia to contribute to nouveau is a pipe dream unless there's a major personnel/policy shift inside the company. They do need to release the firmware though. They said they would neither help nor hinder open source development. Not releasing the firmware is definitely hindering it.