Nvidia Engineer Asks How the Company Can Improve Linux Support

sfcrazy writes "It seems that recent comments made by Linus Torvalds have made the people at NVIDIA take Linux more seriously. Recently Nvidia employee Stephen Warren asked in the Kernel Summit mailing list what could be done differently to make Linux support better. 'In a Google+ comment, Linus noted that we have mainly been contributing patches for Tegra SoC infra-structure details. I'm curious what other areas people might expect me/NVIDIA to contribute to. I assume the issue is mainly the lack of open support for the graphics-related parts of our HW, but perhaps there's some expectation that we'd also start helping out some core area of the kernel too? Would that kind of thing help our image even if we didn't open up our HW?'"

Comments

Ugh, this makes me mad.

[intellitech]

[...] we'd also start helping out some core area of the kernel too? Would that kind of thing help our image even if we didn't open up our HW?

You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs.

I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[ethan961]

If this engineer knows that will never happen (through no fault of his own, higher-ups would have decided this) then at least he's making an effort. People can get upset all they want, but nothing other than good is going to come out of this, whether it's exactly what would be ideal or not. Some help is better than none.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[FridayBob]

... Some help is better than none.

Okay, so how about pointing him in the direction of the nouveau project? Even if his company refuses to share the full API, just a few hints here and there could make an enormous difference.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[lister king of smeg]

not if they plan on complying with the gpl

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

"You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs."

Of course they do. Why in the world would this surprise you? It's a public, for-profit company. The vast majority of contributions to open source by companies are not done out of altruism. They're done out of self-interest.

"I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already."

There's probably something in how they do things that they think (rightly or wrongly) that gives them an advantage over their competition that either isn't patented or can't be patented (or maybe violates someone else's patents).

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[ethan961]

I agree, helping the nouveau project would be greatly beneficial. My post was mainly referring to the general attitude some hold that nothing is ever good enough, and while it is true that the driver state is rather poor, potential for improvement exists. Instead of attacking Nvidia for their efforts, people should actually help and show them where to direct their resources. No, it may not involve the release of all their specs, but they can help in other ways.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Sir_Sri]

Or would give away something about how their hardware, or hardware development works that they don't want anyone to know too much about. Or at least not to wave around in public. I'm sure AMD know, enough staff move back and forth, but some random chinese hardware maker, that I'd be worried about.

Remember nVIDIA sells it's 'first silicon' runs, they don't usually prototype, they do simulations first, and from the simulations that are used to design the hardware they go straight to manufacturing. It's possible some of their driver support would have some hooks (or parts) of their simulation tools in it that they don't really want to be broadcasting around.

But broadly ya, for whatever reason, if their higher ups don't want to be telling the world how their drivers work, and so they won't. Hell for all we know it could be entirely paranoia from an MBA type who just doesn't understand and doesn't want his ass fired if something goes wrong.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[ozmanjusri]

They could have been a brilliant contributer, if they wanted to, but they don't.

Not to diminish Linus's effort, but there is a backstory to his frustration, and nVidia have been given other incentives to become a better contributor.

NVIDIA was approached by one of the leading Chinese CPU teams to use an NV GPU in a pilot school PC project. Linux would run on the Chinese CPU, while GeForce GPU would provide the graphics power. 'Pilot project' in this case means over 10 million PCs in one order, broken down - 100,000 schools with 100-150 PCs each.

To cut the story short, the NV team appeared there, and in very arrogant manner told the Chinese side that they are a large US corporation, and that recompiling the Linux drivers would cost the Chinese a lot of money.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/6/21/china-nvidia-loses-face-and-a-10-million-pc-order-over-linux-drivers-and-nres.aspx

They lost the relationship with the Chinese team, who have since approached AMD. The pilot project was worth an initial 250-350 million dollars, with the potential of much more to follow.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[bug1]

"You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs."

Of course they do. Why in the world would this surprise you? It's a public, for-profit company. The vast majority of contributions to open source by companies are not done out of altruism. They're done out of self-interest.

Good engineers dont think like marketing people, they think like engineers. How to do stuff rather than how to manipulate people.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Racist.

How is this racist? The only way you could construe it as racist is if you are ignorant of the origins of the phrase "yellow journalism".

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[X0563511]

We're asking for specs, not driver code. There's no reason they would have to give us any of those simulation hooks, or any information about them.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[jvillain]

Telling them that it will be OK to slide on the documentation for the video drivers just as long as they do X, Y & Z would be a real disservice to them. The blob just isn't an option any more. Telling people which versions of Linux they can use the video cards with is equivalent to telling Windows users they all have to use Vista if they want to use NVidia hardware. For me right now all of their cards are the equivalent of a 10 year old 2D Cirrus card but with a stupid high price tag attached to it. Get it straight. Every thing takes a back seat to opening up the documentation for the video drivers. My money stays with AMD until they yank their heads out of their ....

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[jvillain]

BTW we aren't asking them to open up the HW. We are asking them to document the interfaces to the hardware. Just like the PCI interface they use has been documented and like the entire PC spec they have been leeching off of and almost every thing else in the world of computing has opened up. This attitude just isn't acceptable any more. Period. Even Microsoft is starting to wake up to that fact.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[kllrnohj]

You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs.

I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already.

AMD did this, and the Linux community still recommends people buy NVIDIA cards. Vote with your wallet, or shut the fuck up. Keep buying from the company with closed specs instead of open ones, and you'll keep getting closed specs instead of open ones. Not a difficult concept, people.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[jvillain]

I guarantee some one in Asia has seen this brouhaha and is trying to figure out how to make a buck selling video cards to Linux users with proper documentation for the interfaces. They don't think like Americans there. They don't just sit on their arses and wait for the government to pass another law so they don't have to compete. Truth is soon Intel hardware with the open source driver will be more powerful than the NVidia card with the open source driver. But doesn't cost as much. Obviously Intel has learned the power of doing the right thing.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Pausanias]

I'd put money on the likelihood that there is a GPL violation in their driver code that they'd have to own up to if they actually released the source.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[X0563511]

So the nouveau guys should just give up and delete everything they have already done?

