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

Bad move....

[Itninja]

Does Nvidia not know there are literally dozens of Linux users out there clamoring for a stable, high-end gaming environment?

Re:Bad move....

[Sir_Lewk]

They are not discontinuing support for their proprietary driver, just their open source driver, which has always been crap. If you want good 3d performance you can still use (and always should have been using) their proprietary driver.

I know, I know. You were just making a crack about how nobody uses linux...

Re:Bad move....

[Alex Belits]

Nvidia is so far the only company that managed to provide a high-quality proprietary Linux driver for their hardware.
Others either provide high-quality open source drivers (ex: Intel) or crappy proprietary drivers (AMD/ATI).

So dozens or not, Nvidia is doing fine as far as Linux-using gamers are concerned. Developers, on the other hand, could use a less hostile stance on documentation and vendor support of open drivers.

Re:Bad move....

[ashridah]

Just to make this anecdote war complete: I used to have an nvidia 285-based card. Ran perfectly, stable, no issues. Eventually, it passes it's used by date, and releases the magic smoke (case was on the hot side)

I replaced it with an ati card: a HIS 5970, high end video card:
Framerate issues in l4d2 after a level change
Frequent hangs/crashes of the video system
Drivers that blue screen the system during installation
Drivers that can't upgrade to the next version without a full uninstall, boot to safe mode, and wipe using a driver cleaner
Horrible flickering in GTA4 when shadows are turned on.
And to cap it all off, the performance with a built-in-sli card is WORSE than the old 285 i used to have!

(yeah, okay, it's windows for both, but the exact same system was 100% stable with one, and not with the other, the only difference being the card and the drivers.)
I see your anecdote, and raise you one "surprise, both sides have issues, that's not what this story is about"

Re:Bad move....

[Antique Geekmeister]

I know at least 200 CGI artists whose IT department would love to switch to Linux and use economically affordable but quite powerful NVidia cards, and a desktop vendor who lost the sale because they couldn't legally pre-install the NVidia drivers nor rely on the NVidia setups to remain stable. The NVidia installer moves aside OpenGL libraries and replaces them: any software updates that accidentally include fresh OpenGL libraries break the NVidia setup.

They're testing ATI based video cards right now to try and close the deal.

Re:Bad move....

[h4rr4r]

The ATI drivers are coming right along and the intel ones are pretty darn good these days.

Re:Bad move....

[hairyfeet]

When was the last time you used them in Windows...1997? It certainly hasn't been since they were bought by AMD, because ever since AMD took over their drivers have been solid as a rock. Hell I am typing this on a quad core AMD with a 4650 and an ATI TV Tuner, and damned if even the TV Tuner isn't stable as hell, and those things are NEVER stable!

So I would say give them another try. You can buy a 4xxx series card for under $50 (I bought this 1Gb 4650 for $36 after rebate) and the thing is quiet as a church mouse and gives me a real nice picture and hardware accelerated everything. you really can't beat the "bang for the buck" in the AMD camp these days. And since AMD is releasing the full specs I'm sure the AMD drivers will get nothing but better in Linux.

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

[stoanhart]

I don't understand why people are upset about this. Linux isn't being treated any lesser here; in fact, this is the same strategy they have on Windows. If you stick an nVidia card into an XP machine with no drivers, you get VESA which you use to go to nvidia.com to download the real drivers. Sure, Vista/7 ships with drivers, and so could Linux if the GPL didn't prohibit it. Besides, Nouveau is better than nv, so the driver is redundant.

This decision has no impact on games or on people using 3D software as the parent has suggested in his comment, since the nv driver had no 3D capability anyways. Development is continuing on nVidia's high quality 3D driver. There is no reason to vote with you wallet.

Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[h4rr4r]

Nouveau driver will work for those folks. The only reason they are killing nv it seems is because the Nouveau driver is actually better than nv.

Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[Bruce Perens]

Let's not forget that nVidia sued, then purchased at a discount, then killed 3Dfx, the first company to create a fully Open Source stack for 3D hardware. You can still find their "Glide" stack, there's a Debian package for it, but the hardware isn't produced any longer.

Intel and ATI find this a worthwhile market, especially because the technical workstation market is insisting on Linux and supportable (meaning Open Source) full-performance drivers for all hardware. Gamers are a useful market but not the only market that 3D vendors play to these days.

If you asked me what was the reason for this, I'd guess it was collusion.

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:Be sure to vote with your wallet

[Kjella]

They don't have to support an open source driver. If they would just publish specs the community could take care of implementing them.

1) You assume that there's a ready set of PDFs that could be uploaded somewhere. There's not, there's actually a mess of various documentation mixed in with tons of internal notes, foreign IP, trade secrets and stuff that was fixed in the driver and commented there but isn't really in a separate document at all. AMD has put a helluva lot of effort in creating a process to produce the documentation and get formal signoff from lawyers, technical experts and executives that this information is safe to release. Often they've given up on documentation and found it's easier to produce a clean code snippet and get that through the review - it's far from a trivial process.

2) Since it's normally a one-to-one hardware-driver combination, things get redone. A lot. Many things are simply removed and replaced by software, kind of like winmodems. It's not like you build a OpenGL 2.0 driver and next generation you have a working 2.0 driver on 3.0 hardware, you have to keep up with the changes to get any hardware support at all. It wouldn't be entirely impossible to do it from specs alone, but it would be difficult. In practice you need people in the project or available to the project to answer questions, correct documentation and work with the internal driver/hardware team. And/or possibly have some sort of NDA program in addition to the public specs, but all of this takes time and effort which equals money.

3) The community is quite frankly not that big. At last headcount there was about a dozen working on the AMD source drivers, of which three are AMD employees. I've heard Bridgman say they use 2-3% of the effort on Linux despite accounting for 1% of the sales, so a back-of-the-napkin calculation says the internal driver team is something like 100 people. With complete access to all the documentation including on unreleased products, the hardware designers, hardware simulators, early engineering samples and so on. So on top of all their other disadvantages, the community is vastly outnumbered. Not to dispute that they could do a lot more specs than without, just that there's a lot more missing than specs.

Re:First

[sys.stdout.write]

Wow, you've managed to fail time-wise, humor-wise, and punctuation-wise! :-)

Whoops, didn't read your signature. I meant "humour."

This isn't a big deal

[JoeBuck]

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).

nVidia also ran?

[headkase]

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.

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:And yet they're still the only cards... WRONG!

[malloc]

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?

Re:So buy intel video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks as good as on an ATI/Nvidia card so far...
Hang on.. frame 2 is coming up.. yup still looks good.

So what happens to HPC with NVIDIA cards?

[ClickOnThis]

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?

Re:So what happens to HPC with NVIDIA cards?

[TeXMaster]

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?

Exactly the same as before: you use the proprietary driver, like you had to do before this annoucement anyway. And in fact, Linux has been supported better than Windows as an HPC platform by nvidia.

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:So buy intel video cards

[MightyYar]

Or that any graphics intensive games will work with.

Games... right... wasn't this a Linux discussion? Games threads belong in discussions attached to Mac stories!

Re:So buy intel video cards

[ozmanjusri]

Mono is safe. Stop spreading this BS.

Microsoft has a history of trying to sell Linux-relevant patents to trolls and of using third-party proxies to attack Linux.

Microsoft has not changed its hostility towards Linux or open formats. Mono MAY be safe, but don't use it for infrastructure projects. Don't encourage the use of Microsoft-sponsored formats or protocols.

Mono is best used as a solely Windows compatibility tool.