The SLI Godfather

CaptCanuk writes "Phoronix has an insightful article about the motivation behind Nvidia's alternative operating system support. From the article: 'When it comes time for a user to upgrade their computer hardware, and decide to go with a choice from a leading manufacturer of graphics solutions, software support is a given, correct? Wrong.' Read on to find out what truly funds their development and why some think they treat Linux as a second hand citizen."

Comments

This should be on the front page

[BadAnalogyGuy]

This sort of thing should be common knowledge to every single person interested in computers. This is how everything works in the "real world" or software development. It boils down to following the money and who needs something the most.

If Microsoft didn't have such a significant segment of the PC market, they would also have to make deals with hardware manufacturers to get drivers written. NVIDIA needs to support Microsoft, so NVIDIA foots the bill with tons of help from MS. HP needed NVIDIA support, so HP was the one who ended up paying for the development.

It's not about conspiracies, it's about money and the need to have a hand in a market segment. If Linux owned a significant percentage of PCs, you'd see NVIDIA tripping over themselves to get a driver written (if it weren't a trade secret risk).

Driver support

[ubersonic]

Most people I know choose hardware based on the fact that they MIGHT at some point run Linux on them.
Even if they are never going to use Linux, they still get an NVIDIA instead of an ATI card, just because NVIDIA provides the better drivers.

None of them provider good OS drivers tho :(

Re:Driver support

[ubersonic]

> You are a statistical outlier. Most people you know may have Linux ambitions, but most of everyone else doesn't.

Maybe where you live, but here in germany Linux is a lot more mainstream.

The only reason NV supports Linux....

[otis wildflower]

.... Is 'cuz of folks doing workstation graphics (like CGI, visualization, modeling, etc). The more folks move to Linux from SGI, Solaris, etc, the more attention Linux drivers will get. The fact that the chipsets are similar enough for consumer-grade graphics boards to be supported is a nice plus, but I very much doubt the Linux gaming community plays much more of a role than that of testers and bugreporters.

How is this article insightful?

[bernywork]

I ask you, it's a complete opinion piece, there is no fact in there whatsoever from what I have seen. The only thing that is based in fact is that HP have a certain workstation line, and that they install RHEL on them and that HP is short for Hewlett Packard. I think the people that have these workstations would probably be reformatting them with a standard build anyway.

I don't doubt that some of it might be true, but at the same time, I don't see anything in here that really makes me turn around and go "Wow, HP paid xxxxxxxx for NVidia to write Linux drivers"

From what I have seen previously, the reason that NVidia make the driver available is because it's an easy port. That's why their IP is worth so much. Admittedly this isn't backed up with fact (Or at least a link to a website) either, but a quick google should see you good, right?

*sigh*

I disagree (but you're right)

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The article itself isn't very insightful, and FWIW, it's pretty badly written. "abecedarian"? How about learning to walk before trying to fly?

Anyway, I disagree. While the authors do not prove any of the points they are making, it is very much standard industry practice for one company to pay another to develop software. If HP needs Linux drivers for their latest CGI-oriented workstations, then they will need to pay NVidia to develop them. If NVidia really needed those Linux drivers, it would have been their first priority to develop and ship them with the release of the HW.

There really isn't a conspiracy to keep drivers out of FreeBSD or Linux or whatever niche OS you're running. The only question is who is going to pay for those drivers. If you need it the most, you will pay for it. NVidia *needs* Windows drivers, so they pay for it themselves. Try getting NVidia to release drivers for Symbian. It's never going to happen without a wad of cash.

Re:I disagree (but you're right)

[Homology]

The sad thing that NDA/binaryblobs acceptance seems to be representative of the "Linux culture". One day we are going to wake to the fact we cannot run Linux without binary blobs, even for basic hardware like a NIC. The NVIDIA binary blobs for the nForce MCP Networking Adapter is an example of this trend.

Re:Another topic

[Homology]

In addition to the various things mentioned in the article, I feel that another topic for pondering is the possibility that SLI may, or may not, ever see the official light of day under FreeBSD. While NVIDIA's code is similar between Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD, there seems to be no corporate customer at this point -- or even the appropriate lobbying for a free port.

Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.

NVIDIA is anti-open source. They will happily peddle some binary blobs for some archs (i386) and some OS, but refuse to give any hardware documentation or even tell the name of their various chipsets.

As long as the Linux/FreeBSD crowd accepts binary blobs in order to get their hardware to work, then NVIDIA will happily continue to only handout binary blobs.

Have a look at the FreeBSD nve (NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter device driver) driver:

This driver is a reimplementation of the NVIDIA supported Linux nvnet
driver and uses the same closed source API library to access the underly-
ing hardware. There is currently no programming documentation available
for this device, and therefore little is known about the internal archi-
tecture of the MAC engine itself.

And this is just a NIC? What's so secret about that? And this is acceptable?

Have a look at what OpenBSD does: Reverse engineer and offer the first open source driver nfe (NVIDIA nForce MCP Ethernet driver)

[/rant]

Nvidia is bad? ATi is worse.

[Tinfoil]

I recently purchased a new laptop from Acer, an Aspire 5672. It's a Core Duo running @ 1.67Ghz, 2GB RAM and an ATi X1400 w/ 128MB dedicated. I'll admit right from the start, I didn't do my research very well. I knew the wireless would be touchy but the ipw3945 project may support it. I didn't think I would have a problem with the video. Nor did I think I would have a problem with the Broadcom BCM5789 gigabit lan, but that's another story.

Was I ever wrong.

The binary ATi drivers do not support any of the X1000 series cards. Hell, even the latest & greatest windows drivers do not support my X1400 chipset officially.