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[kamapuaa]

The story you link to refers to nothing but rumor, and seems to have been copy-edited by a couple of disinterested high school students. It also mentions the idea that China is going to have the world's fastest CPU within a year, mentions the idea of "losing face" like they took "Asian Stuff 101" sometime in the 80s, and refers to the reasonable request for money to make a port as being incredibly unreasonable, some sort of slap in the face to the Chinese.

Additionally, the idea of China making a single order of more than 10 million Linux computers is a little hard to swallow, when the only support is "A rumor appeared from the heart of Beijing."

The article is merely an example of shitty web journalism.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[ozmanjusri]

I know companies that don't aim at maximizing profits can be sued by their shareholders

Not true. And even if you WERE trying to maximise value to shareholders, there's a distinction between long-term sustainability and short term profit.

The Myth of Profit Maximizing

        “It is literally – literally – malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits. That’s a corporation’s duty to its shareholders.”

Since this sentiment is so familiar, it may come as a surprise that it is factually incorrect: In reality, there is nothing in any U.S. statute, federal or state, that requires corporations to maximize their profits. More surprising still is that, in this instance, the untruth was not uttered as propaganda by a corporate lobbyist but presented as a fact of life by one of the leading lights of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, Sen. Al Franken.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/154789/whose_corporations_our_corporations!?page=entire

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[rtfa-troll]

If this engineer knows that will never happen (through no fault of his own, higher-ups would have decided this) then at least he's making an effort. People can get upset all they want, but nothing other than good is going to come out of this, whether it's exactly what would be ideal or not. Some help is better than none.

Right; I'm not getting upset about him. We love him and if he ever gets kicked out by NVIDIA, I'm sure there are lots of us here who will want to hear about it and offer him a job. What upsets us is that NVIDIA clearly has people who understand that we are upset and why we are upset and they still don't do anything. From my point of view this makes things even worse.

NVIDIA; please: even if it's incomplete and misses your latest fastest newest stuff, please provide the Linux developers; both kernel and Noveau; with publishable open documentation which tells them how to set up the rest of the features and at the very least provide good, reliable and colour tunable 2D and low level support for your cards. Preferably provide full, documented access to any feature older than two years.

This can have no possible bad influence on your competitive advantage and will go a long way to making those of us using Linux happier.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Anonymous Coward]

The big deal is that different graphics cards with different prices have exactly the same hardware, just different drivers.
There's no way to give the users what they want and maintain this important business practice.

When chips are manufactured, you don't end up with a stack of perfect chips and a stack of scrap. You end up with a stack of good enough chips, a stack of not quite as perfect chips, and a stack of scrap. So a chip designed to run at, let's just throw a number out and say 1ghz, might get 80% of the manufacturing run which performs at 1ghz and maybe 10% which won't handle more than 750mhz without errors but works perfectly fine if you keep it turned down. Or maybe a manufacturing defect in 20% of some auxillary chip prevents just those chips from being able to fully support some type of function. So you throw the semi-rejects into lower-price point models and disable some of the features in the BIOS so it doesn't overdrive the actual capability.

It's actually very rare for all the boards in the same model and version line to all have the same exact chips... and even when they do they are not usually all capable of the same performance. It's not done to gouge the customers who pay more or to make the lower-end models suffer, it's done to maximize the amount of money you can get out of a manufacturing run. Just because they didn't tell you specifically why board A is cheaper with less functions than board B when they appear identical doesn't mean they're playing a shell game, it just means you aren't privy to all the information.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[miknix]

I can give them some ideas:

What about starting to properly support XRandR and stop the TwinView crap?
What about continuing giving minimal support to old GPUs? My parent's computer has a GeForce FX Go 5300 which has currently no official driver that supports the latest Xorg. Unfortunately nouveau is not working very well with this graphic card either, being the 2D support buggy.
What about supporting KMS in their drivers?

Not going to happen, that's why my next computers will have Intel GPUs.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Runaway1956]

Good Point. (sorry - lower case "P"s seem to be dead on this keyboard)

It is easy to imagine that Nvidia might make a contribution or more to the kernel, that would helP Performance. I'd much rather see everything oPen sourced, but if that can't be done - let them get their hands dirty, and make the drivers work better for Linux. Even if they never actually contribute kernel Patches, the attemPt to do so can only give them a better understanding of the whole system!

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[philip.paradis]

This is utterly wrong. It's telling that you posted as an AC, and I'm assuming that's because you're not a developer involved in any open source work on this issue, and you don't have the first clue about how these things actually work.

However, you do sound like a user with an incredibly exaggerated sense of entitlement, or perhaps a college freshman with wild-eyed ideas that every line of code on the planet should be forcibly "freed." If the code for something hasn't already been written, I presume you're of the view that companies should be forced to pay developers to write it, and of course they should be sure to call you every day for your personal stamp of approval on the last 24 hours of coding. Naturally, the resulting code, which you didn't pay for and didn't write a single line of, must be licensed in precise accordance with your personal opinions on freedom, right?

Let me be absolutely clear on this: the core developers in the open source community working on this stuff want the specs. Just like anything and everything else that open source code was been written for, even back before the term "open source" was even in common usage, precise hardware specifications allow developers to write software that properly interfaces with the specified hardware.

