Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Goes Stable On Linux

An anonymous reader writes "The open source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered incarnation of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver for Linux, has reached its biggest milestone. The Nouveau driver is now being considered stable within the Linux kernel and leaving the staging area, with the pledge of a stable ABI. Phoronix has summarized the state of the Nouveau driver, which works fine if you don't care about performance or are fine with running hardware that's a few generations old."

Comments

"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this is kind of off, but still interesting and related as this was work done by reverse engineering. How do you reverse engineer on Linux, or other UNIX systems like OS X and BSD? Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG, but seems there's just no such things available for Linux or UNIX. The problem isn't even about using console programs, it's about showing the debugging process and being able to put breakpoints.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Development
I'm no engineer, not even a reverse engineer, but I'd probably start with a bus analyzer, gdb, and follow some kernel/driver debugging lists.
Dear reader, feel free to tell me how wrong this approach is.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[cheater512]

strace, gdb, etc...

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, IDA is available on Linux.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't reverse engineer the code, we reverse engineer what is sent to the card. Linux can dump everything going through the PCIE bus, that's the so-called mmiotrace.

We only reverse engineer by taking the binary driver as a blackbox, sending commands and seeing what comes out.

Martin Peres - Nouveau developper

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, keep up the great work. I love Nouveau.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...If you are Mr Peres, why don't you have an account instead of posting AC? After all both Eric Raymond and even Linus Torvalds has accounts, even if Linus naturally hasn't got the time to use his much.

Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?

If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?

Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, DMCA only fits if they actually implemented some type of protection scheme which may or may not be the case. In either case, this does not apply at all as the DRM isn't being broken. The blackbox driver is working as intended and not taken apart in any way, it's like trying to see how a car works without actually taking it apart by systematically doing what you normally would do anyways and recording it's response.

Instead of running a program that sends a large set of commands to the driver and having it returns random responses, you send 1 specific command at a time and recording each response so you are able to reproduce it in their own driver.

What they are doing, is basically mapping the interface (doorway as you will) to the blackbox driver. An interface can not be copyrighted (this has some precedence in court rulings and is done often like emulators). It's only illegal once you start copying either parts of the source code or machine code. If you copy the outside, the inside really doesn't matter in the greater scheme (though of course there are issues of performances and driver specific bugs)

Yes, this is an insane amount of work and these people should be respected greatly especially if they are not being paid to help improve linux.

(Different Anon)

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[phantomfive]

Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG

Real programmers use od.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Forever Wondering]

Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?

What nouveau development does is feed data through the API and look at the I/O ports and what data they get. The developers are feeding data they "own" [e.g. the address of a frame buffer they created] and then retrieving it after it is transmuted. Virtually all devices in a system (e.g. disk controllers, etc.) have a port list so just having that is not novel (i.e. not patentable). Since nVidia isn't publishing a document on the port list, no copyright either. Might be claimed as a proprietary trade secret, but it's okay to reverse engineer in this manner [reverse engineer is a protected activity under the right "clean room" circumstances].

The "clean room" methodology has been court tested many times. In this instance, we have three groups that do not communicate, except in controlled ways. Group A does the above "port probing" and writes a document of their findings. Group B writes an API document using only Group A's report. Group C uses the API document generated by Group B to write the device driver code.

If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?

No doubt nVidia has a license to H.264 patents. Under the exhaustion doctrine, anyone can benefit from using the API to output H.264 video. If that were not the case, any end user [even using nVidia's proprietary driver], would be required to pay H.264 patent licensing fees. Likewise for the use of one's home entertainment system.

However, that doesn't mean some folks don't try. Lodsys [a patent troll] licensed a patent to Apple. Apple incorporated the technology under an API that software developers can use. Lodsys has been trying to extract license fees from all software developers that use the Apple API. Apple is intervening in court to stop Lodsys using the exhaustion doctrine as the basis for their challenge against Lodsys in defense of the developers.

Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.

It's not so much the patent mess (as I mentioned above), but rather the difficulty of deducing the port list, API doc, etc. using the clean room method. The 2D case is [relatively] easy enough. The 3D case [with a large number of acceleration modes, etc.] is a lot more work, many more test cases, etc. Sheer scope of such an undertaking is the biggest limiting factor.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[mupuf]

Ok, I created an account. It will be simpler for others to follow. Comparing me to Linus or Eric Raymond is really over-the-top. I'm just a PhD student who has been working on power management in nouveau for little more than 1.5 years.

Anyway, the answers to your post are right, clean-room REing is legal. The shady part is for the firmwares that you have to decode in order to re-implement them. Fortunately, we know nvidia used a compiler to compile them. As we write them in asm only and don't use the same interface, I guess we are pretty covered.

As for video decoding, nVidia though about us and added a "safe" for the encryption keys. So yes, we can re-implement video decoding (it is an on-going work, but it's ugly) but the compliance with hdcp will never come.

As for software patents, we do our best not to do things covered by them but sometimes we have to. In this case, we think about the sane countries that could benefit our code (most of them are "sane" ;)).

Lastly, nVidia said they would neither help nor hinder the project. If there is something they don't like, I'm sure they will let us know before going to court. If they wanted to go to the court, that would be one hell of a pain since they would have to sue individuals from many countries, mostly european.
Most of us are students, that would be bad PR to sue us :D

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Joce640k]

Sorry, this is kind of off, but still interesting and related as this was work done by reverse engineering. How do you reverse engineer on Linux, or other UNIX systems like OS X and BSD? Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG, but seems there's just no such things available for Linux or UNIX. The problem isn't even about using console programs, it's about showing the debugging process and being able to put breakpoints.

Even if that was true... couldn't you do the reverse engineering on a Windows machine?

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Alex Belits]

Congratulations, you are an idiot!

On Linux, you have a small piece of proprietary software running on an open source system entirely controlled by the developer. Most of reverse engineering is non-interactive, by running a driver/hardware combination while its interactions are watched by other software.

On Windows, everything but your own code is proprietary, including reverse-engineering tools themselves, and you have no way to modify most of the environment or include any kind of automated logging. You are pretty much forced to single-step through giant blobs while watching disassembled code in a multitude of little windows.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Alex Belits]

Shut up, hairyfeet, you are supposed to write pages and pages about horrors of not having a single unchanging ABI for kernel drivers, so poor proprietary drivers developers can write shit drivers.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll grant you IDA's superiority, but after working with gdb for a while I can never go back to ollydbg. The learning curve is a bit steep, but gdb is just so much more flexible, especially with its Python scriptability.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[freedumb2000]

Have you tried Emacs?

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Forever Wondering]

Ok, I created an account. It will be simpler for others to follow. Comparing me to Linus or Eric Raymond is really over-the-top. I'm just a PhD student who has been working on power management in nouveau for little more than 1.5 years.

