Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

[Mavman]

Obligatory Linus: https://youtu.be/_36yNWw_07g

How i was missing this comment ahahahahaha

[mdedetrich]

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.

Yup, HPC/server GPU space in Linux is completely dominated by NVidia currently. So NVidia does care about GPU's for Linux, but its in that context and not your "standard desktop PC with GPU compositing" which is currently completely dominated by Windows/Mac.

Also for this specific case its not a stretch to say that Nvidia's blob has advantages because its built for multiple kernel versions and they can guarantee performance which in that specific space is ALL that matters. NVidia also doesn't want to get bogged down in Linux OS bureaucracy, they want to release on their schedules to serve their customers which are not Linux developers.

[Volker Schmidt]

While linux might be a rare sighting on desktops, it is the dominate player in the super computer area, and in fact quite a number of high end GC are found there. NVIDIA is clearly out to make some money, and they have every right to do so. But as any company they go, where the money is. As long as they can get away with close source and make money, they will clearly do that, since it allows them to keep there users locked in. But they are the dominant player in the GC and AI accelerator market, not the underdog that has to be defended.

I personally would say, that if they want there proprietary driver running in a Linux environment, it is there problem and nobody else. If a distribution decides, that they are no longer willing to do extra work for NVIDIA, I guess that is there decision too. There are open source alternatives now, and after some teething problems, I guess we can call it a stable work environment now.

[brucethemoose]

Nvidia aren't going to be the dominant AI/HPC vendor forever. Even if most competitors flounder, AWS/Azure/Google hardware efforts alone are going to dent that dominance.


Once they lose a bit of market share, the "build around the Nvidia driver because we have no choice" dynamic is going to wane, and maybe they will finally face enough pressure to open up.

[StarterX4]

That's easy to say when literally every notebook in the market with dGPU is equipped with NVIDIA. Even with Ryzen processors. Sure you can get a Radeon, but in my case it means to order it somewhere in other country and pay excess customs taxes and shipping.

And unfortunately there are less models available with Radeons. For example, I love my current notebook for almost everything, except RTX2060 (i am even ok with intel cpu). But exact same model has no AMD option at all. And other models have either stupid keyboard, or useless 2K-4K-8K screen, or some other weird things. Or cost like a Macbook.

Unfortunately, the market is solely focused on Nvidia dGPUs. I don't believe that even Intel Arc will make it to compete with Nvidia.

When I was looking for some new gaming laptop with AMD dGPU, it was really difficult to find any available to buy in local online stores. But if there were any, all of them were MSI (no, thanks, MSI laptops and mobos die too fast).
Finally I found my choice on ASUS website – ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition G513.
The lack of internal SATA port hurts me a bit, but there was no choice for real.

The WiFi card's (MT7921) Linux (5.17) driver is so bugged, that the WiFi sometimes works, and sometimes not, and the driver throws just with probe errors. But since I am on cable, that's not a problem for me (yet).

[Modu]

That's easy to say when literally every notebook in the market with dGPU is equipped with NVIDIA. Even with Ryzen processors. Sure you can get a Radeon, but in my case it means to order it somewhere in other country and pay excess customs taxes and shipping.

And unfortunately there are less models available with Radeons. For example, I love my current notebook for almost everything, except RTX2060 (i am even ok with intel cpu). But exact same model has no AMD option at all. And other models have either stupid keyboard, or useless 2K-4K-8K screen, or some other weird things. Or cost like a Macbook.

It's a chicken-egg problem. You see?

[piotrj3]

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:



There's absolutely no reason for we consumers to defend Nvidia, well, unless you buy their stocks.

Because it is not that simple.

Look I understand that Nvidia in terms of open source recently is a dick. No reclocking support, no support to VAAPI, took quite long time to adopt GBM/DMA-BUF and still the entire kernel situation and in that aspect i surerly agree.

