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NVIDIA Responds To Linus Torvalds
jones_supa writes "NVIDIA's PR department has issued a statement following the harsh comments by Linus Torvalds last week where he referred to the graphics company as the single worst company he's ever dealt with, called them out on not supporting Optimus, and other issues. Basically the company replied they're committed to Linux using their proprietary driver that is largely common across platforms, and this allows for same-day Linux support with full OpenGL implementation. They also say that they're active in ARM Linux for Tegra and support a wide range of hardware under Linux. Despite having not made any commitment to better support Optimus under Linux nor providing technical assistance to the Nouveau community, NVIDIA assures us that 'at the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.'"
Basically the company replied they're committed to Linux using their proprietary driver that is largely common across platforms, and this allows for same-day Linux support with full OpenGL implementation. They also say that they're active in ARM Linux for Tegra and support a wide range of hardware under Linux. Despite having not made any commitment to better support Optimus under Linux nor providing technical assistance to the Nouveau community, NVIDIA assures us that 'at the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.
Posting anonymously because some people are _incredibly_ opinionated on this subject, but not everybody has the opinion that everything linux related must be open source. Linus Torvalds, while a visionary and certainly one of the most technologically-minded people of our age, disagrees with this, and that's too bad. Just because Linus Torvalds thinks you're doing it wrong doesn't necessarily mean you are.
Cheers.
Most common excuse for don't open the source for drivers is IP. But most part of times, the real reason is users will see there is no difference in hardware between standard and platinum cards.
I think Torvalds less critical of closed source drivers and more critical of closed specs. Nouveau would be improved greatly if Nvidia provided more transparency on the hardware.
They're saying "providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals".
So, my interpretation of that is:
"If we released the drivers as open source, then people might figure out how to optimize and tune the Linux drivers. This could result in a better GPU experience on Linux than under Windows. That would embarrass us. To ensure a consistent experience across platforms, we therefore must prevent others from tinkering with the drivers, which mandates closed source."
Does anyone else read it that way?
It is positive sign that they care enough about the Linux community to bother to have their PR department give the usual empty corporate zero content response.
Sure, Linus made Linux and uses it to push his agenda (i.e. that of FOSS)
No, Linus uses FOSS to push Linux, not the other way around.
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Basically they're confirming Linus' words, not denying them. Linus never said that they don't make good drivers. He said that they suck at doing open source, which is an objective truth. Their response is that they do that because they don't want to invest resources to specifically support Linux. Which is exactly what Linus was upset about.
I haven't had an NVIDIA driver work the same in Linux as it does in windows. Ever. Random screen blanking (nouveau driver), weird X errors (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error) and re-compiles every time there is a system kernel update. In comparison, all you need to do in Windows to get the NVIDIA driver working is hold down the enter key with a stapler while it's installing. Accept all the defaults. reboot. it's working.
At "the end of the day" this is not consistency, it's crapsistency.
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These days I have a GTX460 and I get tearing all the damn time. I have turned off compositing, I have turned it on, I have switched to xfce I have tried gnome3.
I hear the Open driver would fix this. If you can't even stop the tearing, then let someone else write your drivers.
Open source software in general has (among others) some practical advantages:
With a closed source driver, those 2 options are thrown in the trash. This is especially important for hardware drivers, if there's no way to patch drivers to work with newer versions of an OS (or another OS), then no further driver releases basically means: "throw away your graphics card".
The net result may work fine for many people, but it tells me NVIDIA puts their roadmap before their user's roadmap(s). I read that as marketing, not user support.
So, maybe we could get Bay State voters interested in open other things?
Apps have a stable API, so non-FOSS software can work fine with linux...
now DRIVERS have to comply with the kernel API, that might not be stable over time and can change... hardware builders should integrate their drivers in the kernel tree or suffer the pain of outside development. Its their choice, having to work together with the community and have the pain for legal process and code cleanup (not all trash is accepted in the kernel) is harder in the beginning, but will pay off for everyone (users, developers and company) on the long run... or play dumb and keep the closed driver and keep updating it when things change.
Releasing the hardware papers will allow the community to develop their drivers without the company have to work much, so between open source drivers, papers or close source drivers, the company have a lot to choose.
Most companies choose the first or at every least, release some papers or demo driver. They are seen as heros.
Nvidia is one of the few that choose closed sources drivers and so earns the hate of many users and the kernel developers.