I'm not hairyfeet that you did the reply to. But, since you referenced info from my post in your reply to his, I'm assuming you just tried to consolidate things. One of the advantages to having an account is that your posts start at level 1 (vs 0 for AC) and people are more likely to "mod you up" and improve your "karma" if you post as yourself (or even a pseudonym as I and many others do--slashdot!=facebook). Eventually, if your karma goes high enough, your posts automatically start at level 2.

Anyway, the answers to your post are right, clean-room REing is legal. The shady part is for the firmwares that you have to decode in order to re-implement them. Fortunately, we know nvidia used a compiler to compile them. As we write them in asm only and don't use the same interface, I guess we are pretty covered.

I was familiar with clean room because I was once part of such a project. I was aware nVidia drivers had parts that they considered to be "secret sauce" algorithms (and ATI didn't?). From what you said, I'm assuming it was the firmware which must be loaded onto the card?

As for video decoding, nVidia though about us and added a "safe" for the encryption keys. So yes, we can re-implement video decoding (it is an on-going work, but it's ugly) but the compliance with hdcp will never come.

I'm only vaguely familiar with the requirements for HDCP compliance, but I'm guessing that safeguarding keys is part of it. So, my assumption is that nVidia needed to do that, in general, rather than to specifically make it difficult for the nouveau project.

Perhaps, the libdvdcss approach by players will work. The players don't have de-CSS capabilities themselves, but they do look around for the lib. If it "happens to be around" (e.g. liability is shifted to the end user who downloaded it separately), they will use it.

Lastly, nVidia said they would neither help nor hinder the project. If there is something they don't like, I'm sure they will let us know before going to court. If they wanted to go to the court, that would be one hell of a pain since they would have to sue individuals from many countries, mostly european.

I'm a software engineer who writes drivers for realtime H.264 hardware encoders. The company's take on this was that the card itself was the protection of the "secret sauce". The drivers were merely conduits to that. The amount of engineering to design logic, verify it, layout the chip, get it fabbed, etc. is so huge, that the driver is a relatively small part of it. In other words, you always need the card, so everything else is protected without needing specific protection of its own.

Another assurance for nVidia is that they know how slow going the RE is, compared to what they can do. They'll always be several steps ahead, no matter what. So, nouveau is no "threat" to them. The only people they're really concerned about are competitors like AMD/ATI and Intel that make HW.

Broadcom used to have the same philosophy for their wireless chip driver. In particular, no linux driver of any kind. The only way to get it to work was to use the windows driver with a glue interface. There was a native FOSS driver done, but you still had to extract the firmware from the windows driver. Finally, after years and years [and realizing that linux was no mere fad], Broadcom relented and produced a binary driver for linux and actually split off the firmware into a separate file. The irony in all this was that Broadcom had been using embedded linux internally on their chips/cards for years.

Most of us are students, that would be bad PR to sue us :D

Be thankful you're in Europe. In the US, the RIAA has been known to sue widows and orphans :-)

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[phantomfive]

Is there a way to read a binary dump (or better yet, disassemble it into assembly) using emacs?

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Alex Belits]

My whole point is, most of reverse engineering on open source platforms does not involve interactive debuggers.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[mupuf]

I was familiar with clean room because I was once part of such a project. I was aware nVidia drivers had parts that they considered to be "secret sauce" algorithms (and ATI didn't?). From what you said, I'm assuming it was the firmware which must be loaded onto the card?

I'm only vaguely familiar with the requirements for HDCP compliance, but I'm guessing that safeguarding keys is part of it. So, my assumption is that nVidia needed to do that, in general, rather than to specifically make it difficult for the nouveau project.

Perhaps, the libdvdcss approach by players will work. The players don't have de-CSS capabilities themselves, but they do look around for the lib. If it "happens to be around" (e.g. liability is shifted to the end user who downloaded it separately), they will use it.

In other words, you always need the card, so everything else is protected without needing specific protection of its own.

My answer to all that is that nVidia cards are mostly software nowadays (except for the real rendering/computing core). Nvidia uses a common ISA for most engines. It was reversed engineered when Fermi was out and took more than a year before we wrote our core firmwares by ourselves. I'm currently writing the hardware monitoring firmware as a first experience with this ISA.

These firmwares execute on harvard "microcontrolers" and all have some special capabilities depending on the engine they run on.

The firmwares themselves aren't secure at all and aren't meant to be anyway. However, some "memory pages" can be marked as secret so as you can't access them from the host unless you know the "password". I never studied this part, if you are interested, you can read what has already been documented: https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/fuc-vm.txt

In the end, the card itself isn't particularly needed since it is mostly software and we should be able to fake many things. But what's the point of hdcp anyway?

Another assurance for nVidia is that they know how slow going the RE is, compared to what they can do. They'll always be several steps ahead, no matter what. So, nouveau is no "threat" to them. The only people they're really concerned about are competitors like AMD/ATI and Intel that make HW.

Right, by the time the hw is shipped, nVidia doesn't worry anymore about their secrets. Nouveau is thus not a problem for them. However, yesterday, the 3d driver for Kepler was released, less than a month after the release of the first Kepler GPU. Some people in the Nouveau really are in-human :D

Be thankful you're in Europe. In the US, the RIAA has been known to sue widows and orphans :-)

Yeah, the US is always crazy about IP. Can't wait for the whole damn thing be to reformed to be friendlier with those who really do make the country go forward.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Minwee]

Oh, that's easy. M-x reverse-engineer-video-driver-mode

I use it all the time.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[hairyfeet]

I wasn't trying to compare you to make some sort of value judgement and if that offended it was not my intent, I was simply pointing out that by having someone associated with a project have their own slashdot account it not only makes it easier to ask questions and to see your posts (since ACs are automatically placed at 0 instead of 1 to a normal non trolling account) but that it keeps people from not knowing whether they are dealing with the real deal or a troll.

Now as for whether REing in this particular case would be legal i have to wonder because as far as I know while REing is of course perfectly legal when it comes to hardware I've never heard of software being covered by this ruling. the thing that worries me about this case (which you can see if you read the case of Jazz Photo V USITC when it comes to exhaustion doctrine since the USA uses a "territorial exhaustion doctrine" ) which may or may not apply if you are not based in the USA depending on how you want to read it (frankly just trying to read legalese gives me a migraine) so the question as to whether the rights Nvidia bought to H.264 would cover your project or not is debatable.

Of course none of this would matter if we are only talking about Nvidia because after AMD opened up the specs i seriously doubt they would outright attack FOSS and risk all those workstation and HPC sales. But the real elephant in the room is how you are gonna support H.264, which is quickly becoming the de facto ruler of web video, without stepping into that whole H.264 patent minefield? After all from what we have seen MPEG-LA can be VERY aggressive when it comes to its patents, and from a glance at their patents its gonna be pretty damned hard to do anything with H.264 without tripping on their patents.

