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.

Comments

Be sure to vote with your wallet

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[Kenja]

NVidia is also voting with their wallet. They seem to feel that they're not getting enough in additional sales to cover the cost of supporting the open source driver.

Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[Arker]

This is exactly it. The Nouveau driver team would happily write and support a proper free driver for the Nvidia cards if Nvidia would simply provide the specs rather than obfuscating and obstructing their work. But since they obstinantly refuse to quit being obstructionists and hinder these good folks, the upshot is that I get better performance with a simple Intel on-board graphics system than with a much more expensive Nvidia card. So I have no motivation to buy Nvidia - why would I pay more to get less?

Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[tftp]

Why is it cheaper to support a proprietary driver where you have to do all the development yourself, then to help developing an open-source driver?

You can't pick and choose developers in an open source project. And it will be very expensive to support people who may be not qualified for the job. You can't expect everyone to be familiar with hardware, or with driver coding, or with industry-standard methods. If you do the programming in-house you, as a manager, simply give the job to people who know how to do it right, and it gets done right.

There is also that cathedral vs. bazaar problem. You, as a manager or as an experienced programmer, may know how certain things need to be done. Perhaps this is not your first project of this type. In the cathedral you simply issue directives how to do it, and it gets done exactly to your requirements (if not, they fix it until you like it.) In the bazaar you only can voice your opinion, and everyone else is free to ignore it. As result, if bazaar members are not as competent with this particular problem as you are, you may watch them making the same mistakes that you did 10 years ago. Meanwhile the software suffers, and your company's hardware is unfairly blamed for that. If the company supports the open-source model then it will be also said that "Company N is unable to make the feature X work, even though they allocated their best engineers to help the developers." Bad news. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Re:Bad move....

[h4rr4r]

To be fair ATI makes crap drivers for all platforms, not just linux.

Slow news day?

[ChunderDownunder]

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.

Re:So buy intel video cards

[GenP]

buy intel video cards

Oh? Where can I buy offboard Intel video cards?

Re:So buy intel video cards

[ross.w]

Try playing Quake 4 on an Intel Video card. Let us know how you get on.

Re:So buy intel video cards

[h4rr4r]

Then you might as well use the closed source driver. This does not change their position on that.

Re:So buy intel video cards

[PixelSlut]

Try playing Quake 4 on nvidia Fermi using VESA and let me know how you get on. Seriously, for many people out there Quake 4 is just not a reasonable measure of a video chip. I don't play Quake 4 on my Linux machine. If I want to play video games I go fire up the PS3 or plug a monitor into my Windows box and turn it on. I do basically everything else in Linux now. I don't need insane graphics to do it. I need something good enough to run mutter or compiz, and ideally I'd love to have something with KMS support. That's really about it.

how it's handled is the big deal

[DrYak]

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.

Re:No surprise

[ardor]

If you want hardware-accelerated OpenGL without lots of headache in Linux, you want Nvidia.
If you want hardware-accelerated OpenGL that supports more than OpenGL 1.4 (which is an ancient version), you want Nvidia.

ATI/AMD: driver headaches to no end. *Correct* OpenGL code causes kernel freezes, graphics glitches and so on.
Intel: the older GMAs have terrible OpenGL support and are performance-wise in the 90s. The newest GMAs are OK for low-end stuff, but only because they are actually PowerVR SGX chips, and not made by Intel.

Re:Bad move....

[icebraining]

AMD has been providing documentation and sponsoring the free radeonhd drivers. Of course, they can't simply open fglrx - it probably has plenty of third-party code. But it's a nice move.

Why should a company be obliged to open source its drivers so people can use hardware on hardware platforms they have not tested on and therefore do not support? Currently a Solaris hardware platform using products like the XVR series which I have worked on can cost 100's of dollars for a low end 2D card, and yeah that sucks; however, why wouldn't ATI reserve its rights on such platforms to release a workstation-class video card that costs maybe 3/4 the amount of the Sun offering but still costs 5-6x what a desktop version of the same GPU would cost? The only way they can do that is by keeping their drivers proprietary, and if I were them I would do the same thing as a publicly traded company.

And why would we be obliged to buy cards from companies who don't provide open source drivers? Personally, I reserve my right to only buy cards with OSS driver support.