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Torvalds Slams NVIDIA's Linux Support
New submitter jppiiroinen writes "Linus Torvalds received the Millennium prize last week for his work on Linux operating system. He was already in Finland, so Aalto University arranged a talk session with him (video). During the Q&A, a person asks why NVIDIA does not play well with Linux. Torvalds explained shortly that NVIDIA has been one of the worst companies to work with Linux project — which makes it even worse that NVIDIA ships a high number of chips for Android devices (which use Linux inside). Torvalds even summarized that ('Nvidia, f*** you!') in a playful manner. What has been your experience on NVIDIA drivers with Linux?"
I haven't had problems with NVIDIA cards since Redhat 5.2. ATI on the other hand...every time I try to install Linux on a laptop with an ATI video card, I end up having to futz with it for hours to get it to work.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
You can't code reliably for complex hardware without specifications.
Which are not released.
Nvidia cards are the only way to reliable game on Linux, either natively or through wine. Look at the winehq.org appdb for any game, then notice how most reported problems are on Ati video cards.
Case closed, unfortunately.
I have no experience with arm nvidia graphics drivers though.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
It does tick me off a bit... NVIDIA was the FIRST graphics company to really come out and support Linux across the entire line. They have consistently made binary drivers in a realistic time frame when new hardware comes out. While all the rest were saying BS about licensing and proprietary codecs, Nvidia just made the damn drivers. Now that is not good enough.
I have had to make a compromise in using the Nvidia driver. It's a "black box", so you don't know what is in it or how others might be able to improve on it, but on the other hand, it does the 3D work for stuff like KDE, Google Earth or 3D games like Brutal Chess or BZflag.
In Mageia, there is the Nouveau free driver, it works very well for 2D stuff, but does not work for 3D stuff.
So it depends on your requirements, and how wedded you are to the "Free" concept. Having said that, if there was a free driver that does 3D on Nvidia cards, I'd take it.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The actual question that led to the 'Fuck you, NVIDIA' was about hybrid graphics on laptops I believe, which are currently not usable(?)/supported by NVIDIA under Linux, that's was the problem I believe. I recommend rewinding the video a bit for more context.
Linus isn't talking about gaming, performance or anything else like that. The point is : nVidia ships a binary blob and an obfuscated source portion that needs to be built outside of the vanilla kernel. That is what Linus is talking about, nVidia's lack of cooperation with the kernel people at integrating their drivers into the main line kernel in a way that respects the project's goals and visions.
Why you people are discussing the performance when that is not at issue, I have no idea. It was all pretty clear to me what Linus meant.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Both systems duel boot the OSs.
Well there's your problem, having your OSes walk 10 paces, turn around, and shoot each other is bound to lead to problems. I would suggest trying to dual boot instead.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why should Nvidia subscribe to the projects "goals and visions"? Thats the projects concern, not theirs.
AMD provides specifications and a small developer team that actually works on open source drivers.
Intel provides open source drivers.
NVIDIA makes good binary drivers, but those have problems when a new kernel version comes out with changed interfaces:
Only NVIDIA can adapt them, and until they get around to it, NVIDIA may not work with the latest kernel version.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Hence why it's Linus (the project lead) that's talking about it ? He's voicing his concern... I don't get what you're even trying to get at here...
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Linus did give Nvidia the bird and a "fuck you" but he never slammed the quality of the Nvidia's hardware. His gripe with Nvidia is how hard it is for Linux to work with the company since they only provide a binary blob driver which makes bug fixing for it dependent on Nvidia's whims. Plus they refuse to even provide specs and API's for their hardware which make writing open drivers much more difficult and time-consuming because of having to reverse-engineer everthing to get a workable driver. In this case, Linus is absolutely correct.
I suspect your definition of "realistic time frame" is a bit different than some people (especially those who consider Linux their primary OS, and won't touch Windows).
I only run Linux on my desktop, laptop, media PC, and work PC. Also, my fiancée only runs Linux. Last time I rebuilt my Desktop, about a year ago, I used a GTX550Ti, and the drivers were prebuilt in a PPA for Ubuntu.
When I buy new hardware, I wouldn't want to wait months/years to use it... So nVidia clearly considers Linux a second-class citizen, which may be OK for you, but not for some.