So I wish you nothing but luck, I can't even imagine how insanely difficult it must be to use clean room REing to try to gain control over something as complex as a modern GPU but I hope you have a lawyer you can talk to about the legal implications when you get closer to feature parity thanks to the H.264 minefield. Of course if the rumors are true that H.265 will have DRM by default the entire thing might be moot anyway as its a DMCA violation to even attempt to circumvent DRM even if its just to allow the user to use what they have paid for. But I wish you luck, with something so insanely complicated and powerful you are gonna have an incredibly difficult road ahead, i only wish that legal issues didn't even need to be considered. Kinda sad that the USA used to be a hotbed of innovation and now its pretty much SOP to be based in China or the EU or anywhere BUT the USA just to stay out of the copyrights and patents minefields.

On a final note your comment about "sane countries"? Remember ICE can get you pretty much anywhere on the planet as megaupload found out. If things keep going the way they have been frankly I'd probably just block USA IP addresses if it were me, I wouldn't want to take the risk of getting my door kicked in because some corp got their panties in a wad.

Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation"

[Anonymous Coward]

You and your comment are the garbage.

Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[jrminter]

The latest version on Ubuntu 12.04 beta2 doesn't cut it on my hardware. I am thankful for Nvidia's support of Linux.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[GrumpyOldMan]

Besides spotty hardware supprt, AFAIK it is also missing VDPAU (HD video decoding) support, which is the main reason a lot of HTPC types use Nvidia cards in their linux machines. It is also fairly hard to remove. I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.

As a Linux (and other *nix) driver guy, I have tons of respect for how Nvidia deals with the constant, gratuitous changes in the Linux kernel APIs.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[jrminter]

I could not agree more. Nvidia has been very responsive.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not remove the driver, dumbass!

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[drinkypoo]

I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.

Or you could have blacklisted nouveau and rebooted, which would have taken about thirty seconds plus the reboot time. However, it IS offensive that you have to do this.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[Bert64]

Having open source drivers in the kernel is better for 99% of people...

If you are a user, things are more likely to work out of the box, your hardware will be more widely supported and is likely to continue working for a lot longer.

If you are a developer then you can fix bugs in the drivers, and make improvements to the system without being constrained by needing compatibility with an old abi (note even microsoft have changed their driver abi several times, because what seemed sensible 10 years ago no longer does)...

If you are a hardware manufacturer then open source drivers means wider support for your hardware, translating to more sales.

The reasons some manufacturers have for not releasing open drivers are generally detrimental to users, eg..
forced obsolescence - drivers no longer available, forcing you to buy new hardware.
something to hide in the driver code
something to hide in the hardware that would become obvious with open drivers
driver contains third party code they cannot open source
a paranoid desire to "maintain control'
drm schemes (which will get cracked sooner or later anyway)

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[allo]

they don't plan to support it, yet.
When wayland is the way to go, they will adapt their driver. But they will not create a driver for beta versions of a maybe successor of X.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[diego.viola]

But can they? I mean legally.

IIRC there was some legal issues with them using some things from the kernel, like KMS, and doesn't Wayland requires that?

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[Hatta]

I just switched back to the proprietary driver, because Nouveau doesn't control my fan's speed, and can't adjust brightness contrast. All it took was removing the driver with apt-get, putting nomodeset back in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, and running the nVidia installer again. 5 minutes, tops.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[allo]

i do not know about this problem.

My information was, that nvidia said when asked some time ago, they do not have plans to support wayland at the moment.
Which is quite logical, as there are too little users of wayland to encourage anyone to update his drivers for wayland. When wayland is THE graphics system on every distribution, i bet there will be nvidia drivers.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[diego.viola]

Agree completely.

Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware...

[rdnetto]

I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.

I'm curious why it took you this long. It took me a total of 5 minutes, and this was the first time I'd even used Debian (previously used Ubuntu and its derivatives exclusively) - just searched for the relevant package and removed it.

Ironically I ended up reinstalling it because the non-free binary drivers for my card don't support 3.0.x kernels.

Or if you care about free software...

[Narcocide]

Which I do, but I also care about performance. I've found myself having to switch back and forth between it and the propreitary Nvidia driver on some machines.

Re:Or if you care about free software...

[Carewolf]

Summary is wrong. The nouveau driver is several orders of magnitude FASTER than the proprietary driver.. Well, for 2D acceleration. It is quite slower for 3D, but I don't really play games on Linux, so 2D is more important to me.

The nouveau driver really solves he Achilles heel of NVidia on Linux. 2D performance.

Re:Or if you care about free software...

[diego.viola]

Exactly, 2D rocks with Nouveau, 3D is gradually getting faster with each Linux release.

Re:Or if you care about free software...

[Narcocide]

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage

Maybe this?

Or this perhaps: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/HardwareStatus

From what I've read 2D *is* faster for many of the cards but not all, and only notably so for the older ones that Nvidia has shuffled off to their "legacy" driver. 3D, from what I have heard, does not work at all on most cards, and is massively slower across the board on the few older cards for which there is some minimal support working thus far.

Maybe my information is out-dated now but I would say if you have archaic Nvidia hardware (AGP-era and earlier) then this driver may be a breath of fresh air for you as far as features (KMS support, woo-woo!) and 2D application performance. For all other purposes... eh, I'd say the future of this project shows promise but it could use some generosity from Nvidia of the same sort they provided for the forcedeth ethernet driver.

Re:incredibly bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to go guys.. you've now given Nvidia massive disincentive to continue to do more work with their MODERN drivers.

Competition is usually a motivation to improve rather than stagnate.

Wouldn't be at all surprised to see things like VDPAU and CUDA recieve even more attention from Nvidia. Maybe even features like KMS might happen now...

Re:incredibly bad move

[Sasayaki]

Not dismissing what's obviously a pretty daunting technical challenge, but still. The problem is...

Why would you buy a $250 3D Nvidia card if you didn't care about performance?

Cool project

[gatkinso]

Sometimes causes me headaches when trying to develop CUDA projects... but all in all a wonderful thing for 95% of the Linus user base. Spock would approve.

I only wish Ubuntu didn't ram it down my throat.

Re:incredibly bad move

[sheehaje]

Which is why open source drivers should be discredited everywhere. Because it can be done, but at a disservice to everyone...

Why scratch an itch when the manufactures will stand up eventually and do the right thing? /end sarcasm

Nothng but Hate

[goodgod43]

It's amazing to me that there is so much flame out there for this. None of you could do this, Not a single one of you have tried, and yet, this small group of dedicated people have actually figured out a piece of proprietary hardware to the point of having their code included in the Linux kernel? Way to go guys.

Re:Nothng but Hate

[ghn]

+1 to you. Congrats to the Nouveau developers. That is a major accomplishment.