The beta ATi drivers apparently support my chipset, but ATi supports 24bit graphics and nothing else. Alas, the display panel in the laptop is 16 or 32 bit. Running at 24 bit yields a display that looks like something one would expect to see after dropping a couple hits of acid.

Even worse, when trying to use the vesa xorg drivers, I am not able to use the native 1280x800 resolution as when the vesa drivers poll the graphics chipset for the available modes, 1280x800 isn't listed! No amount of fussing with the xorg.conf file has yielded a working solution. The final straw is that I am unable to tell the laptop not to scale lower resolutions up to 1280x800, so 1024x768 (4:3 ratio) is scaled to fit the panel, which is 16:10, which just makes things ugly.

So, until I can get native resolution, Linux is useless on this laptop. The display is too fuzzy and stretched to be usefull. Thankfully I still have my old laptop, as it has an nvidia chipset in it. Sure, the laptop is slow compared to the Core Duo, but atleast the display works properly.

NVidia may be pro Linux, but not open source.

[(H)elix1]

One thing worth pointing out is NVidia has been pretty good producing Linux drivers for most of the stuff they put out. It started with the video cards, but as they moved to chipsets they kept it up for all the bits on the chipset/mainboard as well. The place that people find fault is they release the drivers as binary rather than source form, and make it exceptionally difficult to roll your own as they don't release any under the cover info. They say it is partly due to licensing on their side, partly to keep the competition in the dark.

Now for me, I use the OS as a development platform. I don't expect source for any Win32 driver I use nor do I care if I have source for Linux or Solaris for that matter. As long as it works and does the job, I'm happy. I suspect I'm a pretty typical Linux user. The Linux developers would have problems with this - having to poke around a black box is a pain in the ass. My pain point comes with having to deal with them at install/update time. I also keep a small stack of Matrox Millennium (4M PCI) cards around because they do 'just work' without binary drivers. If they made them source based it would be more convenient for me, but NVidia has been pretty good keeping up with the multiple kernels and major distros. I'd call them pro Linux, but not open source.

This article hits and misses

[unr_stuart]

Yes, of course, nVidia isn't going to spend time developing drivers for 0.01% of their customer base. The reason why Linux has any support at all is because nVidia sees it as a growing market, and because the drivers for Windows and Linux share 98% of their code. This isn't true of other platforms. Look at the Mac for example, their driver interface is completely different than that of Windows or Linux, which is why it takes longer (even though they have a somewhat full team of engineers for the Mac).

For the Linux drivers, the engineers simply say "what do we need more urgently, these bug fixes, or these features?" If they need the features, they borrow the code from Windows and put it in, with possibly some minor glue code. With other platforms, some poor engineer has to learn enough about that one particular OS to get a driver working. Again, how does diverting this portion of time equate to revenue for ATI without a guaranteed contract from the hardware vendor? It doesn't.

nVidia has a steady stream of revenue from Windows users (gamers and casual users) and Linux users (research and education), but the same is not always true of other manufacturers like HP, Sun, etc. And again, why would a business invest their time and money if they don't have a reasonable assurance of profit?

Re:Another topic

[edwdig]

Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.

This is what happens when your kernel developers refuse to provide a stable driver API.

Yes, it would be better if drivers were open, but it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if Linux provided a stable driver API. It'd make everyone's lives easier if the APIs were more stable. People who won't release an open driver for whatever reason would at least be more likely to develop closed drivers, users already using closed drivers would have less issues going forward, and people writing drivers would no longer have to worry about hitting a constantly moving target.

Ballmer needs to stomp his feet and party's over!

[Dr. Spork]

What I learned from TFA is that even mediocre graphics driver support for Linux is hanging by a thread. There are the occasional fortunate (and according to TFA, tenuous) corporate allignments, like HP's funding of NVidia's Linux driver development. Thank you HP! But NVidia themselves come off looking rather indifferent about the Linux drivers issue.

They're in it for the money, and their real customer base consists of Windows gamers. Now, these customers are rather picky about stable and optimized drivers. They read articles about benchmarks, and a driver that squeezes out an extra 5pfs will in many cases make the difference between $300 of revenue or similar money in the pockets of the competitor. That's why NVidia work hard on Windows. It's their lifeline.

We're living in an age when Microsoft doesn't fear Linux on the desktop. They just don't; they think it's a joke. Suppose something happens to change their mind, and they really start competing in their ham-fisted, machiavellian way. They really only need to do one thing to destroy desktop Linux: Make a phone call to NVidia. Ballmer: "Hey, you know all that work you do on Linux drivers that makes you almost no revenue? Well, stop it. Stop it or you will find some rather unfriendly code in Vista sp1. End communication."

That's all it would take. Remember that starting next year, if you don't have a 3D-accelerated desktop, your machine will look like a dinosaur. So never mind Linux games. Just the regular desktop will look and work like crap without the proper GPU acceleration. And proper GPU acceleration on Linux is impossible without the mercy of GPU manufacturers. This is really the greatest Achilles' heel of OSS. Just one phone call by Ballmer (maybe involving a thrown chair) is enough to cut off the air supply of OSS on the desktop. There is no remedy. Linus was writing code for a chip (386) with documented internals. He did a great job. GPU manufacturers won't document the internals, they keep changing anyway, and trying to reverse-engineer something is probably banned by the DMCA.

This is the grim lesson I leaned from TFA.

Re:Where are RedHat, Novel, IBM, etc on this?

[binford2k]

All nvidia needs to do is open source their driver and then it's maintenance requirements drop to approximately zero.