Everyone considers Linux a second-class citizen. nVidia just threats their second class better than most. Even HP takes a while to release drivers for new printers...
It doesn't mean that the companies are any better - but nVidia's "high road" as you make it out to be really just makes them the bottleneck when it comes to hardware driver support. It puts them in a position where they MUST create the drivers in a timely fashion, because there is no other choice.
Whereas, with other vendors, the existing reference drivers can often be fiddled with to gain partial support for new hardware, and as specifications are released, anyone with the know-how can begin adding support for that hardware - the bottleneck becomes the availability of talent and motivation.
So that is why the ATI drivers are so amazing, and support the latest stuff! No, wait a minute... They only support a narrow range of product before they fall off, and you get the 2D only version.
Anyhow, I take a different road - I avoid high-end graphics hardware entirely, and since I'm not a "gamer", it doesn't matter to me. I just use hand-me-down hardware that people give me and I'm content with it - but I do usually favor AMD's graphics chips since they are more open by nature.
For someone not that interested in graphics drivers, you sure have a strong opinion. And actually, for your case, I would recommend Intel over ATI. PErhaps because to me, graphics are important, and stability more so.
I think you and many here misunderstood what Linus was talking about. Linux specifically said NVIDIA is one of the worst companies with whom they worked. Period. There is no need to bring up ATI into the table. There is no need to bring up that your card has always worked beautifully. This is talking about his and the kernel maintainer's experience in dealing with hardware vendors, something that we ourselves never have to deal with. Their proprietary drivers may be the best ever but that has nothing to do with!
If the kernel maintainers have a question about the hardware, they can't ask NVIDIA they have to test and reverse engineer to find the answer whereas with other companies, they may get an answer directly from the manufacturer. Get it? "...NVIDIA just made the damn drivers. Now that is not good enough." Not from a kernel maintainer's or Stallman's point of view, I'm pretty sure.
Quick, let's lash out at Linus!
You've obviously never had to deal with a shitty company before. Nvidia interacts heavily with the Linux world, but any attempts to accomplish things if you aren't a direct customer buying millions of chips from them is goddamn impossible. It's not just getting sources, it's just making shit work and having to deal with the fact that a prominent company whose technology gets used in so many platforms causes you no end of trouble (bug reports, workarounds, etc.) but they won't assist or aid you in the slightest. On top of being entirely closed source. You can't ignore the issue entirely, but your hands are tied in terms of how you can actually look into and resolve a problem.
So yeah, Nvidia cranks out Linux drivers that work decently well. That doesn't make them immune to criticism, especially not at the level Linus probably has to deal with them at.
But hey, Slashdot is rapidly becoming very, very anti-Linux so why not?
NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".
But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
If it costs them money to support Linux and they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, then what incentive is there to continue even supporting them at all?
Because they feel the Linux market is worth supporting. They don't do it to make Torvalds happy.
If I were nvidia, i'd be glad to make drivers. An unusable card does not sell very well.
The problem isn't that nVidia doesn't put out functioning binary drivers. They do. Their binary ones are much better than ATI ones IMHO. The problem is that the binary drivers don't always survive kernel updates So people who rely on nVidia's proprietary binary drivers can't always update their kernel or they lose their graphics until nVidia puts out an update. Now, there are open source drivers for nVidia that get updated with every kernel update; however, nVidia does not put out enough specifications so that these drivers are able to use full card functionality like full 3D acceleration. It wasn't until recently that the open source drivers have been able to reverse-engineer some of the functionality.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
> If it costs them money to support Linux and they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, then what incentive is there to continue even supporting them at all?
It doesn't.
I think people nowadays just don't understand what Linux is anymore.
This discussion has nothing to do with desktop, performance or even servers.
Nowadays, Linux is shipped on 900000 phones every days and that's a very lucrative business.
Nvidia has a share of this with its Tegra chips but their way of supporting it makes it a pain in the ass for others inside the kernel development community.
From that point, Linux complaining is totally fair. PR is basically his only weapon.
It isn't NVIDIA's job to make drivers for someone else's OS.
If nVidia does not make drivers for someone else's OS who, how do they make it for? They don't have their own OS. Their entire business relies on someone else's OS. So does nVidia make drivers for Windows and OS X or not?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Nobody asked Nvidia to do any driver. Linus is here complaining that they aren't COOPERATIVE. That's very different. Besides that, yes, it should be Nvidia's job, since they are the ship makers. Also, they do use Linux themselves. So they just take, and don't give, which isn't fair.