Re:Nothng but Hate

[Daniel Phillips]

It's amazing to me that there is so much flame out there for this.

Not from real people, it's just trolls.

Re:Nothng but Hate

[pankkake]

Yep. People who will never be users or contributors, not matter what they say. They're here because they don't do anything meaningful with their lives, so they have to undermine the work of others.

The only winning move is to ignore them.

Re:Nothng but Hate

[bill_mcgonigle]

Agreed. I briefly ran a mostly current Nouveau on my work desktop when I updated to Fedora 16, and everything auto-detected and came up nicely.

This was shortly before I pulled the PCIe card out because the Radeon driver finally works too with my display, and now supports the AMD APU I bought last June.

The only thing I acutally want at this point is lower power consumption, by utilizing as much silicon as possible (which will also help the gamers). Functionality seems to finally be mature at least! Sure, I have 2008 performance but that's all I need.

It's not a revolution, but it's one checkbox for the revolution.

Re:Nothng but Hate

[drinkypoo]

I wouldn't flame about it — it's cool that it exists — but I wish they would spend their time focused on problems that actually need solving, like support for (original) Xbox graphics. Every so often someone contributes some work on it, and from the comments it looks like it's ALMOST there, but not quite. But meanwhile they're working on drivers for cards that already have official support! That cheeses me off slightly. Not so much that I would actually create a comment and complain about it if there weren't already a thread about complaining about it, though.

You can be impressed and dismayed at the same time, it's called ambivalence

Software freedom trumps proprietorship every time.

[jbn-o]

Software freedom is important for its own sake. You're better off with a less functional free implementation than a more powerful and reliable proprietary implementation in numerous practical ways programmers and users have known for decades.

If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all. Proprietors control your computer and tell you what you can do with it. Free software gives you the freedom to control your own computer. One can learn to program and understand the Nouveau source code: maintain the code to work on more OSes and work with more hardware, free from the fear of DRM (digital restrictions management). If you're not a programmer, like most computer users aren't, you can still help the effort by giving programmers what they need to help you in return. Often that's money, equipment, good bug reports, documentation translations, and writing documentation for the software.

We're better off relying on each other in freedom than we are depending on a proprietor. Socially, we can't build a better future for ourselves by relying on secret software. We should be allowed to fully own and control our computers and we'll get there with software freedom.

Nvidia should have told their customers how to fully use the equipment they sold. Nouveau hackers are remedying that deficiency. I'm grateful for the valuable work Nouveau hackers are doing for all of us.

Re:incredibly bad move

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They are presently suffering togetherness issues on both fronts(Intel because Intel denied them authorization to build any QPI chipsets, AMD because AMD now owns ATI...); but Nvidia shoved a pretty significant number of integrated graphics chipsets out the door in the past few years. For a while, they more or less were the embedded graphics option for AMD boards, and they presented a fairly persuasive offer on the Intel side, given the dire state of Intel graphics.

That's quite a few performance-insensitive Nvidia parts in the world, in addition to the discrete ones, which usually indicate some level of interest in performance, or at least driving a greater-than-default number of heads...

Tegra

[tepples]

2) buy someone elses (likely)

And this is what NVIDIA has done. NVIDIA bought a license for ARM's CPU and built the Tegra SoC around it.

now all thats left to do

[nimbius]

is design a time machine to go back three years and peddle this afterthought to the linux community, just as theyre putting the finishing touches on a workable desktop video driver for AMD cards that supports HDMI.
then nvidia can hop back in and take a trip 5 years back, and fix the problem with faulty chips they just decided to ship and apologize for as an afterthought.

while we're fidgeting with the knobs in our video card tardis of sorts, we can shuffle on back to the point in nvidia history when despite overwhelming support by AMD for 64 bit linux, nvidia decided 32 bit was all they were getting.

Re:incredibly bad move

[gmack]

The last time someone came up with a replacement for an Nvidia driver was for the ethernet drivers and Nvdia ended up discontinuing their own and contributing to the open source driver instead. If this happens again we are all better off.

Why all the hate /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously guys why all the hate? Sure it doesn't work for everyone, it works on old hardware. But here's the deal, it works and is sufficient for day to day use. Here's the amazing and nerdy part of it too, they REVERSE ENGINEERED IT. Something as complicated as a video card. That's no small feat and they should be congratulated for their efforts to make linux just that much better. Start hating when you contribute something with any significance at all. BTW I'm not a kernel developer, just a nerd that appreciates a feat such as this.

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[chuckymonkey]

Dammit, posted AC. That'll learn me to not log in.

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is people like you that give nerds a bad name. I suppose you also think that it is an accomplishment that Microsoft reverse engineered Apple's OS so it could work on Intel chips. Yeah, Microsoft helped Apple with that. Did you know that? I'll bet you didn't. If it wasn't for Microsoft, Apple would still be in the stone age, using Netscape Navigator which caused the entire computer to crash every 9 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdqgIoOQcfw

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit, posted AC. That'll learn me to not log in.

Yeah I hate it when I accidentally forget to log in, and then accidentally type in a CAPTCHA, and then accidentally click "Submit", and then realize "shit, I forgot to log in!".

Gets me every time.

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[chuckymonkey]

Well, before that I'd honestly never posted AC before :P. I didn't know that the CAPTCHA was just for AC since I post fairly infrequently these days I actually thought it was something new. But when you say it like that, yes it was kinda stupid.

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[tiqui]

The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves

First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:

Install super-buggy and annoying, very slow but ideologically-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow video driver people say usually works as long as you do nothing serious and do not care about performance video driver [x]

I originally thought this project sounded admirable and wished the developers well, but I now despise this driver.

Part of the problem is the oft-cited and completely dishonest use of the word "free" by some open-source advocates. "Freedom" is not, and never should be: "freedom for me to demand that you do things my way". Open source advocates often rant about "freedom", particularly for the users of software... but then they erect completely unnecessary barriers/annoyances to try to manipulate those very same users into only using certain software, or only using it in certain ways. I use Linux precisely because I value my freedom, and that includes my freedom to do anything I want with that software... but that includes one of the most important freedoms of all: running proprietary code. When somebody does something that blocks my use of proprietary code, or prevents that code from doing certain things, or reports proprietary code as "tainted" (an act that serves no legitimate purpose other than to scare less-educated users away from proprietary code) he perverts the very notion of "freedom". Installing a marginal open source driver automatically (without asking at install time) in a manner that makes it just an annoying extra task to get rid of it (and keep it from continually rising from the grave to attack again) is an act that just baits users to hate the auto-installed thing.

