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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
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.
Wow, you've managed to fail time-wise, humor-wise, and punctuation-wise! :-)
Whoops, didn't read your signature. I meant "humour."
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).
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.
I have an PC connected to my TV with HDMI, it uses an intel X4500HD. What exactly is the issue with TV support you are having?
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.
Used to run 9.10 now runs 10.04. Only thing I had to do was switch the audio output to digital.
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.
Are you telling me other card makers have even worse solutions than Xinerama for multi screen setups?
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
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()!
I assume he means S-Video out, although I'm not sure what problem he's having; S-Video works fine on the Intel GM965 on my laptop.
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?
Do your homework.
When you find a really good video card that does 3D well in Linux without proprietary drivers, please let us know.
Only we won't be holding our breath.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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.
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...
Whoops, didn't read your signature. I meant "humour."
I think you meant "humour", humour does regularly not have a full stop in it. I mean, your joke about British English falls flat when you use American punctuation guidelines. Punctuation marks are kept outside quotations in British English, my friend. Why? Because it makes sense.
Though to be fair; it falls flat to me. Because I only focus on details like the jerk I am.
Clicked pie.
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
Will do - next time.
For now I have Radeon with 2D only.
S-Video works fine on the Intel GM965 on my laptop.
Only if you want non-accelerated graphics, which doesn't work so well for playing back video.
You dont know what you are talking about. At best the binary blob "supports" a limited subset of linux-based systems, and even that not properly. You may find it "works well" for you on your specific setup, and you may be myopic enough to not care about anyone or anything else, but fortunately not everyone is so short-sighted. To properly support a free system requires that the actual software (NOT a derivative blob) be available and free as well. To properly support linux specifically means to comply with the requirements of the kernel team so that the driver appears in the kernel tree and is maintained as part of the kernel. A binary blob has never and will never constitute support, period.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
luckily, linux had 64bit support in the 20th century
I could get a decent quad core computer/dual core 64-bit laptop with decent hardware for the price of your license (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx) and I could even get an Apple machine if I add your hardware, your Server version and whatever you plunked down for your desktop license together.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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)
The 2.6.32 kernel fixes the HDMI TV detection for 720p resolution on intel chips. Everything else works great for me in intel world (using Gentoo x64 stable).
13.5.1 In American usage printers usually place a period or comma inside closing quotation marks whether it belongs logically to the quoted matter or to the whole sentence or context.... But when a logical or exact distinction is desired in specialized work in which clarity is more important than usual (as in this dictionary), a period or comma can be placed outside quotation marks when it belongs not in the quoted matter but to a larger unit containing the quoted matter. The package is labeled "Handle with Care".
You're right :)
Karnal
My Aspire One suspends and resumes perfectly. There's an Intel GPU in there. I project from it all of the time. NTSC TV out? My hardware doesn't do it. But all of my NTSC monitors are gone, except for one on an inspection microscope.
Bruce Perens.
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.
my AMD 3650 suspends just fine, and is very functional under Linux. I'm not sure how they can have "no functional support at all". On my laptop, with an Intel gpu, it suspends and hibernates just fine, so I'm not sure how that is primitive. Feel free to explain what you mean.
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 ]
Uhm, I don't know about you, but I have been using an Intel card for years and the problems you mentioned were solved around 2005.
Palm trees and 8
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.
I have the same issue (forcing digital audio output).
I must ask, as I have not yet found a solution: Have you been able to get a "mic-in" port microphone (as opposed to a USB mic) working under ubuntu?
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 used the gui tool to select the digital audio out.
I have not tried the mic-in port since doing this change but I used it before. You need to make sure you select "Digital output + analog input" I think.
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.
Quit it with the FUD. nVidia has given an unofficial agreement that they won't interfere with nouveau, and now that most of the code is kernel-side, there are some quality legal teams ready to defend the code if necessary.
~ C.
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 just put Gentoo Linux on my little Asus 1001HA netbook this week and I discovered to my amazement that I could drop the uvesafb driver because the Intel one support Kernel Setting Mode right from the word go - so my system boots in a 1024x600 framebuffer console just like that.
Presumably this has all happened because Intel supported the code going into the Kernel in the first place - I think NVidia could learn something from them...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I do not buy Nvidia cards. I meant for the folks that do. I currently buy only intel graphics hardware. Once ATI has good opensource 3d support I will buy a card just to support them.
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!
Wait until you try loading Linux on a Toshiba laptop that has a widescreen lcd that is 1440x900 on an integrated Intel chipset. X dies a miserable death when it attempts to autodetect. VESA goes down in flames as well. Nothing but white, black and gray vertical lines the entire way across the screen when attempting to detect the proper resolution.
I've tried REHL, Puppy, DSL, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, XUbuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva.
Failure every single time. I gave up and went back to using Vista.
And no, none of the Intel driver packages worked.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
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.
I assume you mean the GMA 500. It worked for you. Congratulations. The rest of us aren't as fortunate. Forget suspend and resume. Just being able to change the screen brightness would be nice.
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
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.
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?
Aspire Ones are mostly GMA950-based, as far as I know...
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.
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
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.
Yeah, I selected that "Analog input"both mono and stereo. No dice.
I guess I need to decide whether to spring for a USB headset/mic or to just yank out the audigy and use the onboard sound...
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.
Insightful observation.
And yeah, I agree. The American system for this is far inferior to the rest of the world. It's almost as bad as not using metric...