Nvidia drivers were actually the driving force behind the concept of kernel tainting where an oops dump reports that non-free modules were in use. Nvidia drivers were creating a huge number of oops reports that couldn't be debugged due to being closed source.
I like Linus. He speaks his mind, and that is good. He does not strive to be a politically correct suck-up like most of the soulless corporate speaking heads you see all over the place.
He has every right to say "Nvidia, fuck you". How should his message be sugar-coated? Should he write a 500-page NY Times bestselling book about the matter? Hold a seminar? Issue a press release? Have a meeting with Nvidia CEO, CTO and CIO, presenting empty Powerpoint fluff and wanking around the issue in such abstract terms that it can be interpreted in any which way, after which everyone thinks they've done their part but nothing happens as a result? No. It suffices with three small words. Why waste more time and effort? To not hurt someone's feelings? Don't be such a baby.
I think part of how Linus comes through as he does is a cultural thing. Although he has lived in the USA a lot, he's still a Finn. If you need to deliver a message to someone who is not behaving, you deliver a message, wrapping it up in a pink box with a greeting card full of hearts is pointless. And let's face it, Nvidia hasn't been a model citizen - if you're a dick, don't be surprised that others are dicks towards you.
And you ask: what incentives does Nvidia have to support Linux? Well, how about not making life hard for the people who pay actual real money for Nvidia's products? And not making life hard for the people who try to support the Nvidia products on a great OS on their free time?
This story starts more than a decade ago. There was a hugely popular software vendor concerned that maybe one day people might choose to not use their software. They had vast sums of money and controlled access to the immediate future for software and hardware vendors alike.
Foreseeing a potential difficult future they chose to defend themselves in a particular way. They formed subsidiaries they controlled and gave them patents, and filled them with developers skilled in the finer (and secret) nuances of how to interact with their software, and they kept them informed with advance knowledge of how it would work in the future.
These subsidiaries approached hardware designers with a simple message: they would accept the patented technologies and use them; they would let the subsidiaries write the drivers that had special hooks into the software; they would do this under non-disclosure and never tell - or they wouldn't. If they accepted they would not be able to publish open specifications about how their own hardware worked because that would be exclusively cross-licensed with the subsidiaries in exchange for access to the patents. The hardware makers who wouldn't play along wouldn't get as good compatibility with the big company's software, nor inclusion in their distribution CD and OEM images. The refusers would be plagued with difficult installation, buggy drivers and unhappy customers and fail in the market. The software would change in ways the refusers could not predict, but the accepters could. Some accepted, and some refused. Those who accepted survived, those who refused mostly died.
This has continued to the present day and as the hardware has evolved the agreements persist in ways that are now not removable.
Nobody involved in Linux wants hardware manufacturers to write the device drivers for them. They only want open and clear specifications for how the hardware works so they can make their own drivers. They aren't going to get that from NVidia, nor ATI, nor any others whose technology is intertwined with this compromise from yesteryear. This boon is now beyond their ability to grant without starting again from the beginning.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's been established for a while that nVidia is not going to open source their driver. It's not like this is a surprise. In the past, Linus has gone on record to say that binary blobs are better than no driver at all.
The turnaround on a kernel release would need to be a month or so for a company like nVidia to make the required changes to their driver and have it ready when a new kernel is launched. Hell, even the Evil Microsoft provides developers access to pre-RTM builds with enough time to make sure that their drivers work at launch.
What kind of OS changes their driver API so much that a driver compiled for one version doesn't "just work" with an incremental update? An immature one. Frequent kernel updates are basically patches. If your driver API is changing that much, you need to re-examine how you're doing your development.
We have every right irritated with Linus here. I've written software for Linux, Windows, and embedded RTOSes. Linux was by far the most painful. Boost was the only thing that made it tolerable. Berating a company that supports a user base which represents 1% or less of their market without any modern-day language tools at their disposal (STL, Boost, a decent IDE) is just counter-productive.
If Linus wanted to do something productive, he'd help to stabilize the various APIs in the kernel so that this stops being an issue.
Bottom line: this goes both ways. Either you allow binary blobs and give the providers of those blobs a chance to get their drivers working before you put out a new kernel, or you launch a kernel whenever you feel like it and live with the fallout.
