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Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

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  • #41
    Originally posted by user1 View Post

    Regarding opening their firmware for Noveau devs, I agree, they should do it. I remember they stopped doing it for some reason when Maxwell was released in 2014, which is why pre Maxwell cards work better on Noveau.
    They didn't "stop" anything. They started signing their firmware (mainly due to the fact that at the time there was a crypto boom so many miners was selling unsupported hardware with custom firmware that NVidia didn't like). That signing of the firmware basically made reverse engineering of the cards impossible unless you had master keys and this is what occurred after Maxwell.
    Last edited by mdedetrich; 04 April 2022, 10:42 AM.

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    • #42
      Originally posted by gbcox View Post
      At this point it's more than obvious that NVIDIA could care less about LINUX. Kudos to Matt however for calling them out. The only thing that will get their attention is if they believe that their profits are going to be impacted. Distributions should no longer bend over backwards to support NVIDIA equipment (which, with the cooperation of Intel and AMD that is quickly becoming a reality). If you want a good experience, use AMD or Intel. There are many LINUX users and proponents that are in decision making positions or influence decisions. All they need do is to start using that power to avoid NVIDIA like the plague. If companies start demanding servers/desktops/laptops with Intel or AMD graphics the market will be more than happy to oblige. The carrot approach hasn't worked... time to use the stick.
      Exactly!

      With its minuscule market share I'm thankful NVIDIA supports Linux in the first place. If I were them and saw all this infinite hatred and mockery, I'd simply continue the development of server-only drivers (CUDA and ML) and abandoned desktop altogether. I am sure Open Source fans would be happy in this case.

      To be honest I'm looking forward to this. I'm fucking tired of open source fans never ending demands.

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      • #43
        Originally posted by birdie View Post
        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.
        At the very least NVidia should support a viable alternative to the closed source driver. Unfortunately they intentionally kneecapped the nouveau driver...

        This guy didn't just lick the boot of a major corporation, he straight up made a meal out of it

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        • #44
          Originally posted by NobodyXu View Post

          Defending Nvidia, who refuse to work with open source developers?
          NVidia is working with open source developers, i.e. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...7#note_1275874 (James Jones is principle engineer for GPU's at Nvidia

          If you read that thread plus other material online, unfortunately you will release its not so black and white. Many areas of contention with this specific issue (of integration NVidia drivers into Linux OSS graphics stack) is because of how outdated the Linux OSS graphics stack generally is.

          You may dislike Nvidia, but they are very forward thinking when it comes to graphics Even EGLStreams with the problems that it hard, the design of the API outperformed other solutions out there due to their explicit synchronization design in the API where as much of Linux still relies on the simple (but now often outdated/wrong) principle of everything just being read only/write only buffers.
          Last edited by mdedetrich; 04 April 2022, 11:02 AM.

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          • #45
            Originally posted by birdie View Post

            Exactly!

            With its minuscule market share I'm thankful NVIDIA supports Linux in the first place. If I were them and saw all this infinite hatred and mockery, I'd simply continue the development of server-only drivers (CUDA and ML) and abandoned desktop altogether. I am sure Open Source fans would be happy in this case.

            To be honest I'm looking forward to this. I'm fucking tired of open source fans never ending demands.
            Actually, it's more about business than random fandom. Businesses purchase the same hardware in bulk for obvious reasons. Various departments have different software requirements. You have to maintain that hardware and software. You don't want to have to jump through hoops to do it. It's good business to just avoid NVIDIA if they are throwing up support roadblocks.

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            • #46
              Originally posted by birdie View Post

              Exactly!

              With its minuscule market share I'm thankful NVIDIA supports Linux in the first place. If I were them and saw all this infinite hatred and mockery, I'd simply continue the development of server-only drivers (CUDA and ML) and abandoned desktop altogether. I am sure Open Source fans would be happy in this case.

              To be honest I'm looking forward to this. I'm fucking tired of open source fans never ending demands.
              The fact that they don't do it means that they can't do it.

              There are customers that depend on their driver on Linux.
              They even release a single board computer for IoT and ML.

              As for the part of only supporting server, Nvidia from day 0 provides aweful support for anything but specific domains.
              It works well for specific domain it is designed to, but is shitty for all the other activities.

              That is one of the reason why people hate Nvidia, another reason being that it is a ton of pain to install.

              I totally don't understand why you are defending them.
              Did they pay you with money or something?

              Nvidia are fucking rich, giant tech.
              We consumers want to get the best product for our own use case, we do not owe Nvidia anything.

              Nvidia deservers to be hated and mocked on for all it had done, including the ridiculous high GPU price.
              If you have checked the steam hardware https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/, then you can see that 5 out of 6 most frequently used hardwares are GTX 10 series:

              NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 8.18%
              NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 6.08%
              NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 5.62%
              NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 5.53%
              NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2.87%
              NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 2.71%
              There's absolutely no reason for we consumers to defend Nvidia, well, unless you buy their stocks.

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              • #47
                Originally posted by mdedetrich View Post

                NVidia is working with open source developers, i.e. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...7#note_1275874 (James Jones is principle engineer for GPU's at Nvid

                If you read that thread plus other material online, unfortunately you will release its not so black and white. Many areas of contention with this specific issue (of integration NVidia drivers into Linux OSS graphics stack) is because of how outdated the Linux OSS graphics stack generally is.

