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Nvidia Drops Support For Its Open Source Driver
An anonymous reader writes "While Nvidia is not open-source friendly (despite public outcries over the years), they have traditionally supported the xf86-video-nv driver to provide basic mode setting support and other basic functionality. However, with the 'Fermi' and future products, even that open source support will cease to exist. Nvidia has announced they are dropping this open source support for future GPUs and really ending it altogether. Nvidia's recommendation is to just use the generic X.Org VESA driver to navigate their way to nvidia.com so that they can install the proprietary driver. Fortunately there is the Nouveau project that provides a 2D and 3D video driver for Nvidia's hardware, but Nvidia fails to acknowledge it nor support their efforts in any form."
David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.
How is this a surprise?
This is about as newsworthy as mono being a patent minefield and a bad idea.
What does that mean? Is the "X.Org VESA driver" now a web browser?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...what? Sorry I can't read this. Why does my screen look all funny?
Does Nvidia not know there are literally dozens of Linux users out there clamoring for a stable, high-end gaming environment?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I've made it a habit to avoid nVidia chips in the laptops (especially - because you can't change cards in a laptop) and other computers that I purchase. This only confirms that decision. I'm not a gamer, but obviously lots of software uses 3D hardware these days.
Bruce Perens.
I use an Nvidia video card with the Nouveau driver on my desktop. Sure, it's not as fast as Nvidia's closed source driver but it works well for me. Fedora 13 will have a Nouveau release with out of the box 3D acceleration and DisplayPort support too.
By this point, Nouveau beats the old nVidia open-source driver, so everyone would want to run either Nouveau or the proprietary nVidia driver. There's no real reason to support the obsolete, limited xf86-video-nv any more (though it's not going away).
This doesn't surprise me one bit, when I got my new quad core and was having a ton of problems with 64bit drivers, all I was ever told in the multiple linux forums was that it works on older hardware! So I installed something that would work on my new hardware, Windows Vista! Haven't looked back since, so the linux community can go ahead and stay in the 20th century, I now have Server 08 installed with Desktop Experience and love it. Linux will never be ready for a normal end user.
... that are actually supported in Linux. Intel cards have very primitive support (good luck if you want TV out, or if you want your laptop screen to come back after going into suspend), and ATI have no functional support at all.
How hard can it be for a manufacturer to get a tiny bit of clue about this?
Is nVidia turning into an "also-ran"? I'm not stating, I'm asking. The reason they are "protecting" their drivers is because it "contains" proprietary secrets. If I'm not mistaken Ati is kicking their ass right now so is their strategy paying off for them? nVidia spent a lot of money promoting themselves in game title screens while arguably Ati just went out and built better hardware. Perhaps nVidia needs to refocus on "technical" advances instead of "marketing" ones.
Shh.
In the past, I've made it a point to buy nvidia cards, because of it's Linux support, even though that support wasn't Free as in Freedom. They are a for profit company, who supported a binary driver for my favourite GNU/Linux OS. (I am in favour of the whole for profit idea, but believe there is a place for open source software in it, like Red Hat.) However, since ATI was bought by AMD, and are putting out a truly free driver for their cards, I will buy exclusively ATI cards in the future.
Open matters when I vote with my wallet. This will cost them my business at the very least.
enemy of your freedom.
Next time I buy some graphics card, I'll do my homework first. Even Radon needs blobs in the kernel to work.
Why don't we have a generic driver format that is only compiled into machine code when it is installed? That way drivers would work across all operating systems and CPU configurations.
Are the current OS / Driver interactions so different that having glue code compile along with them will not work in having an abstract interface?
We certainly don't need buy-in from the OS guys to do this type of compiler/installer.
As nouveau reaches maturity, nvidia is simply putting the 'nv' driver out of its misery.
Were nvidia to discontinue its binary driver, now that would be news but it isn't.
Your ship is sunk, once the 8+ core intel chips come out you'll be history.
David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.
Tubal-Cain points out that the use of past tense on "going" was unnecessary.