I will be the first to stand up and strongly advocate for open hardware specifications. That said, the absurdly entitled position you're taking does far more harm than good in the community at large. In short, kindly shut the fuck up and stop ranting about things you have no understand of, and no honest stake in.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I truly don't understand what the big deal is.

When designing hardware peripherals, it's both a skill and an art defining the interface to the CPU. On the one hand, you can use dedicated logic in the peripheral to do everything, but that comes at a high cost. Not only does every bit of hardened logic use some die area, but it also needs extensive test suites and simulations to be developed and ran which can take a lot of time. More hardened logic also adds risk, since if there is a bug, it cannot be changed. Therefore, if possible, it can be advantageous to construct the interface such that it is very flexible, at a low level and closely tied to hardware function. Microcoding is an example of these techniques where instructions can be redefined to workaround silicon bugs or to correct instruction implementation.

I suspect that if nvidia properly documented their interface, it would therefore give away key parameters of their chips as well as insights into what they harden and what they leave to the CPU. Things such as pipeline steps, interlocks (if any and where) and even the number of different hardware blocks they put on their die may become evident.

All of this benefits the competition greatly, and in an industry where designing and producing these high specification chips costs tens of millions of dollars, I fully appreciate why they hold their cards close to their chest.

Finally, what I don't understand is why Slashdot readers think they should open up the specs or drivers. Nvidia make and sell their cards and can do what they want while respecting law and licenses. They could very easily provide no driver for desktop Linux at all, and given the effort required to support Linux in all it's flavours and variants with frequent new kernel releases and ever changing APIs, I'm sometimes surprised they bother.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[David Gerard]

This is a common myth in the geek world: that corporations are not merely incentivised, but actually required, to fuck over whoever they can in the pursuit of whatever arbitrary short-term buck someone on the internet is discussing at any given monent.

This claim is popular but incorrect - under the business judgment rule, directors' decisions cannot be judicially challenged unless they are grossly self-aggrandising or actually provably insane. The second standard is never met unless there is no deliberative process whatsoever.

The original source of this claim appears to be Cryptonomicon, where a shareholder doing this to a startup is a plot point. They can bring a suit for this, but only in the trivial sense that someone can bring a suit for anything. But as for being required by law to fuck people over in the short term no matter the long-term sensible consequences? It turns out reality isn't fiction, and that's why fiction is called "fiction".

So no, judgement on how much to interact with an open source project is entirely within the company's remit to decide. As would be sanely expected.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

But it's the kernel license, so if they plan on releasing any useful code, it must be under a GPLv2 compatible license.

I really don't understand why they don't open up already. Their only real competition is ATI, and there's not a single technology that nvidia could expose through their source that ATI doesn't already have ... so, why don't just open up?

The way nvidia gets itself into the kernel is an ugly hack, and we're sick of it and the problems it brings.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Instine]

Agreed. They should help this project. While the opinions of readers here clearly matters to *some* degree, I'd like to think NVIDIA would care about my take. As I'm right now designing and building a GPGPU compute system. And while it won't get in the Linpack this year, it genuinely might in a few years from now. Right now (I broke away to write this) I'm pawing over the OpenCL vs CUDA options AGAIN, to weigh up which to go for. Right now OpenCL is pulling me strongest, simply because I know I could move to something else if I had to. I don't want to. NVIDIA apear to be leading the race to me, for stable, enterprise ready, server standard GPUs. I prefer CUDA.

So guys, I prefer your products, I could spend hundreds of thousands, maybe million some day, but I'm nervous enough to choose a lesser option in order to leave myself an escape path - purely because your lack of openness at the interface with the hardware worries me. I don't want the hardware opened, I want its API. The lowest level software interface to it (and preferably the code to your supported drivers). If you opened up I'd know I could always get a driver that worked if I needed to move OS. Or that I could tweek for performance in the area I need it. etc... Open up. Why not? I've given you a bloody good reason to. Haven't I?

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[TheRaven64]

I've worked on GPU drivers, and while much of what you say is correct, you seem to be conflating 'open source developer' with 'some guy working in his spare time'. When I was hacking on GPU drivers, it was for a company that sold a compiler targeting them for HPC. There are other companies with a vested interest in improving GPU drivers, for example those selling big GPU clusters, and they can employ competent people to hack on the drivers. There are also a few small companies that specialise in writing graphics drivers who are happy to take on contracts to write drivers for new cards (GPU makers often subcontract out some of this work, especially in the embedded space).

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[TheRaven64]

Truth is soon Intel hardware with the open source driver will be more powerful than the NVidia card with the open source driver.

There's also the problem (from nVidia's perspective) of commoditisation of the market. Most consumers don't want the fastest GPU, they want the cheapest GPU that's fast enough for their needs. As with CPUs, some people don't need the latest and greatest, and this percentage of the market grows over time. As the niche of people needing the high end cards shrinks, so does nVidia's R&D budget and their ability to stay on the leading edge. This is something nVidia should be intimately familiar with, as it was how they killed SGI...

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt anyone will even see this, but I think it's great that they took any interest at all.

The owe our tiny market segment exactly nothing, but they're asking anyway. That's certainly something and it seems awfully nasty to get all "fuck you, it's all or nothing" about it.