Again, its their choice. Also, its the user choice to buy their cards or not.
i personally prefer open drivers and stability over better performance and locked in over on my own machine. other might have other opinions.
finally Linus dont have a hidden agenda, he cares only about the kernel and closed source drivers make very hard to almost impossible to debug problems. He choose GPL as a license as it protect his work from being abused by others. Linus didnt even wanted to migrate to GPL V3, so is clearly dont have a hidden agenda.
Again, if NVIDIA dont like the kernel license, they can choose to work only with *BSD kernels.
Higuita
Yeah, you're right, who's this Linux Torvalds to judge who contributes to the Linux kernel and who doesn't.
He wants working Optimus on laptops. He was kinda clear about that.
it's common for perfect chips to be marketed lower than what they can actually do.
You do realize that the whatsit where the defect is doesn't actually work, right?
For one thing, perfect chips get marked as defective if there aren't enough defective chips to meet the demand for low-end hardware. For another, there are probably only a small number of bins of numbers of defects. If there are models with 48, 64, and 96 working whatsits, and 63 of them work, it'll be sold as a 48, and drivers won't be able to use 15 of the working whatsits.
So ATi opens up, and the community COMPLETELY failed to deliver a usable solution. WTH should Nvidia care? The FOSS community has already shown that they can't do it. Mod me down if you want, but I speak the truth. We failed. As long as Nvidia continues to provide a driver that works, and works well (which it does), then I will always use Nvidia cards.
I have nothing clever to put here...
Openly bashing NVIDIA for doing things their way is wrong, because it's their product, and, therefore, their decision.
The right to make a decision does not include the right not to be criticised for the descision one make.
because it's their product, and, therefore, their decision.
As long as they don't sell it. Once they sold their products to millions of user, they are also responsible for that what they are selling has no built-in secrets what so ever.
NVIDIA sells hardware. That's one market. NVIDIA distribute software. That's an other. Not releasing the information about their hardware creates a situation where NVIDIA (an the rest of the hardware market virtually) is abusing its market leading position on one market, to sniffle the other. All this because of contracts all around between Microsoft, the gaming industry and so on. For fuck sake, that's my fucking video card, I'd like to know how to use it. I didn't by with a computer, and I could use it in a completely different architecture. No, they narrow the market choices, to control not the product, but the customers, so they can get juicy extra money through anti-competition deals from software companies.
No, I'm happy to openly bash them repeatedly for making a choice that sucks. Yes, it's their choice to make. If I didn't think that, I would be advocating they be sued to force them to make a different choice. Otherwise, I'm expressing my opinion of their awful and stupid choice. And I should be perfectly free to do that. It's not like freedom is a one-way street here.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I wouldn't call Linus's off-the-cuff speech "bashing". While his exact words were "Fuck you, nVidia" it was in a jovial sort of way. Americans might not understand, but for most English speakers (especially Brits and non-natives) "Fuck you" is not always incredibly harsh.
His main criticism was, they were making a lot of money off Linux (selling chips to run Android), and were being difficult to work with.
Also, it was an off-the-cuff remark. He's not a Presidential candidate or CEO, he's a programmer. Some people talk in a way that PR flacks don't, and if they are well known it causes a bit of a PR shitstorm. The media reports their "rant", instead of the 49 other minutes before it, in which they were speaking quite insightfully.
Seriously, everyone knows about the Tanenbaum–Torvalds "flame war", in which Linus came up with such withering remarks as "linux still beats the :-)", and sprouted fanatical anti-free-software rhetoric like "For the true hacker, not having source code is fatal, but for people who just want a UNIX system, there are many alternatives (albeit not free)".
pants of minix in almost all areas", and Andrew shot back with things like "You would not get a high grade for such a design
Strong stuff.
I guess people are more interested in shit-slinging (or even pretending that there was shit-slinging) than the technical points these guys raise.
I've heard Linus is a bit mean at times (rejecting patches? refusing to mentor new contributors?), but the idea that he's an angry angry man seems to be more myth than anything.
Everyone is upset NVIDIA doesn't give away all it's secrets. There hard earned property. that they built. Why not go the more open route and create one set of driver standards for video cards. VESA -- everyone knows the standard and its up to the manufacturer to optimize their side and on the consumer side you get what you asked for.