If someone was actually surprised by this, they haven't been paying attention. Although Nvidia has been providing a non-free binary blob driver for Linux, I've always gotten the impression that it was mostly an afterthought. It took them forever to produce a 64 bit version of their binary blob, long after Linux on x86_64 became commonplace. And, of course, they never, AFAIK, built anything for non-x86 Linux platforms. This is just Nvidia's death spiral. Their future looks rather bleak. Both Intel and AMD have their own GPUs, now. Pretty much every motherboard now has onboard video which, for nearly everyone is perfectly adequate. The market for add-on video cards has no future. Intel offers excellent free drivers, which are already bundled in most distros. I no longer buy new hardware as often as I used to, but when I do, for desktop use I always look for Intel chipsets. I know that accelerated 3D video will work out of the box, on my distro. AMD -- eh, not that much, but they're working on it, from where I'm sitting. So, Nvidia is odd man's out. They always had a 'tude towards Linux. I won't miss them.
and voila. companies may go against their corporate culture in accordance with the needs of the times, but in the long run, they cant avoid showing themselves for what they are. like microsoft blowing with the china-censorship issue and negating all the positive pr they and bill gates tried to do in the last years, nvidia also showed its own nature.
Read radical news here
When did you last actually try using an intel card? I bought a new laptop in December, Intel X4500 inside, running Ubuntu 9.10.
It has suspended/resumed flawlessly for three months.
Last night I plugged it into a projector, click the Display settings, it auto-detected the new projector (listed by name even) and enabling output was a single click. Options to extend desktop or mirror it worked without problem.
Again, have you actually tried any this lately?
___________________ I want to be free()!
They screwed me with the nvlddmkm driver. I won't patronize them. The open source community should do the same. They will only change their f***** behavior when it hurts ecnomically.
Well, it's a good thing that rasterizing is on its way out anyway.
Scanlined triangles is not the way to go forward. It is slow at high polycounts. O(N).
With high enough polygon counts, raytracing is actually faster, and you can do that on your multicore or Cell SPUs.
There is no more need for shader hardware.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Honest question - is it really worth their time (and costs) to write open-sourced drivers for Linux?
Has anyone quantified the sales to show that Linux is a worthwhile market segment?
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I don't know what the hell you people are talking about, but nVidia was and is supported extrememly well under linux by their own driver package you can get right off the website. Yes they have to compile code on your machine most of the time but I've found it to be stable and reliable for all the nvidia boards I've used. And it's opengl support appears great too.. running WoW under Wine for example is a killer example of what it can do.
Does nVidia have a proprietary driver for their video card for Linux? Or is it just the Open Source one?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
ATI / AMD WIN's!!!
not only do they have good on board video they also have open drivers as well.
ATI gets my business now.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Yeah, Intel works great as long as you stick to 2D. The OpenGL support, however, is horribly broken in a thousand subtle ways, which becomes apparent as soon as you try to run serious code on top of it.
but, going forward, it'll be either ATI or, (much less likely) Intel. I used to be a regular Matrox buyer, then ATI and my last 2 cards have
been Nvidia. But, since I'm a solid supporter of opensource and OSS-friendly companies, I bid thee adieu.
As a infrequent-to-moderate gamer, I don't need to have the latest greatest, power-sucking, screen-sizzling framerates and, in any case, ATI is neck-and-neck
anyhow.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
(...that was of course a joke, first 64 bit processors of course shipped way later, but project Trillian, an effort to port linux to the newly announced IA-64 platform (Itanium) was already underway in 1999 (released Feb. 2000), GCC however had 64 bit compatibility in the 20th century already. So, yeah, even if there was no 64 bit processor before 2001, linux supported it theoretically 1999.)
Of course, multimedia is an issue on the linux platform, and if you use a lot of multimedia like playing games and stuff, you might be better of with Windows anyway. Support from Vendors is not a problem of linux itself, it is a problem of the manufacturers.