Just a thought.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[SplashMyBandit]

> The pilot project was worth an initial 250-350 million dollars, with the potential of much more to follow.
People always say this, "more work to follow" but it hardly ever works out like that. The Chinese are notorious (as in *consistently and repeatedly*) ask for samples with the promise of more orders and they take it apart and reverse engineer it. They do this with electronics, shoes, ships, MiG and Sukhoi jets, missiles, commercial agricultural strains even Austrian towns. I'm not anti-Sino, just reporting what has been documented as happening and appears to be a sustained, systematic and government condoned effort to make unlicensed copies of technology (that is, 'steal'). Perhaps NVidia were aware of this, even if many Slashdotters are not.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Bert64]

You could say that linux is significantly invested in x86 too, and yet it also has support for mips, arm, etc...
If the driver is even remotely well written, then it should require absolutely minimal effort to support other architectures. There are plenty of drivers for pci and usb devices in the linux kernel that work on other architectures pretty much by accident, try building a sparc or alpha linux box and throwing some random pci cards in.
And let's not forget that until a few years ago, there were nvidia drivers for macos on powerpc.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[GNious]

I would think that the Nouveau project would prefer to keep nVidia people/developers out of the source - they cannot risk there being any "polution" of intellectual property.
Lawyers should first classify what the company can divulge (and their answer: Nothing), before anyone from nVidia even thinks about looking at the Nouveau source.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Tough Love]

NVidia should open their register specs like AMD or else fuck themselves. I believe that is what Linus meant.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Tough Love]

Either NV hands over the goods, or we have nothing

Crawl back into your cesspool, idiot. Like GP said, we need register specs. That's it. NVidia no doubt has a lot of years invested in their driver, but they can keep it. We have way more man years available than they do.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[philip.paradis]

I'd be delighted to see you back up any of your assertions with deep insights into my personal history, the histories of other interested parties on this topic, actual refutation of any of the listed points instead of generalized hand waving, demonstrated understanding of how practical open source / free software development works, and additional relevant citations.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies don't like giving away the goods for fear of losing competitive advantages. Companies that invest a lot in their goods as NVIDIA does are especially fearful of creating new competition. This isn't a competition is bad argument, it's a giving away your tech and enriching your competitors is bad argument. Also, NVIDIA doesn't have to open it up to Linux. Seriously, what will the Linux community do? Threaten to get behind another chipmaker? Maybe a full scale boycott of NVIDIA? NVIDIA doesn't get much benefit from the Linux community.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[RabidReindeer]

"You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs."

Of course they do. Why in the world would this surprise you? It's a public, for-profit company. The vast majority of contributions to open source by companies are not done out of altruism. They're done out of self-interest.

"I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already."

There's probably something in how they do things that they think (rightly or wrongly) that gives them an advantage over their competition that either isn't patented or can't be patented (or maybe violates someone else's patents).

One of the very best ways to obtain a good image is to provide what your customers actually need. Or at least what they think they need. And in the long run, it's usually going to be a darn sight cheaper than spending a lot of money on PR types to repair damage that never should have happened to begin with.

Especially when it degenerates to the point where one of the most respected software developers in the world is publicly photographed aiming a rude gesture at you.

The current NVIDIA driver generates all sorts of annoying artifacts on my screen when ordinary web pages scroll. The only reason that I even buy NVIDIA hardware is that their competition is even less supportive. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I'd pay good money for something that wasn't evil.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[treadmarks]

I don't think NVIDIA is doing anything wrong, but I'm sick of hearing the profit motive used as a euphemism for antisocial or greedy behavior. That's not the way capitalism is supposed to work and everybody needs to know this. Any business textbook will tell you that the profit motive is not meant to be synonymous with greed, but in practice that is how most Americans think of it. I don't know how people got tricked or corrupted into this way of thinking but we're all paying the price now as fraud played a huge part in the economy's destruction.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[FridayBob]

I would think that the Nouveau project would prefer to keep nVidia people/developers out of the source - they cannot risk there being any "polution" of intellectual property. ...

Not necessarily. We don't need their source code, just more information about their API. And as was recently ruled in the Oracle vs Google case regarding Java, API's can not be copyrighted.

Lawyers should first classify what the company can divulge (and their answer: Nothing), before anyone from nVidia even thinks about looking at the Nouveau source.

Not their source code -- just the API for their hardware! Not that I expect that Nvidia's management will allow their engineers to divulge any API information (even just a little), but for us that's what's most important.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Deorus]

Telling people which versions of Linux they can use the video cards with is equivalent to telling Windows users they all have to use Vista if they want to use NVidia hardware.

Fortunately, Vista drivers work perfectly fine on Windows 7, making that a non-issue and demonstrating that Linux itself IS the actual problem. Thanks for the Windows reference!

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[Yvanhoe]

We can even point him to the exact page where Optimus developers complain about NVidia's attitude and ask for specific help

There should be ways to detect the wirings and whether there is a mux and where, but the documentation is not available to the developers (maybe you can help us figure out how to do this, have any ideas? You can also 'petition' nvidia for releasing these specs: nvidia customer help ? )

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[gbjbaanb]

Telling people which versions of Linux they can use the video cards with

or guess what, we could create a stable ABI and then a single blob would work with (gosh) all versions of Linux.

The other benefit is that all other bits of hardware would work with all versions of Linux and could they start to be sold with shrink-wrapped drivers in the shops.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[west]

Nvidia's distinguishing technology and products are not its driver software

What? There's at least as much useful (and reproducible) technology in the drivers as in the hardware. I can pretty much guarantee any open-source drivers would be gone though with a fine-tooth comb for useful information in exactly the fashion that companies purchase and disassemble their competitors products for manufacturing information.

In any half-way competitive industry, if you're competition *isn't* using your open source efforts to improve their own products, they're probably already out of business for a whole host of other blatant stupidities.

That said, in many industries, there isn't a lot of useful information for competitors in the software. Fearing to open-source most general purpose computing is usually pretty foolish. However, high-end video cards is definitely not one of those industries. A lot of money is spent on software R&D innovations and experience to invent or improve algorithms which will happily be taken by the competition to improve their own product.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[hairyfeet]

But whose fault is that when Torvalds flat out refuses to allow a hardware ABI that EVERYONE ELSE has? Solaris, BSD, Windows, OSX, hell even OS/2 has a fricking ABI now and the ONLY OS that doesn't is Linux. So why should Nvidia or anybody else jump through hoops to support a broken design?