But problem is in wider spectrum. You have to think about last 15 years of GPU stuff, and all the revolutionary changes. Unified shaders, variable refresh rate, GPU computing, raytracing, deep learning supersampling, Mantle, Vulkan, GPU video decoding, shared VRAM between GPUs etc. And guess what in almost everything except Mantle, Nvidia was the one to discover and bring innovation. Almost any revolutionary change in GPUs was Nvidia's doing. Now if Nvidia didn't exist, I wish there would be another company instead of Nvidia that goes forward with innovation because AMD or Intel aren't ones.

Another thing is about GPU price increase, actually here you are wrong you are supposed to blame AMD. Why - because Nvidia already has so big market share that they are on edge of monopoly. In nutshell with Turing price increase - you don't realize it, but with AMD's situation they had to. AMD struggled with CPUs (Ryzens aren't around), AMD struggled with GPUs due to extremly successful Pascal launch and they were doing actually pretty badly. Tell me what would happen if Nvidia released Turings in same price as Pascal. AMD would be fucking dead.

Also to add to this point, you had more then 10 years of Intel dominance. And how much intel increased prices of CPUs over 10 years of absolute domination - they ... didn't? They increased prices pretty much in line with inflation over 10 years. And who was first company to make more the 1000$ CPU? AMD, with first FX series. Who increased prices suddenly the moment they gained advantage over competitor - AMD again with Zen 3 CPUs. Oh you liked how we conquered market with cheap Threadrippers? Guess what, there isn't Threadripper refresh for Zen 3. Goodbye now upgrade to waaaay more expensive Threadripper Pro if you want Zen 3. Oh i also forget, we will only sell now it to OEMs.

When GPU shortage was comming who adjusted MSRP so high that even if you bough at MSRP you regressed in performance per $ comparing to previous GPU serie? That is right AMD. (look at Gamersnexus reviews or any review with perfomance numbers and make calculation yourself of 6500/6600/6700 GPUs). Nvidia wasn't such a dick. Who is actually helping with GPU shortage (looks at Steam survey) Aha, there is only like more then 10 times more Nvidia Ampere gpus then RDNA2. You could have 5 companies like AMD, and Nvidia would still have strong majority of desktop new GPUs.

And that last paragraph for you, should be an answear why Linux has to support Nvidia and not the other way around regardless how bad company Nvidia is. It is because in grand scheme of things you dont' have alternative.

[RahulSundaram]

But it is new that Red Hat environment makes this statement as Red Hat is backer of Nvidia for professional workstations

I would caution against reading this as a Red Hat statement at all. It clearly is not. Matthew Miller is posting his opinions in his twitter page and that's all there is to it. Red Hat developers have been talking about the issues with Nvidia for a long time because the engineering difficulties have existed all along and also working with Nvidia at the same time on behalf of customers because this is just business. The same goes for working with Microsoft or so many other vendors. None of this new.

[STiAT]

Proper open source NVidia drivers... a wet dream.

I have a NVidia card (3070Ti) by more or less choice, I couldn't get my hands on a AMD card when prices were high and my old rig burned down. So I'm stuck there now since it's completely heatpipe cooled and I would basically have to replace the whole PC.

I have had issues with the nvidia driver breaking in the past month and expect them to break again. I can live with that, but proper support for open source drivers or maintaining it themself would be great. And the firmware specs.

I doubt they'll do that, even though, even if a small market, it's not as if they could not afford a small team of devs for that effort.

In about 5 years when I replace this rig and the situation has not changed and I can get my hands on equipment to completely passively cool a AMD/Intel card (if they are a competitor then), I'll go for them. 1 Percent are still more than a million Nvidia users.

[sinepgib]

They don't owe me anything?
I bought their hardware and I expect it to come with software support.

I'm in no way in birdie's camp, but he does have a point. Whatever your expectations were, Nvidia complied with what they advertised, which is Windows support for a then-current version. If you bought it knowing their Linux support is lame, that's really on you. Did you see a penguin logo on the box?
That said, I long for a law that forces hardware providers to release the programming reference manuals. That's the bare minimum for any kind of usable hardware, and you do own the hardware. Then the open driver would be the open source community's responsibility.