Just to mention: Windows sometimes does not even ship network drivers on newly installed systems. The cause, why newly bought laptops can run all the nifty stuff from-the-box today, is more or less, because manufacturers include the drivers on the laptop preinstalled. I do use a lot of linux on installing windows network drivers on a new box, because linux ships most network drivers out of the box in the kernel even on newer hardware. So it really depends on what piece of hardware we are talking about. I know this, because the wonderful Windows Vista was one of the most requested uninstalls of all time, and replacing it with Windows XP was always a game of "oh, will it have network right away, or do I have to pre download the drivers..."
(If you were cynical, I am sorry, if not, I just fed you)
As the open source whore that I am I've still preferred NVIDIA, though them suddenly dropping unix based OS support other than Linux will suck horribly. All in all I've just found them to be a great example of a company who wants to keep their technology closed up yet goes the extra mile in keeping their hardware compatible and "controllable" with many different software. Of course other BSD support would be sweet but FreeBSD support is more than enough to stay ahead of other hardware vendors who keep their shit closed.
The big deal is in how it's handled.
ATI way:
They collaborate actively with the 3rd party open-source driver guys (RadeonHD project, etc.)
They publish specs to help them, and take efforts to make subsequent hardware more opensource friendly.
On the day they drop support for some old hardware from their official driver, they point to the opensource project which is mature enough by now for the old hardware.
Nvidia way:
Actively ignore that a 3rd party open-source driver effort exist (Nouveau).
Don't make the slightest effort to help them and don't release anything (well, on the other hand, they don't send Cease and Desist letters at least).
On the day they drop support for the own official opensource driver, they point to some other limited functionality driver (VESA BIOS based) so users have a GUI to download their official closed source driver.
They pretend Nouveau doesn't exist at all, despite the fact that it's gaining widespread usage: Specially since inclusion in Kernel, virtually all distributions are starting to use it, either in the current or the next iteration.
I mean that Nouveau is very probably what the 2.6.34 / 2.6.35 kernel-based distros are going to offer to Fermi owner (although very probably 2D only support).
They could at least acknowledge its existence, even if only with the proper "Not supported by Nvidia" warnings.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Its been stated before in interviews with NVIDIA developers that their drivers do share a common code base between all platforms. And as much as i would like to see their own 100% open source driver, I do understand there is likely licensing issues that prohibits that, as well as competitive concerns in releasing the source.
Mostly however I hope they keep their promise of 'not helping but nor hindering' the Nouveau project (I mean obviously more on the nor hindering part) Plus I how they would be of any gain by trying to hinder? other than causing a bad relations shit storm amongst the already divided opinions.
As for Noveau, it seems from my own and other experiences from Arch Linux forums that its as good as if not better than the xorg-nv driver anyway.
Seems they win mostly by not having to spend any development time on it.
Everybody but RMS just runs the proprietary driver anyway...
I for one appreciate the great binary only drivers you provide me on my Linux systems.
I don't care that you keep your math algorithms private in your quest to be better than ATI and Intel.
Just remember, I choose your product over the others because of your support of Linux.
Keep up the good work
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
DirectX being proprietary and Wine unable to Not Emulate it, might you not as well go with nvidias blob and OpenGL? At least the screensavers look good. Well, some of them. 3D is so 2000. What we need is fast 2D. Wayland and nouveau may be the future. xf86-video-nv never was.
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
I see my newest laptop has one of their chips. Apparently my next ones won't. Goodbye.
if there is a market for a competitive open source friendly (hell, open source hardware) 3d video card, someone will make it. currently, it does not appear to economically viable to be both open source and competitive, in the 3d hardware world.
Until then, the binary driver will still exist.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Our institution buys a lot of laptops each year and recommends the purchase specs of hundreds. We are an OS-neutral environment. I guess NVIDIA has no regard for us.
ah oh bob saget!!!
http://www.semiaccurate.com/
for examples of NVidia's authoritarian belligerance...
You assume that they will continue to code for Linux users/gamers, AND
you assume that NVidia won't use DMCA/ACTA to stop Nouveau coders permanently
( for unauthorizedly accessing/messing-with NVidia property ).