I run multiple proprietary and very specialized CAD applications which run perfectly on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia drivers... we get a better user experience on Linux than on Windows (for non-video driver related reasons). With the Nouveau drivers, the applications are essentially unusable, therefore Nouveau harms the reputation of Linux... it makes newer releases of Linux look buggy and in need of manual tweaking and fixing. The Nouveau driver must be manually removed and replaced with real Nvidia drivers that actually work. Then, when the systems auto-update certain components, things break and we have to re-install the proprietary drivers (again, making Linux look buggy, when it never was before). This is a new pain-in-the-butt we never used to have to deal with. Ever since Nouveau went into the build, nearly every IT problem we have (and all the wasted time solving it) is tied directly to the presence of Nouveau. I now want the project to die a fast and painful death.... though I am open to it rising again and re-entering the distros someday when it is fully functional (speed and compatability are a very basic part of functionality). Video drivers are very unlike many other drivers; they can have a critical impact on everything in the system in ways that a printer driver, for example, does not. It's a major screw-up to auto-install a known-bad driver into a system by default. Note: bad in this context means "does not function properly and with the proper speed on all associated hardware" rather than "waaaaahhhhh! the programmers would not give me their source code! waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!"

Fanboys who say the Nouveau drivers work great ( as long as you only do certain things, or only use certain cards, and as long as you do not care about performance, etc... ) should just go back to their e-mail, twitter, and web browsing (and other tasks so simple they can be done on a tablet) and let those of us who need our systems to really work, in a stable manner, with excellent performance, decide when a driver is finally minimally acceptable.

Re:Why all the hate /.?

[causality]

Well, before that I'd honestly never posted AC before :P. I didn't know that the CAPTCHA was just for AC since I post fairly infrequently these days I actually thought it was something new. But when you say it like that, yes it was kinda stupid.

Anyone and I do mean anyone can do a stupid thing. The fact you have a sense of humor about it is strong evidence, in fact proof positive, that you're not a stupid person.

If you were a stupid person you would resent and resist all suggestions that you erred in any way that could be corrected. That is the mark of stupidity. It never admits fault no matter how obvious it may be and never believes it should ever do anything differently. Instead it climbs up on its high horse, acts "hurt" and tries to convince you that you're a terrible person for observing fault. Stupidity and immaturity are interconnected in that sense, for all immature people secretly think of themselves as something like "God", and you don't "blaspheme" "God" or you face "God's" wrath. Their egos are bigger than both their brains and their guts combined in that way.

P.S. I am the original AC. It wouldn't have been as amusing if I made the original post while logged in.

No, nVidia isn't stupid

[Sycraft-fu]

They realize their top notch drivers are a big selling point of their hardware. You'll find more than a couple people who have the opinion that AMD has good graphics hardware, crippled by poor drivers.

nVidia will only discontinue Linux drivers if the market shrinks to such a size that it is no longer worth it. If Linux becomes an "embedded only" OS or something they'll stop. However so long as it is being used a reasonable amount, they'll keep making drivers for it (they also have FreeBSD and Solaris drivers to give you an idea).

Particularly since it is a big market for their GPGPU stuff. When people get a big multi-card Tesla system, they sometimes want to run Linux on it. That is only doable with first flight drivers that have all the features supported, work with the latest hardware, and give up nothing in terms of speed.

Re:No, nVidia isn't stupid

[Daniel Phillips]

Don't forget that render farms are a major franchise for NVidia and Linux pretty much owns that space.

Re:No, nVidia isn't stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running trials of Tesla GPGPU for engineering simulation software. When installing the nVidia proprietary driver for the card on linux, the nouveau driver gets in the way. One has to blacklist the nouveau kernel module for successful installation of the binary nVidia driver.

Re:No, nVidia isn't stupid

[jo_ham]

I see you stopped reading his comment at the first line you reached that caused your neckbeard to chafe in rage because you don't think reading comprehension is important.

Maybe you should *keep reading* the comment.

Awesome!

[starseeker]

I'm using this driver (well, probably a slightly older version of it) with my desktop now, and so far I've been pleasently surprised. I don't need blazing fast performance on 3D for most things. FlightGear/OpenArena level games are about as far as I'm likely to push, since I'm not into the latest and greatest FPS anymore. Given that, the prospect of an integrated driver that "just works" without having to do anything extra is awesome.

My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!

Re:Awesome!

[Daniel Phillips]

My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!

That about the same space I'm in with the open source Radeon driver, except that it's working well on very recent cards. I can still go back to the Catalyst driver any time I want and I will get a (steadily shrinking) throughput boost. But the number of times I bothered to do that in the last 18 months is zero. Instead, I plugged in a newer card and got much bigger boost that way, incidentally, without increasing power consumption. By the way: this point totally hard to understand for Windows users... when I plugged in the Southern Islands card to replace the old 4000 series, that's all I did. Just pulled out the old card, plugged in the one and turned on the power. No fiddling with drivers or settings whatsover. The same driver just came up and worked with a card three years newer.

Re:Awesome!

[Daniel Phillips]

See, I told you Windows users would have a hard time understanding this. I didn't even need to plug in a driver disk.

Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[portablejim]

One thing which you cannot do with the official NVIDIA driver for GNU/Linux is have mixed rotation monitors. (I would like to be proven wrong - have even tried to prove myself wrong, but given up).

I currently have one monitor in portrait and one monitor in landscape and one monitor in landscape, with the ability to drag windows from one to the other. I have some acceleration, which allows me to see through terminal windows.

Nouveau works, official one does not work. Simple choice.

Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[dbIII]

I'm doing it now with the NVIDIA driver - one horizontal and one vertical. The line in xorg.conf for the vertical screen is:

Option "Rotate" "Left"

Now for some reason the GUI tool doesn't include that option but it can be done by adding that option to the configuration file.

I think there also might be a driver independent way to do with RandR as well instead of in xorg.conf but I haven't touched RandR for a while.
Of course if Nouveau already does what you want then there's no reason to stop using it even if there are other ways to solve the problem. I'm just pointing out an option that I probably found deep in the long NVIDIA readme file a year or two back and have used since.

Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[sbryant]

I'm doing it now with the NVIDIA driver - one horizontal and one vertical. The line in xorg.conf for the vertical screen is:

Option "Rotate" "Left"

Now for some reason the GUI tool doesn't include that option but it can be done by adding that option to the configuration file.

It looks like there's no way of doing that on the fly, then - or does anybody know how to do that? I know that nVidia's driver doesn't use xrandr. I want to use rotation, but I could only get it to rotate all the screens at once (and I don't really want to stand the laptop on its side).

Looks like I should check out the current Nouveau driver

On a side note: does anyone know the state of the driver for Intel HD graphics? With HD4000 coming out, that's starting to look really interesting...

-- Steve

Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[Compaqt]

Nvidia driver doesn't do xrandr? I use it. Here's my xorg.conf:

Section "Module"
                Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
                Identifier "Default Device"
                Option "RandRRotation
                Driver "nvidia"
                Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[sbryant]

Nvidia driver doesn't do xrandr? I use it.