You can use Win2K drivers on XP, you can use Vista drivers on win 7 and 8, that's over a decade of support for a driver. That means that in all likelihood the hardware will be long dead before you can no longer run it on your choice of Windows OS.

I'm personally using a 2008 Vista driver on my fully updated Win 7 simply because it interacts better with the software I prefer to use, yet on Linux its fully expected that driver simply won't work without a recompile or major futzing, that's just fucked up folks, and even one of the Red Hat developers says the current system simply isn't sustainable, you have too few qualified people trying to support too much and the QA and QC simply isn't there because of it.

I can tell you that as a retailer that is why I'll sell a system with XP despite XP being creaky as hell now, simply because I can't even take a 4 year old Linux and upgrade it to current without shit breaking. The entire driver subsystem in Linux is a God awful mess and if this finally gets people to talk about it, instead of just accepting fixes and forum hunts as par for the course? let me be the first to say i'm ALL for it. there is no damned reason why companies like Nvidia and AMD should have to keep releasing drivers for old hardware simply because Torvalds ego won't let him see the current system doesn't work. And PLEASE don't say it would encourage binary blobs because in case you ain't notice? they ALREADY DO THAT NOW, you just have shittier support.

So don't sweep it under the rug folks, this is simply a symptom of a MUCH larger problem, and that is the current driver model simply isn't sustainable. You can get by with it in server and embedded because hardware changes there are practically non existent and positively glacial, hell many servers still use Rage II for GPUs for the love of Pete, but to gain in the consumer market you need to be able to keep up with the constantly changing hardware and the current model simply doesn't work. Its always behind the curve, always way behind, hell by the time things are properly supported they usually aren't being sold in retail anymore. this really needs to change folks, and the only way it'll happen is if enough people get fed up with the status quo and complain. You can and DO deserve better fellas.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[SplashMyBandit]

"As for agriculture strains, those are natural (though changed through generations of controlled breeding). Copyright doesn't apply there."
I live in New Zealand (NZ). Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent developing a strain of apples known as New Zealand Rose. It is a delicious apple. However, Chinese tourists were found with cuttings of the apple trees (they're always found with such things) and now the apples are grown in China - destroying some of the export potential of the apple, plus also destroying the brand in the quality control that NZ maintain for their product (since the Chinese can sell inferior quality apples it taints the NZ brand).

This is not unusual, in fact the Chinese Government has a department that asks its citizens going overseas to bring back anything useful they can find and they'll be rewarded. This is called the 'Thousand grains of sand' and is an interesting approach to spying (who cares if some tourists are arrested, since there are many more you can still get interesting stuff). It is not ok for it to be government policy to conduct industrial espionage - the Chinese joined the WTO (in 2001) which means they agreed to obey international property rights agreements. Now they are not the only ones, but they certainly are the greatest and more importantly they are *deliberate and systematic* offenders. Therefore, while your post has some good points I don't think it was made understanding the true 'state of play' at the moment.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[gbjbaanb]

how often does an ABI of something as mature as Linux need to be changed? Microsoft manages quite well, and only changed their driver model when the big media firms persuaded them to put DRM into it for Vista. I should imagine stabilising the Linux ABI today would not change for the next 20 years.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[west]

The choice is yours!

Um, the choice isn't theirs (the engineers) - it's the company's.

Moreover, just about everything you've posted there are reasons to NOT give out the source code!

(I apologize if this is meant to be humorous - if so, I'm missing it.)

when I see a concept in action in actual hardware ..I could figure anything out.

Allowing you to produce better products that will help make the original company's products less attractive.

These people, having gained lots of knowledge and insight from their experimentation and other related studies, would be much better positioned and more confident about going into the business of creating their own state-of-the-art video cards.

Come on, this has to be humor. You're saying companies should release the source code to help others start new businesses that will destroy them?

I think the video card market could really use some more competitors at this juncture.

Thus with more competition profit margins decline even further, helping enrage the stock owners. Are you sure you're promoting open-source?

If NVidia and ATI/AMD truly are confident in having the best engineers, processes, etc, they will surely continue to dominate this market

Companies *aren't* certain they'll continue to dominate (at least the ones that last - there's nothing as doomed as a company that is certain they'll retain their leadership status). You're basically saying idiots will release source code.

the customers would get better and cheaper accelerators in the bargain.

Um, that's likely *bad* for the companies trying to make money selling video cards...

There needs to be new competitors entering the market, and there certainly will be sooner or later.

and again...

ATI/Nvidia may have the upper hand at this present moment, but other technological advances, computing in general, simulation and manufacturing capabilities, etc, have caused us to reach a point where much lower end players can now enter the graphics accelerator market and compete successfully.

So the big two should help to speed in their own destruction?

Which of you wants to be the inspiration to future graphics engineers, who will be influenced by your designs and your way of doing things

You don't want to influence you competitors to be more like you, you want to be unique so that customers flock to you alone!

Again, my apologies if this was meant to be humorous.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[hobarrera]

You seem to have it all wrong. There's no need for the manufacturer to even SUPPORT drivers. If they just release documentation, each OS's developers will gradually develop, and maintain drivers for their respective OSs. Period.

Re:Ugh, this makes me mad.

[gbjbaanb]

nonsense, otherwise Windows would have to be re-released with a new ABI everytime too. If MS can have a stable binary driver model, there's nothing stopping Linux from doing the same.

The very thing that they don't want to do.

[sethstorm]

Open up the hardware such that proper drivers can be written for any card (recent or not) and platform w/o the need of binary blobs.