Have you tried the FOSS drivers? Because you really shouldn't complain when AMD did what the community asked them to do and handed over the specs, or did everyone forget how many times we've heard "Just open up the specs and we'll support the hardware" on this very forum and others? AMD took that one step farther by actually hiring developers to assist the FOSS driver devs in getting up to speed, and from what I've been reading they've been coming along nicely, although focus has naturally been a little heavy on the APUs since so many of them are out there.
This DOES highlight what i consider to be a major failing in Linux for quite some time, the fact that its damned near impossible to JUST get security updates, as package A needs kernel B and depends on packages E-G so to keep the thing updated you end up with an "all or nothing" so you can't just update say the XBMC software without changing graphics drivers and a bunch of other shit. People can scream bloody murder all they want but THIS IS WHY a hardware ABI is a GOOD thing, because if I want to keep my 3 year old graphics drivers while being fully patched and running the latest of everything else on Windows? not a problem, I just don't have to update the graphics driver. this is also why AMD's support phase isn't a problem on Windows, as one can simply stick with the last driver and be fine for the life of the system and after 4 years they've squeezed all the power they are gonna out of a chip. Again like it or not the ONLY REASON that that Nvidia or AMD have to keep releasing new drivers for old hardware in Linux is because you simply can't use the old drivers with new kernels or the whole thing falls down.
So I don't see how the community has any right to complain about AMD, you got exactly what you asked for, all the specs opened and handed to you on a silver platter. AMD simply has a hell of a lot more on its plate than just graphics so continuing to support 4+ year old chips on an OS with maybe 5% market tops is simply a waste of resources. if you want to complain pitch a fit at Torvalds for making driver support such a damned mess, even one of the big Red hat developers says the current way of doing things simply isn't sustainable, that a single group can't control 20,000 packages and drivers and keep it working, and recommends an ABI and a much more stripped down design that allows you to concentrate on the core while letting those that sell the hardware provide drivers. I wonder how much money Nvidia has blown keeping a team of devs around to do nothing but constantly update the Linux drivers when Torvalds constantly breaks the damned drivers with kernel fiddling? bet it isn't cheap, not cheap at all.
If handing you the full specs like you asked for STILL isn't enough? Maybe its time to look in the mirror and consider that maybe, just maybe, you're doing things the wrong way. There should be no damned reason why you can't take the last release that AMD made for that HD3200 and have it run perfectly on the latest distro and the fact that you stand here and admit that it doesn't work just shows what is wrong with linux in a nutshell. After all how do you expect the smaller hardware guys to support you if the big guys have to pay entire teams to constantly fix the damned things just to make the drivers work?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Torvald's is carrying out the unproductive one.
Your so-called productive approach has been entirely unproductive for more than a decade. It is way past time to say "fuck you".
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
There was all this chatter about how if the GPU companies would just open up, legions of extremely smart programmers would make grad-A OSS drivers, better than the Windows counterparts!
So AMD does and... Nothing. We have a broke ass, "sorta works" OSS driver. Apparently the legions of programmers are either busy playing WoW or maybe, just maybe, writing a graphics driver for a modern card is way harder than people give it credit.
I think part of the problem is you get people who've written something like a NIC driver and say "Oh this driver writing isn't bad." The problem is most hardware is peanuts compared to a GPU. They are just amazingly complex. You can see it in driver sizes. A NIC or RAID driver will generally be 100ish kbytes, sometimes less. On my system, the primary WDDM nVidia driver file is 20MB, and it won't even work completely with that alone. It's driver to support OpenGL is another 25MB, another 10MB for D3D10/11 components, 7MB for CUDA, and so on, never mind support stuff like the control panel.
Basically it is a really complex problem, and of course each new version of the graphics hardware brings in a new setup to deal with. So it isn't so easy to bash out a high quality driver for graphics cards.
Thus the OSS AMD drivers really aren't any good, despite AMD playing nice. The community has not managed to produce some amazing driver that is fast, stable, feature complete, that makes Windows people say "Man I wish I had that." Had that happened, I'd be more inclined to say "Get with it nVidia." However as it stands, nVidia is able to produce a Linux driver that is in every way as good as their Windows driver, and that is damn good. Given that, I'd say they are doing it right.