OK, I should qualify my statement: it doesn't support the rotation properly. To be fair, the resize part of 'randr' works fine.

Do you also use multiple screens (where you can drag windows between them), do you still have full acceleration on all screens (including video overlay), and can you rotate the screens individually?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, please please tell us how you did it.

-- Steve

Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation

[Compaqt]

No, bro, I can't say I do use multiple monitors.

I did want to get that xorg config out there because I had to struggle to get that exact incantation to make xrandr work for my Nvidia setup.

There's a cultural side to the open source thing..

[Gimbal]

...and it would seem to be a rather persistent thing, at that.

Personally, I think it's great to hear some simple news about a non-trivial thing relating to a driver that also affects the overall performance of my own computer. That it's an article not written in marketspeak covered with a 20 gallon drum full of marketsauce, then, I guess that may also serve to comment to the technological integrity of the open source developer domain.

But sure sure, we can troll, we can. Cheers.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. I had a problem with my onboard network card a while ago. I dug up an old 3COM PCI 10/100 card, those cards were awesome and would survive god striking them. I put it in, boot Windows 64 bit and... obviously no driver. It's an old card and no one bothered to create a driver for Windows 7 64 bit. Then I reboot under Kubuntu also running 64 bit and hey, it's working.

Re:incredibly bad move

[ArcherB]

1) build their own cpu (not likely)

You mean like the Tegra line of processors? I think you should limit your thinking to x86 dimensions.

Depressing standard of comments.

[Mr EdgEy]

The comments on this story really do illustrate how the readership of Slashdot really has changed over the past few years.
This is a real "News for Nerds" story, a story about open source development and how we're still not really past the bad old days of winmodems when it comes to (real, not binary blob) hardware support by manufacturers.

A full half of the comments I can see above seem to be troll posts along the lines of "LOL M8 DOESNT RUN UNREAL TOURNAMENT 27".

Oh dear.

Re:Depressing standard of comments.

[Turnerj]

At least the moderators are doing their job of making the better comments higher then. I think it is great that a stable open source version of the NVIDIA driver is available. I think what really should be taken away from this is that it is another improvement to the world of open source. The knowledge gained from reverse engineering and building a suitable alternative is really all that matters. Whether or not it can handle the most high end gear or not is relevant unless they pitched it as being able to.

Re:Depressing standard of comments.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the blame needs to go the summary.

...which works fine if you don't care about performance or are fine with running hardware that's a few generations old.

How much more negative can it be? I guarantee that if they left that out, and instead talked about the complexities of reverse engineering a driver, the comments wouldn't be so ugly. I am actually curious about how reverse engineering works, but this thread was doomed from the beginning.

Re:Depressing standard of comments.

[boristhespider]

Exactly this. I'm not personally interested about the complexities of reverse-engineering, because I know it's too complex for my feeble brain, but I've a lot of respect for people who can do it even if I'd leave the open source driver another couple of years before using it. (I've no moral compunctions against binary blobs.) But I came to this thread pretty much knowing it was going to have the shit trolled out of it, entirely because of that part of the summary.

Re:incredibly bad move

[ArcherB]

Not dismissing what's obviously a pretty daunting technical challenge, but still. The problem is...

Why would you buy a $250 3D Nvidia card if you didn't care about performance?

Well, you could dual boot. In this case you would want all the performance you can get while gaming in Windows. Since you are probably not gaming much in Linux, all you really need is enough power for desktop effects, which require a 3D driver.

Or you could just by a $50 Nvidia GPU and use this driver with it. I don't thing it's limited to the latest and greatest Nvidia cards.

which works fine if you don't care

[Osgeld]

If i didnt care about performance why would I bother to install something aside from whatever the system boots with on install?

Re:which works fine if you don't care

[Osgeld]

1) if I need linux and do not care about video performance I am just going to drop in the disc and go
2) where the fuck did ubuntu come in? and yes you guys generally do, everyone else moved on to other distros

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[Daniel Phillips]

In addition, and this is a big one for me, you don't have to reinstall the open source driver with every kernel upgrade.

Thank you for the raving review

[apparently]

I hereby pledge to only install software that "seems to work."

X on a server

[bobzyeruncle]

After fighting with the nVidia installers for years I'm happy with any X solution. Thanks for the hard work.

Re:X on a server

[drinkypoo]

After fighting with the nVidia installers for years I'm happy with any X solution.

it's called a distribution, and there are several that solve the nvidia driver problem for you, not that I've ever had a problem with an nvidia installer.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[HJED]

Perhaps you set it up wrong (you have to reboot/restart x to change most settings related to multiple monitors). I have managed to get multiple monitors working in both separate x-screen and xcinerama (which is similar to how windows does dual screens) setups on multiple different machines. One thing that doesn't work very well with multiple monitors is gnome 3/unity/cinnamon but that's not due to the drivers, its due to the gnome 3 devs deciding no one needs multiple monitors.
KDE, MATE and gnome 2 all work fine on multiple monitors using the nvidia drivers it takes about 30 seconds plus a reboot to set it up. The only problems i've had with the official drivers is how ubuntu tries to remove them when you upgrade to a new release.

Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Linux

[csirac]

Point being: this shit is hard, and the current milestone represents a huge achievement. If everybody had the attitude that "well it sucks compared to [something else] right now, why bother", nothing hard would ever be attempted.

Re:NVIDIA fail

[Osgeld]

especially microsoft

Very stable

[geminidomino]

Absolutely fantastic, provided you haven't bought a video card made in the last 3 or 4 years...

Hell, I can't even boot the latest Mint or Fedora live-CDs without derping around nouveau, and I'm not exactly bleeding edge here.

Re:Very stable

[drinkypoo]

Hell, I can't even boot the latest Mint or Fedora live-CDs without derping around nouveau, and I'm not exactly bleeding edge here.

Ubuntu users have no end of problems too, they have to actually blacklist Nouveau on several Ubuntu versions to get the nvidia driver to load. I am among them, still on Oneiric though.

Nice

[phorm]

Older cards don't even necessary have a binary driver that will work with them. Something like Nouveau will keep older systems ticking along, while also filling the gap for those that don't need the full support of the binary driver

Re:Nice

[drinkypoo]

Older cards don't even necessary have a binary driver that will work with them

As an exercise, look up which cards are supported by an official nvidia driver. You will be astounded, especially when you compare it to the shitty supported hardware list for fglrx.

Re:Nice

[CronoCloud]

Umm, the current Nvidia driver supports cards back to the 6*** series. And they do keep versions of the driver for older cards around. With Fedora, all you have to do is insall the rpmfusion repo and install the older driver series via yum.

Re:Nice

[phorm]

It's a big list, but I've still got some systems with older cards that I had trouble getting to work with the binary blob.
Nothing bad about having a second choice in Nouveau.