That shouldn't be an impossible task given how much weight NVidia has towards third parties.

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the solution "curated APIs". They approve and distribute what developers make for custom and legacy hardware and software. Apple could learn from this too.

JJ

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[Gaygirlie]

Open up the hardware such that proper drivers can be written for any card (recent or not) and platform w/o the need of binary blobs.

That shouldn't be an impossible task given how much weight NVidia has towards third parties.

People keep spouting these things without actually taking into account that NVIDIA most likely has all sorts of contracts and license agreements they just can't break. Yes, it's fun to bash NVIDIA and try to paint them as some sort of a big, black demon worth all the hatred in the world, but in the end that doesn't actually *help* anyone, least of all F/OSS movement. Intel has the advantage in that that they entered the GPU-market a lot later than NVIDIA et.al., so they could avoid many of the mistakes their competitors did and they also have the whole, complete chain needed to produce and ship GPUs all by themselves and that really makes the comparison feel more like apples and oranges than anything directly comparable.

NVIDIA could possibly open up future hardware, but they'd still possibly have to then develop some areas completely from scratch in order to not run afoul of their previous engagements and such a move obviously would cost them huge amounts of time and money. And well, Linux-users simply ain't worth that. All this is to say that NVIDIA should open up as much as they can, that I agree with, but that it is also highly unlikely they could open it all up even if they wanted to.

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[Gaygirlie]

I see why you're writing as an AC.

because nothing prevents nVidia from collaborating

Copyright, patent and contract laws quite likely do. Oh, but let's not let real-life facts bother us, eh? Ignorance is a bliss and all that.

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[Phroggy]

nVidia is violating somebody's patents. I don't know which ones. They don't know which ones. It's really not possible for them to know which patents they're violating, and it could be that they're actually not violating anything, but it's probably a safe bet that they are. That's how broken our patent system is.

The flip side of this is, whoever holds those patents that nVidia is violating also doesn't know that nVidia is violating their patents. However, if nVidia were to release the specifications and source code that we all want them to, it might become easier for somebody to recognize that nVidia has unknowingly violated their patent, at which point nVidia might be very screwed. Or maybe not, who the hell knows? In any case, a series of patent infringement lawsuits could be very very bad, and could potentially destroy the company. The only defense nVidia has against this is 1) building up a patent warchest of their own, so that if somebody sues them, nVidia can look for patents they own that the other company is violating and work out a trade, and 2) shrouding their hardware in mystery, so nobody knows how it works and therefore nobody can figure out if it's infringing on someone's patent or not. Note that #1 is not possible against a patent troll that doesn't actually produce anything, so #2 is really all they've got.

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[MichaelSmith]

Well yeah maybe. There are degrees in these things. AVR outsourced their entire developer toolchain for working on their microprocessors so that you can compile for any of their chips with gcc. Its very convenient and it sells a lot of hardware for them.

Re:The very thing that they don't want to do.

[zixxt]

nVidia is violating somebody's patents. I don't know which ones. They don't know which ones. It's really not possible for them to know which patents they're violating, and it could be that they're actually not violating anything, but it's probably a safe bet that they are. That's how broken our patent system is.

The flip side of this is, whoever holds those patents that nVidia is violating also doesn't know that nVidia is violating their patents. However, if nVidia were to release the specifications and source code that we all want them to, it might become easier for somebody to recognize that nVidia has unknowingly violated their patent, at which point nVidia might be very screwed. Or maybe not, who the hell knows? In any case, a series of patent infringement lawsuits could be very very bad, and could potentially destroy the company. The only defense nVidia has against this is 1) building up a patent warchest of their own, so that if somebody sues them, nVidia can look for patents they own that the other company is violating and work out a trade, and 2) shrouding their hardware in mystery, so nobody knows how it works and therefore nobody can figure out if it's infringing on someone's patent or not. Note that #1 is not possible against a patent troll that doesn't actually produce anything, so #2 is really all they've got.

Keep in mind that has not stopped AMD from releasing a ton of specs and docs and nobody has come forward over the years to sue AMD over their releases. Nvidia is just being stupid at this point and time.

Nvidia Open Source Policies

[hackus]

Eventually given how global markets expand and change, Nvidia will have to change its policies.

After all, they sell a GPU.

Consider how silly it is not to publish register information so you can write software for it. It is silly. Especially if Intel did the same thing with its chipsets because AMD might get some information on how a instruction works and try and copy it therefore making assembly language illegal and silly IP laws.

Eventually this policy is going to cost Nvidia in the pocket book, and they will either come around or sink into nothingness.

The exact same direction Apple is going to be heading to very shortly.

-Hack

Re:Nvidia Open Source Policies

[Chibi Merrow]

Eventually this policy is going to cost Nvidia in the pocket book, and they will either come around or sink into nothingness.

And yet, our new deployment of thirty Linux-based image generators I just setup all have GeForce cards in them... Do we live in the same world?

nVidia cards, with nVidia's binary blob driver, are the only way I can get any work done in Linux. That doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon, either.

I wish it would. My home PC has a Radeon card... But the support under Linux just isn't there.

So score +1 Linus Torvalds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your lack of faith disturbing...

A vulgar finger gesture got results.

Demand the moon, get a moon base.

Same thing as always

[macemoneta]

It's unnecessary, and likely impossible, for Nvidia to open source its proprietary driver, due to licensed software they don't own (they have stated in the past). All that's needed is for Nvidia to release the documentation on the components they manufacture, as AMD/ATI did in 2008 (and Intel has always done). The existing nouveau driver team will take it from there. Nvidia can also choose to provide funding, salaried developers, or sample cards for the team. That would put them in a parity position with AMD and Intel.

