Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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()!
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.
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).
Well, Linux users might be multiplicators: Many of them are technology affine and therefore their family and friends might ask them for hardware recommendations. So if the Linux user only uses Intel or ATI (s)he'll hardly recommend nVidia cards to their family and friends, not? So probably nVidia managment needs to go back to business school and learn the maths.
Are you considering graphics cards as gaming accessories or graphics cards as parallel math coprocessors for the medium-end number crunching on a budget market? If you consider the latter then drivers for graphics card, which bring support for OpenCL, will make linux a worthwhile market segment. Where do you find people crunching numbers? Windows? OSX? No. All the cool kids crunch numbers with linux.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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 ]
There are 3 drivers for nVidia cards:
Since Nouveau is becoming mature enough to be the default nVidia driver in distros now (Fedora was the first, as far as I know), it is not really a loss to see support for the "nv" driver dropped.
The issue with that statement is that you're not looking for Linux users as the multiplier, you're looking for open source zealots.
The nVidia drivers on linux are miles ahead of anything else on the platform in terms of quality vs features supported. For the most part, and excluding the brief periods after the kernel devs get frisky and change the driver APIs again, they just work, as well or better than any other Linux video driver and they provide a greater depth of features than any competing card or driver. This has been the case for more than 10 years now.
ATI has equally good cards, but god awful proprietary drivers and no 3d support in the open source onces. Intel has full support in their drivers, but their cards are a joke. The only way in which either of these companies beats nVidia's performance on Linux is that nVidia's drivers are not open source.
So your "Linux Users" has to be culled to "Linux Users who care more about ideology than functionality", not an insignificant group, but not as large as the first. Then you take into account that most normal people largely ignore the opinions of wide eyed zealots no matter their stripe, and the effect is limited again.
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.
hello? nvidia is a publicly traded company who is in this to make money. they're not a person. I'll bet dollars to donuts that supporting this open source driver costs more money than it generates. Most of the linux users who truly care about open source 3d drivers should be on intel already anyway.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
How much time does it take to publish the source code of their currently closed binary blob? Nobody asks them to write a different driver that they could open-source, as that would be silly.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.