                You may dislike Nvidia, but they are very forward thinking when it comes to graphics Even EGLStreams with the problems that it hard, the design of the API outperformed other solutions out there due to their explicit synchronization design in the API where as much of Linux still relies on the simple (but now often outdated/wrong) principle of everything just being read only/write only buffers.
                Thanks for sharing that with me!

                Yeah, Nvidia is definitely very forward-thinking.

                They are steps ahead AMD in GPU.

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                • #48
                  Well, the general tone is clearly set in this discussion.

                  Let me try to introduce some facts to potentially make this discussion more fact based.

                  1. NVidia drivers work. I have been using NVidia graphics hardware since a more than disastrous experience with ATI - granted a very long time ago. However, since then I always had a perfectly working driver on any OS I chose to use, even many years after purchase of hardware. The experience using the proprietary drivers (meaning price/performance/features of graphics card, driver installation and functionality) was at least as good as I expected. For many years I had vdpau, cuda with NVidia, where AMD hardware would have provided me a lot of headaches in comparison. At this point in time, it looks like hardware acceleration using graphics hardware is in a good state with AMD and other vendors - I don't think we would have this discussion otherwise.
                  2. As opposed to Nouveau drivers. For the last three generations of NVidia cards I could not use Nouveau drivers even in basic 2d desktop mode. In some cases there were simply black screens, in other hangs, at the minimum there were artifacts. More than once I had to revert to terminal mode (which luckily still works) to install NVidia drivers.
                  3. Using NVidia drivers on Linux does not have a bad user experience. My preferred distro is Fedora, and for many years rpmfusion has provided a great and seamless experience to me. Recent versions of Fedora even bundle NVidia drivers in a separate, but ootb repo, which enables an even better onboarding user experience. Personally, I stick to the rpmfusion repo because I install other packages from there and like to reduce the number of repos my setups use. I think the possibly worst experience using NVidia drivers on any Linux distro would be to download drivers manually, install them using the dkms option, which builds kernel modules automatically. I would consider that largely seamless.
                  4. AMD and Intel graphics products are now competitive to NVidia products. Well, we are here on a Phoronix forum after all and, at least to me, I still prefer NVidia products based on the performance facts frequently presented here. I agree - AMD products have become significantly more competitive than only a few years ago, but not enough for me to change my obviously quite settled ways. There is simply no obvious price/performance benefit of using AMD over NVidia on the upper end, where I am buying. Intel Arc seems to not quite compete in that market, yet. But I am looking forward to seeing tests and reports to the opposite - I am certainly welcoming any new competitor to the market.

                  In short, as long as the vendor, in this case NVidia, has a very competitive product and happy customers there is very little need for the vendor to change their ways. Linus Thorvald's opinion is certainly interesting, but largely irrelevant. The opinion of non-customers is also interesting, but largely irrelevant to NVidia.

                  What is interesting to NVidia is loosing market share to competitors which, in part, is enabled by open source drivers. AMD is reading this correctly and I am looking forward to a time where I am excited to buy an AMD graphics card instead of NVidia.


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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by JMB9 View Post
                    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).
                    Originally posted by birdie View Post
                    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.
                    If MB9 is right about Nvidia drivers for old CPUs, that puts Linux in the position of either dropping support for the older hardware or going to a stable ABI, which is against the Linux design policy as I understand it.
                    Even Microsoft, which puts lots of emphasis on compatibility, changes its driver model from time to time and older hardware is left behind. Being very reluctant to do that makes Linux so attractive for old hardware (among other things).

                    The inclusiveness is also a matter of effort by the hardware makers, and in some cases they may be obliged to keep 3rd party IP confidential.
                    In case of Windows, neither Nvidia nor AMD can afford to not support it. So of course they put in the effort.
                    MacOS is not quite as important in market share, but there was still a nice chunk of money to lose. These days, there is no need to develop new Nvidia drivers for iOS, with Apple going to its home-brew solutions (the M1 chip).
                    In terms of IP, I remember it took AMD quite a while to sort out 3rd party IP in their drivers. Only then they could seriously switch to open source for their drivers.

                    About your three points,
                    1) should be not too much work if the hardware does not change anymore. Which is usually the case for a GPU not in the current generation. When hardware gets thrown out of support, it is usually 20+ years old. For popular hardware, it tends to take longer. Only a few months ago, there was a patch for the floppy driver.
                    2) In most cases, there is also the option to download the source code and compile it yourself. Granted, not palatable for many end users. Also, Linux does not completely exclude closed source, see the closed source drivers for Nvidia. It is just not very welcome in the kernel. Linux working with Nvidia is much like Nvidia working with Windows:
                    Not supporting it at all would be too damaging.
                    3) is more or less what we are arguing about here. As in "how many concessions should Linux make?"


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                    • #50
                      Originally posted by birdie View Post

                      With its minuscule market share I'm thankful NVIDIA supports Linux in the first place
                      Corporations don't do this for gratitude and it means nothing for them. They do it because are specific markets that Linux is extremely dominant in that Nvidia wants to have business in. If it was actually minuscule, they will stop because it will no longer be profitable. As simple as that.

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