Re:Same thing as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are the initial steps that can be taken:

1. Document the hardware. Releasing full specs would go a long way. Intel just released thousands of pages for its new stuff.
2. Have your engineers work on the nouveau project to support all of your cards in 2D.
3. Make nouveau your official linux driver for all 2D stuff. Initially this would be hard, but this is a case of if you bite the bullet, you will see rewards both short and long term.
4. We understand that the 3D stuff is where things are exciting. Move all of the 3D stuff to being a closed module of nouveau, or even to userspace.
5. Work with the virtualization people. You can do it, we know you can.
6. Work towards being able to open all of your cards. Can you work with people to set release dates for older cards? How about the ones you don't really support anymore?
7. Keep talking to the community. It does help.
8. Contribute to an open hardware project. Perhaps by agreeing to manufacture an open video board?

Re:Same thing as always

[Crosshair84]

All that's needed is for Nvidia to release the documentation on the components they manufacture, as AMD/ATI did in 2008 (and Intel has always done). The existing nouveau driver team will take it from there.

Yea, how well has that actually worked. Oh yea, it's failed miserably. 4 years later and ATI Linux drivers are still garbage and the only reason Intel drivers work is because of the server market and because chips don't change often. It's not rocket science, writing graphics drivers are HARD and Linus continually poking his pecker into the kernel means they continually break and have to be tinkered with to work again.

The VOIP visitation recorders at work have to have updates turned off because Ubuntu craps itself whenever it tries to update. When the box is 4 hours away that is a big deal. Our windows machines have auto-updates turned on and never have problems. We've tried having a development machine at the office to test the updates, but for whatever reason, the number of VOIP boxes and minor hardware revisions make it impossible to develop a standard update profile for us to reliably push out to all machines. So we have to just lock them down as much as we can and hope for the best. We are working on a Windows based solution so we can eliminate the Linux boxes in the future.

It needs to be repeated so it sinks in, Linux needs a reliable ABI so ATI and others can just slap a Linux driver onto the CD that comes with the card and call it a day.

Re:Same thing as always

[macemoneta]

Posting anon because I've already modded this thread - I've clearly been way too far out of the loop for way too long. Is this to say that ATI is now the Linux-friendly manufacturer whereas NVidia is not? I thought that in the past, NVidia had the lead by way of better drivers, better stability, and VDPAU. Did ATI/AMD leapfrog ahead or is NVidia still the better way to go when building a PC with the intention of running Linux on it?

ATI/AMD's New Open-Source Strategy Explained:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826&num=1

AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjA1Mw

AMD Releases Additional R600 GPU Programming Documentation:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=960&num=1

AMD Releases 3D Programming Documentation:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_tcore_release&num=1

Re:Same thing as always

[wrook]

4 years later and ATI Linux drivers are still garbage

Actually, I have an HD6950 in my box. I had been running the proprietary driver basically because it was set up by default and I was too lazy to change, but yesterday I decided to give it a go. In terms of performance, it is not garbage (I haven't looked at the code). There are actually quite a few advantages to the open source driver.

For one, the 2D operations seem to be significantly faster. I had to screw around with Catalyst on the proprietary driver to get good desktop performance, but the open source driver is considerably snappier out of the box. Also, Gnome Shell was crashing on me frequently with the proprietary driver (usually when doing an expose type event), but this seems to have stopped completely with the open source driver (it has also never crashed with my Intel card on my netbook). Finally video playing seems to have been improved. No matter what I did there would always be some situations where I would get tearing with the proprietary driver, but I never get tearing with the open source driver. There is probably a way to fiddle with Catalyst to get everything working well on the proprietary driver, but I could never seem to find the sweet spot in terms of performance and stability

I'm not a big gamer, but I have a few games. Some games work flawlessly. Some have reduced framerate. One game (the World Forge Ember client did not run at all due to driver problems.

Apart from Ember (which is kind of screwy most of the time anyway), every game I've tried is playable at a reasonable framerate and resolution. I suspect that hard core gamers would not be happy playing some of the more modern windows games under wine, but I don't have any of those to test. On the whole, for a casual open source gamer, the open source driver actually has a better user experience for me. Admittedly, I have a fairly high end card, so I don't know what it's like for a cheaper one, but I don't get a dramatic drop off in performance. The improvement in other areas more than makes up for it in my mind.

Quite possibly for a specific application you have in mind, it's not acceptable, but that's a far cry from "garbage".

Re:Same thing as always

[Anonymous Coward]

And still the Nvidia drivers give the best performance compared to the other cards and open source drivers. You can argue until you turn blue, but at the end of the day this is just a fact..

If you depend on heavy graphic 3D performance nothing beats the Nvidia cards and closed source blob. I think most users are just pragmatic and use this combination. At the end of the day you have a job to do, and being up in arms about the openness of the drivers and rejecting them for that does not get this job done.

Nvidia over and over again explained they have reasons not to open their specs (you can speculate about third-party entities restrictions, but this is not a fact so far). While this is not an ideal situation it is the best we got.

Just imagine Nvidia would say: "Considering the negative reactions we decided to stop supporting Linux at all. Only manufacturers making specific soft- and hardware (like tablets and Android or programs like Maya) will get support at a small fee". Do you think that would hurt Nvidia? Do not forget the bulk of the graphic cards Nvidia sells is for the gamer market on Windows machines. While they would lose a small segment of the user market, I do not think it would it would hurt them too much. I am just wondering how long Nvidia keeps supporting Linux. I could be they are on the brink on giving up support at all. If they do that I think Linux would certainly not be helped by that, closed source blob or not...