Look around you at the way the world is becoming more authoritarian...
You are *gambling*, and I'm not making the gamble you are.
As for AMD taking years to get Linux up to speed,
in 2009 it STILL wasn't possible to open a complex Office document
through either CrossOver Office *OR* OpenOffice.org
( embedded documents aren't always intact or accessible )
: it TAKES years to build that complex/involved a system & get it right.
4 more years, and a significant portion of the world will turn to FLOSS.
No sooner, though: too much more work to do...
Cheers,
Clearly GP has not. nVidia binary drivers get good 3D framerate - everything else absolutely sucks about it especially xrandr support. Intel's open source drivers are miles ahead, and for similar powered GPUs they have much better performance. nVidia gets by on brute power of their hardware only. Their drivers suck. Oh, and they never really supported nv anyway. Just go and look at all the "WONTFIX" bugs on the tracker.
Problem solved.. with only the fanatical FSF zealots still up in arms..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I have been waiting in anticipation for ATI's driver to be usable. I play Warcraft and use VDPAU so I will unfortunately have a tough time being an early adopter :(
I know this is might be silly, and I swear I'm not trying to piss anybody off. I really do want to know (so please hold the snark): What exactly is this controversy about?
When I buy computer hardware, I buy it so I can do the things it enables me to do. I'm not a hard-core gamer myself, but if I wanted to play a game that requires high-end performance from a video card, I would buy a high-end card so that I can play the game. I'm a developer and I like to tinker as much as the next guy, but if the manufacturer was kind enough to provide a software driver that's stable and delivers all the capabilities of the hardware into my hands, I can probably find better uses for my time than reinventing that wheel because I'm offended by their lack of transparency.
There is a LOT of discussion here already. I'm just not sure what about. I admire the FOSS community for its adherence to principles. But seriously - what do you ACTUALLY lose from using the proprietary driver that nVidia has specifically developed for your operating system, which many people here seem to concede works perfectly well, and that is provided to you free of charge when you buy the video card? Is this ACTUALLY a problem, or is it a matter of principle? And if it's the latter, what exactly are you fighting for, and why is it a priority vs. all the other problems in the tech world that heaven knows need solving?
Only the proprietary driver supports a separate X-Server on each monitor, which allows you to have two independent sets of virtual desktops: You can choose what appears on both the left and right for the task at hand.
It wouldn't matter even if they dropped support for the proprietary one as well, since their latest driver is unusable anyway - at least on my Toshiba U500 laptop it is. The damn thing crashes all the time, so I am still using the VESA driver.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Good for you. But some of us actually care about the nature of the code that runs in kernel mode (sic!) for security and auditing reasons... and some of us don't use popular/supported kernel like Linux but something more exotic. Sure, we can always use X in VESA mode there, but Nvidia's binary-only move still sucks. It's AMd/ATI and Intel all the way here.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
To be efficient, their drivers, in obfuscated C (in the dim past) and with
misdirection (my take) they use the techniques in this US patent: 5,475,400,
apparently owned by the Evil Sim Empire, a/k/a Creative Labs.
Too bad Creative lost Danforth to the GC position at (also litigious)
Rambus, or this would already be troll bait.
To avoid complications, this causes delays and obfuscatory
efforts. (To paraphrase the Chairman, "Allex Cuisine) or,
for this "Let the sparks begin!"
This one is the best, and I have tried many as I am a custom pc builder by trade. Advanced Cleanse Extreme
some of us require more out of our video cards than to show a spreadsheet at qvga at 1 fp5s
If a vendor wishes to provide a computer hardware product, full specifications and programming manuals should be made available. The documentation should be extensive enough so a driver can be programmed which uses said hardware completely.
The product may only be sold if all documentation is available.
This would make sure other operating systems, besides the popular ones, can get driver support for all hardware available. That should level the playing field a bit.
it's been a long time coming, you could say... they didn't really put that much effort into it...