This is actually a battle over special features -- my hardware can do some pretty sweet stuff, but I wanna control how you can access that stuff. the concept from above still applies, but there is no incentive for the hardware designer to devote resources (people and the salaries they have to pay those people) to help you bang out that new framework.
I love open source, but it's built on peoples free time. Companies have to justify how something makes them money. Saying this will build product sales in a 10% market share is not enough. So come halfway and get the framework done and they will optimize their side. This is the best of both world I get a product and they stay behind their doors, but it's a blackbox I can use.
They all think there is secret sauce in their product with some genuine trade secret level information.
In reality, having seen the secret sauce from a 3rd party perspective a few times, it turns out that often times the competitor is doing it basically the same way. So the only people being hurt by not publishing the hardware specifications (as was the normal state of things until the late 1990's) are the hackers and budding engineers trying to make the product better in some way.
In the case of graphics companies, it seems they are somewhat justified for not releasing the source to the proprietary drivers, as that is such a huge part of their performance work (aka sometimes the games aren't faster because the hardware is faster, they are faster because the driver is using a better algorithm, or has more micro optimization). Not releasing the hardware specs is just silly, because at this point, a big portion of the graphics chips are understood well enough that releasing information on mode setting or shader setup is more like filling in the details, rather than giving away any secrets.
The Optimus stuff is a prime example, its basically just going to be information on enabling/disabling parts of the chip or setting power envelops for certain functions. The real secret sauce is how to use that information. I have a similar issue with my little NAS box at home based on a guru plug. Marvell claims to be open source friendly, and gives away specifications that look good until you actually try to do something like power down an unused sata port. Then your SOL without the NDA, because knowing the register which controls the power gating is some kind of secret....
Mostly, what is being hidden is the fact that the emperor has no cloths.
There's what they say... And then there's the code.
If they're really contributing as much as they claim, then why is the mainline cpuidle support for Tegra in 3.4 so piss-poor compared to that of their own forked 2.6.36 branch? Where's the documentation on their CPU's idle/power management capabilities? Why is the Tegra code so badly branched that devices running Android 4.0 on Tegra are running 2.6.39 instead of the officially recommended 3.0.8?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
First off, Nvidia are buttheads. They are. But they also have a right to make money. Apple, EA games, Sony, Intel, and on an on - they all operate this way, as does 99% of business. Where Nvidia is wrong is, well, where can I go out and pay $5 or $10 for a driver from them that works? You see, part of it is that the companies say that they offer a proprietary driver but I can't actually go out and BUY it from them or obtain it from them.
But this brings up the other side of the dirty coin, as it were. That the Linux (in particular) community seems to have a major issue with paying for anything. I have zero issue with paying small fees. I do it all the time. I pay for my sandwich at lunch, my gas in my car, and well, pretty much everything in life. I just want a solution and to move on to the dozen other things that that I have to do during my day. So there's this great divide. They often don't even deal with issues or fix things at all, because it requires paying "the man" or using their code. ie - if it's not free and 100% open-source, we won't touch it at all.
It's just as bad as Windows. They have effectively decided that you're SOL and stuck with their vision of 100% free or it's impossible to obtain view of their OS (which while open-source, is controlled on most Distros by a group of whingey, anal buttheads that might as well be CEOs at a typical software company, since they control the project with an iron fist) And this filters down to the forums and "help" groups that are as useful as a wet rag most of the time. Yes, the people mean well, but it's always "just install this". Without any explanation or documentation. Instead of mentioning the exact codecs you need to buy, they just will say "there is no package for that". No link - it's this attitude that if it's not 100% free, we don't even mention it or link to it.
This idiocy is most apparent with "projects" like Wine. There has been a long-standing mouse driver issue that never gets discussed, fixed, or worked on. Because the code to make it work, is proprietary and there is no work-around (requires paying Microsoft a small fee, and their code is the only way to make it work properly). Cedega had a version of the driver that worked. Cedega went out of business, and as an end-user, stuff just stopped working a few months ago. The mouse driver(among other things like sound drivers and so on) and is effectively locked away as it's Cedega's proprietary (and legally protected) code. Wine won't release it.(yes, these are the same people) The official response over at Wine is "there is no fix". There is an actual fix, but they refuse to release it or make it available for a small fee.
They whine about everything having to be open-source to the point of acting like it's a holy war, and yet when there's money involved, the same people don't act any different than Nvidia.
Me, I just want to pay my fee and get on with my life.