I do agree with fglrx though. A lot of older cards were never supported (though the "Radeon" driver may cover them), and prior to the AMD buyout they tended to drop support rather quickly. Not sure about how well support is going these days, as most of my stuff is nvidia. The 6370M in my laptop is fine but it's still pretty new'ish.

Re:Nice

[phorm]

The one I really had issues with was a 5000 series, so that's probably part of it. The other was in a laptop (can't remember the specific gen).

The funny part about laptops is that up to a point, the nvidia linux driver tended to be BETTER, even considering wine etc. I had stuff that would run on 'nix+wine better than windows, because the Linux driver was updated whereas windows wouldn't take a generic driver (wanted the one for that laptop) and got out-of-date *really* quickly.

Software patents fail

[dbIII]

It's a software patent thing that Nvidia are very sensitive about since they have some ex-SGI guys that have already been dragged through the courts once by patent trolls. I can't see them opening their drivers any time soon and I don't blame them for it.

Re:Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Lin

[lsolano]

Your comment really makes sense, made me think twice about what I wrote.

Maybe, it would have been better to make this announcement as a solid promise of a good driver, a work in progress with a bright future instead of saying that it went stable with the "exceptions" mentioned.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[pankkake]

> If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all.

And nVidia does exactly this, they drop old models from their drivers (it isn't that bad, the last time it happened to me, it was really old, and the machine stopped being relevant for desktop usage a long time before). Still, I like the tranquility of mind; that's why I switched to ATI cards everywhere. It's good to have choice again. The work of Nouveau developers is impressive, considering the competing open source ati drivers got a lot of help from AMD.

I applaud your efforts

[kriston]

I applaud your efforts, but unless we get wirespeed performance on our nVidia hardware in both 2D and 3D modes, thanks anyway, but no thanks until nVidia assists the Noveau folks for real.

Re:incredibly bad move

[kriston]

Yes, that, and the abandoned SoundForce platform. Sheesh.

Great news

[qu33ksilver]

Great news ! Linux rocks. A great addition to the platform for all the gamers who have to switch to windows for playing games (include me . .:P)

Re:incredibly bad move

[bill_mcgonigle]

Oh, good point. Is Don still doing clusters? Don't they all use GPU's now ? ;)

Re:incredibly bad move

[JohnBailey]

Way to go guys.. you've now given Nvidia massive disincentive to continue to do more work with their MODERN drivers.

But if they hadn't.. Would you have been able to post anything this whiny?

Moron...

Nvidia is not releasing drivers for gamers on Linux. Shocking I know. But this hasn't and most likely never will be why Nvidia releases Linux drivers.

Nvidia does however, create drivers for their high end workstation cards. Which are regularly used on Unix/Irix/Linux workstations. The consumer grade stuff is an offshoot of this. Not the other way around. They have already written the code for paying customers.. Why not tweak it a tiny bit and let everyone else benefit.

This is a low end get you working driver, that does not actually get used on high end graphics workstations So no change in incentive.

Re:incredibly bad move

[drinkypoo]

Nvidia is not releasing drivers for gamers on Linux. Shocking I know. But this hasn't and most likely never will be why Nvidia releases Linux drivers.

Nvidia does however, create drivers for their high end workstation cards.

Wrong and right. nVidia DOES release drivers for gamers on Linux. How can you tell? They support old hardware. Look at the supported hardware list for the geforce driver, now compare to the supported hardware list for the ATI driver and laugh. Only the very newest nVidia cards ever lack Linux support, and then only the budget ones, and they get it within a few versions.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're better off with a less functional free implementation than a more powerful and reliable proprietary implementation in numerous practical ways programmers and users have known for decades."

Not to downplay the release of the driver, but this is nonsense. As a user, in what way am I "better off" with a less functional implementation just because it's "free" (as in speech, one assumes), when I could be using the full power of my computer with a proprietry driver? It's an absurd argument.

Bear in mind I'm a *user*, who wants to *use* his equipment, rather than an idealogue who wants to feel all smug and proud. So banging on about freedom isn't going to cut it when you're openly recommending deliberately hamstringing it.

Re:Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Lin

[neonsignal]

The comments "if only you don't care about performance..." came from the anonymous submitter of the slashdot summary, not from the original article.

The original article is talking about how the nouveau driver is becoming part of the stable kernel, and benchmarks it against the proprietary Nvidia driver. The benchmarks show that for some applications the nouveau driver has quite acceptable performance, and for others it is significantly slower.

Becoming stable is not a claim that it is finished, just that the ABI is stable. Those people who don't care about licences are going to continue to use the proprietary driver for the foreseeable future; the announcement is primarily relevant to those of us who do care about licences and appreciate the effort and intelligence that has gone into the nouveau driver.

Re:incredibly bad move

[airlied]

at least from a corporate point of view, you get what your IT dept buy.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[airlied]

There are lots of other type of users. People designing embedded systems, people maintaining long term projects etc.

The thing we probably don't care about you, since you will just go install the binary driver from nvidia site. Most users probably just want their desktop/laptop to work out of the box.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[Anonymous Coward]

All absolutely true, but it doesn't address my point. I'm not saying the developers *should* care about people like me, since I *will* just go and install the binary driver from nvidia, at least until nouveau is fully supported. I was more wandering off-topic, because he made a blanket statement, covering everyone. I definitely am NOT better off with an implementation I've deliberately hamstrung, just because it's "free". Fuck free, I want it to work. If it can do both I'm very happy, if it's a choice of one or the other I've nothing against binary blobs.

I'd like to emphasise I'm not having a dig at the developers, what they've achieved, with zero documentation, is extremely impressive and I hope they carry on development. Some day nvidia will cut support for every graphics card they currently make, and on that day we'd be a lot happier with a solid open source driver - all of us with nvidia cards, no matter what they're plugged into and for what purpose.

But claiming that I'll always be better off with an incomplete free implementation is the attitude that's turned open source from a worthwhile endeavour into something edging a religion.

Re:LOL... stable but crappy

[micheas]

While the WINE project relies on testing windows software to see what windows api calls are being used, and tries to mimic them, the Nouveau project actually knows the entire possibility of what can be sent and what calls are and are not implemented.

I would guess that the Nouveau project will eventually succeed in a very ambitious project. I see no reason to believe that wine will ever succeed, that target keeps moving, and is not easy to define.

Re:Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Lin

[rohan972]

Stable doesn't mean implements all features or supports all versions, it means it won't crash your computer.

What I want is to be able to play video with default drivers that install with the system. A card a few generations old will do this and playing video hasn't been cutting edge performance for a long time.