This is the most informative posting on this topic yet, I find.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Why should I go through all that? Windows does things one way, Linux another.
apt-get/aptitude is my one-stop solution for all software installation/upgrade/removal and, sometimes, downgrade.
Same as the Linux kernel is my one-stop solution for all drivers. Everything, that is, besides 3D drivers.
There's a hardware-news website which keeps a close tab on the developments called http://www.phoronix.com (also tracks NVIDIA developments; this article in particular might be interesting to NVIDIA owners: Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D OpenGL Driver).
Also, you can follow the development of mesa at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/.
Current AMD status seems to be that for older ATI's (up to R500 series) there's a "normal" X driver (supporting KMS?) + "bleeding edge" newer, probably highly experimental Gallium3D r300g driver, and for the newer R600, R700 series there's only the normal X driver, with KMS, called xserver-xorg-video-ati. There's also an xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd but I think it's a bit less developed.
With the following "testing" and "unstable" stuff installed on Debian:
I can play tremulous, urbanterror, and openarena normally, but nexuiz crashes the X server and the commercial ETQW and quake4 crashes missing some higher OpenGL functionality, so YMMV. :-)
It is my opinion that this risky "develop everything anew" Gallium3D strategy will pay off, because the AMD/ATI, Intel, Nouveau and VMware teams can then bundle their efforts on the exciting higher-level "state tracker" layers (such as more recent OpenGL with GLSL for games, and OpenCL!, and maybe some kind of video acceleration or at least DCT also if they agree on which one) and only need to write modesetting and Gallium driver compiler stuff themselves.
But nobody can say for sure if all the temporary instabilities and incompatibilities will all be behind us at the end of 2010. It's good enough for me
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
For several years, I have been buying ati chips on hardware from various vendors but the field seems to be shrinking. Recently I got a 4350 card from diamond media at frys and while trying to get a rebate filed realized that their customer support is non existent. I will continue with ati but diamond wont get any further business from me. I know they are quaking in their boots but it seems a lot of customers agree.
For things like FreeBSD or even more 'out there' stuff like Hiku or GNU/Hurd - fine.
Considering it took them years to support FreeeBSD 7 and 64 bit - I guess I don't need to worry about voting with my dollars and buying their products in the future.
And at some point I'll have to start stocking up on the GPUs that can do things like hash cracking. *sigh*
1. We're cancelling/impinging open source efforts for nVidia. ...
2. Open source geeks aren't buying nVidia.
3.
4. Don't profit!
5. GOTO #1
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
nVidia is not in DIRE need of MUCH better Xorg drivers. Oh the joys I've had with a nb + 4850 + linux in the year that I've owned it... never another ATI product again...
The Windows drivers aren't quite as good as nVidia's are either. There a couple apps/games that have problem in VERY specific areas, probably some corner case that ATI's driver crew handled poorly. Likely because recently, they ONLY seem to be chasing the latest and greatest apps/games an, apparently, saying to hell with anything older than a few months. It's the ONLY product that I've EVER owned where I've looked out for new drivers EVERY month hoping for fixes, whereas with other hw I've tended to go quite some time between driver updates and then only when a problem occurred which was, generally, fixed by the time of the latest driver...
GTX480 here I come.
It would be true for 10 years earlier but today, a bad performing opengl or direct3d driver means a bad performing OS. Everything is opengl accelerated, even the office suite and 3d accelerated browsers are otw.
Forget everything, 1080P video isn't 320x240 mpeg1 video of older times. It needs acceleration too.
For years I've purchased nVidia cards because of their support for Unix/Linux. Yes there is Noveau (the full open source and integrated driver), however the full nVidia proprietary driver gives excellent performance and it's rock solid. I didn't even know that nVidia had an open source driver of their own. As others stated, there is no need to worry since nVidia will continue to support their proprietary driver. Yes, it's proprietary, but unfortunately we have no other choice when it comes to solid performance. Hopefully someday they might release the code for their proprietary driver and convert it to open source, but I'm guessing that's unlikely.