My needs can be met by intel and ATI cards, now nvidia has joined them. So from my perspective, there is now more competition. For someone whose needs would not be met by these drivers, I can see why they might not be very impressed, but it has changed my buying criteria for my next box, and I am considering getting two more low end boxes soon.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[TheRaven64]

Because this driver will continue to be supported for as long as there is interest in it, not just until nVidia decides that it's time for you to buy a new GPU. A few years ago, nVidia released a driver with a remotely exploitable (kernel mode arbitrary code execution) vulnerability. When this was publicly disclosed (about a year after being reported to nVidia), they released a driver update that fixed it, but which didn't provide support for all of the cards that were vulnerable. You had two choices then if you had slightly older hardware: you could run a driver with a known vulnerability, or you could use the VESA driver and have no hardware acceleration at all. Now you'd have a third choice: run a slower driver that is maintained and constantly improving.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[Zontar The Mindless]

I bought this laptop about 2 years ago, installed Linux (and the official nVidia drivers), and multiple monitors--one of them sometimes being my 52" TV via HDMI--have "just worked" for me ever since. I applaud these guys, but I'm also a believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Might give it a burl whenever I get round to a fresh install on this thing, though.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[Zontar The Mindless]

Huh? I've *never* had to do a reboot or to restart X for this. I plug in the 2nd monitor, it gets detected after about 10 seconds and just works after that.

Running OpenSUSE 11.3 with the Desktop kernel/KDE 3.5.10/nVidia drivers here. Did you not install the nVidia config tool or something?

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[Hognoxious]

I *will* just go and install the binary driver from nvidia, at least as long as they allow me to.

They might go under, they might decide to charge for upgrades or new versions.

A free (AIS) implementation is a defence against those things happening.

Re:Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Lin

[micheas]

And then there are those that use the least amount of closed source software they can, while still accomplishing the task at hand.

We will re-evaluate if there are some situations that the open source driver may be usable now where it wasn't just a few months ago.

I would expect the days of compiling the nvidia kernel module to be coming to a close in the next couple of years, the driver looks like it might actually be faster than the binary blob when the clock setting issues are figured out.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[Bert64]

Well, if you have hardware which is a few generations old then you generally have 2 choices:
"a driver that works fine if you don't care about performance"
"hardware that doesnt work at all"

Considering that a video card which is a few generations old can still be a useful device for most purposes except gaming, i'd rather use the fully working card i already have than be forced to buy a new one.
Also if your using an old card, you probably aren't concerned with performance.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[jones_supa]

What struck me odd was that even the IPW2200 chips have no more official Windows 7 support. Well, the Vista driver works.

Nouveau runs hot

[sgage]

I have no problem with the performance of the nouveau drivers, but compared to the proprietary drivers my card (8500 GT) runs quite a bit hotter. So I tend to stick with the proprietary drivers.

If the nouveau devs can address this point, I'd be very content to stick with nouveau.

Re:incredibly bad move

[HarrySquatter]

Maybe even features like KMS might happen now...

No it won't. NVIDIA's actual customers on *Nix are people who don't give a flying fuck about KMS. And no, their actual customers are not Linux "gamers" are desktop cube jockeys.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[jo_ham]

The early 2000's called and want their joke back. You're trying too hard.

Works for me - my thanks to the devs

[sensei moreh]

Subject line says it all.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[CronoCloud]

you don't have to reinstall the open source driver with every kernel upgrade.

You don't have to reinstall the Nvidia driver, at least on Fedora with rpmfusion enabled, which is the "easy button" way:

sudo yum install akmod-nvidia

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[jawtheshark]

You mean the 3C90x? The situation is even more twisted than what you described. You will find no 32 bit or 64 bit driver for download anywhere for it... BUT, that's not the whole story because there is a driver and you can get it over Microsofts online driver search.... I'm not kidding, in order to get this driver you need to be online already. In my journal I have documented this alongside my ramblings about the fanbois saying 7 has drivers for everything out of the box. Well the 3C90x definitely doesn't, at least not out of the box.

Re:incredibly bad move

[Goaway]

Competition in you main market is an incentive to improve.

Competition in a tiny side market is an incentive to give up and stop wasting resources on it.

Re:incredibly bad move

[The Wild Norseman]

I think you should limit your thinking to x86 dimensions.

Exactly! I think that 86 dimensions are enough for anyone.

Re:Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Lin

[neonsignal]

Yes, I'd agree with that too. I have some older machines where the blob already does not work because it has not been maintained by Nvidia. Yes, those machines are ready for retirement, but I'll retire them when I'm ready, not when Nvidia decides they are obsolete.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[HJED]

I installed it, but when you enable another monitor or change from "seprate x-screens" to "xcinerama" or change the screen positions nothing changes until a reboot (or an x restart) because it just change the config file.
Maybe SUSE has a newer version or something, all the distros I use are debian based.

Re:Finally, it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

[HJED]

I've always found the nouveau drivers to provide terrible graphics/screen resolutions and very little in terms of config options. I will give you that they require less setup, but that is usually just because they are default. KMS would be very useful in the official drivers but, good graphics quality is more important.

Re:LOL... stable but crappy

[micheas]

3D desktops were first created on Linux. (admittedly as a proof of concept).

There are quite a few things that are native to Linux that make use of openGL.

3D drivers are more or less a requirement for obscure software like KDE4, and Gnome 3.

I use the nvidia binary blobs, and wind up recompiling the module that loads the blob every few months, I will be happy when I don't have to.

Re:NVIDIA fail

[diego.viola]

Agreed.

Re:NVIDIA total fail

[diego.viola]

Seconded.

Re:LOL... stable but crappy

[diego.viola]

Nouveau works just fine for KDE4 and Gnome 3 (OpenGL compositing). In fact, Gnome and KDE developers recommend Nouveau as a driver instead of the blob for the DEs.

Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti

[diego.viola]

I agree completely, I couldn't have said that better.

Re:incredibly bad move

[diego.viola]

Everyone should care about KMS.

KMS is simply a great advancement for Linux, unless you want to be tweaking your xorg.conf to death. KMS does all the configuration for you, it actually removes the need of having a xorg.conf.

Re:incredibly bad move

[bolthole]

One definition of Moron, would be someone who thinks, "if I dont see a reason for it, there is no reason for it".

nvidia does not apparently want its graphics hardware drivers open sourced. long LONG time ago, they started out open, but then went closed for them.

Somewhere high up in management, there is somewho who believes there is an important business reason for doing this.

If that person, or persons, are still there, they are now faced with the datapoint of, "if we release our closed source drivers on linux... they will get reverse engineered, and our intellectual property will be opened up against our wishes."

Then then becomes a business reason to discontinue linux graphics driver support in the future, depending on whether they are still all cagey and proprietary about their graphics cards.
They probably are.

btw: exactly how many "high end [Irix]" workstations exist in the year 2012???
Really weird rational you are claiming.

AMD Drops Radeon HD [234]xxx Catalyst Support

[jbn-o]

Phoronix.com just published an article called "AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support and never mentions software freedom in their article. The proprietor changes but the freedom issues remain the same.