Re:Same thing as always

[jvillain]

You can get a distro with 10 year stability if you want it. But that leaves you frozen in time. Linux has made hellacious progress compared to all other OS's because it is willing to ditch the bad and move forward. I remember one year where we were all fretting about having no journalled file system. 6 months later Linux had 5. How many can you run now? Telecom companies and others run their Linux machines with 5 nines of uptime. Maybe the problem isn't actually the ABI.

Re:Same thing as always

[arose]

If nVidia sees no benefit they needn't be doing any of it. Wait, they wouldn't be, their attitude makes it quite clear that they care preciously little for goodwill. Desktop users likely only get support as its a good bugtesting pool for their workstation and supercomputing clients. The only thing they'd accomplish by pulling out is sending developers to the FLOSS Radeon drivers, something that could turn very bad in the long term. So yeah, pull the desktop blob... if you dare.

Re:Same thing as always

[im_thatoneguy]

And yet their open source drivers still are unusable...

I don't give 2 shits about "Theoretically" working drivers. I need reliable, stable and fast drivers. The AMD Drivers are none of those things.

Re:Same thing as always

[jimicus]

Don't you believe it.

It is quite possible to buy three computers from the same supplier, with the same model number and the same specifications within a month of each other and find that you wind up with three subtly different pieces of hardware.

There are ways to avoid it - most major suppliers will guarantee that certain ranges won't receive a change to the hardware without a corresponding change in the model number - but those ranges are typically quite a bit dearer.

Re:Same thing as always

[Bert64]

If you do that, then it will be seen as "good enough" and noone will write drivers to take advantage of new kernels, all drivers will end up limping along.

Easy

[lennier1]

Firstly, deal with the goddamn shitfucking Optimus hardware that's out there!!!!!!

Optimus

[jaminJay]

Better power management. KMS. More timely releases. Stop whinging that there are problems with Linux/Xorg/whatever preventing you from doing something and work with those up-streams to fix it. Stop making excuses, start releasing code. Extract the proprietry stuff to (a) smaller blob(s) and expose the trivial interconnects and such at the very least. Never say it can't be done: everything's possible. Etc.

Re:Optimus

[Electricity Likes Me]

Better support for the hybrid graphics chips going into laptops would help a lot.

he knows

[phantomfive]

. I assume the issue is mainly the lack of open support for the graphics-related parts of our HW,

He knows exactly what people want. The entire point of the question is to make it look like they are doing something without actually doing something.

Re:he knows

[Luckyo]

He also knows that this is not going to happen, and is looking for a middle ground. Fanatical "open source or GTFO" movement isn't look pretty in this either.

Re:he knows

[wrook]

But it's not a middle ground. It's not related.

Let's say I'm trying to get to the bus station. You live in the area and so I ask you how to get to the bus station. You say, "I don't really want to tell you that." I get pissed off and complain loudly that even though you know the way to the bus station, you won't tell me. People start saying, "Boy, that guy's not friendly at all, is he?"

So in order to avoid the bad reputation you say, "Well, I still don't want to tell you where the bus station is, but what if I offered to cut your grass. Would that help matters?"

Of course I would love for you to cut my grass, but it isn't at all related to the issue of the bus station. It's not a middle ground, it's a red herring.

Re:he knows

[drinkypoo]

That's a shitty analogy. Don't feel bad; most people make shitty analogies when a car gets anywhere near the conversation.

Here's a better automotive analogy to the current situation: It's like you're trying to get somewhere on a bus, because you don't own a car, don't want to own a car, you think cars suck. And you ask which bus you need to get on to get where you're going, and the person you're talking to says "Well, I just get in my car and I drive up this way and down that way and I'm there." You don't want to use a car, you want to ride the bus, but the person you're talking to isn't going to tell you about that, because (as it turns out) they work for a car company and their business is in sellin' cars.

It's still not perfect, of course, because it's an analogy. For some reason, even though [for the most part] we have fairly functional minds and are technically capable of discussing most issues without bullshit abstraction. The truth is that nVidia probably can't give away the information that's being requested of them because of their relationship with Microsoft. They can only tell you how to use their car to get there, or suggest you ask someone else with another vehiclular strategy.

I'm sticking with Radeon

[ArcRiley]

Very happy with my Radeon chipsets, don't have to worry about kernel version incompatibility or graphics lockups from some bug we can't even begin to fix. I've had both problems with nVidia hardware.

No PR move from nVidia is going to change my mind beside opening the specs.

Alright, I'll bite...

[Narcocide]

Frankly the GPU support issues are going to be the big key issue no matter what. Whether you think its wrong/stupid/immoral/wasteful/anti-american or whatever to use Linux as a gaming platform or for any other sort of performance-critical real-time 3d rendering *some* Linux users will still disagree with you and do it anyway. Whether flaws in your business plan and/or shady under-the-table anti-competitive agreements made years ago with certain big software vendors preclude you from giving Linux full support or if its really some legitimate logistics problem *some* Linux users will still disbelieve the excuses and not forgive you for it. Some of those Linux users still consider themselves your paying customers. You will never truly live this down, but don't worry; judging by the word on the street these days neither will any of your competitors.

However, if you want to set up a smokescreen that hides the fact that *someone* in the higher end of Nvidia's chain of command is openly prejudiced against open source software (or just made a shit ton of cash on Microsoft stock perhaps and refuses to believe therefore that Linux is anything other than a waste of the company's time) you could at least consider making an attempt at distro-native packages for your driver that show evidence that you are capable of and willing to put at least half as much effort into working within the rules and parameters of various distro's packaging systems and with their tools properly as you've already put into that big self-extracting NVIDIA-Linux-x86-whatever.run bash script monstrosity to make it capable of the far more arduous task of cleaning up after itself enough to get a working GLX after it has fully subverted and broken said packaging system by using very crude non-native tools and methods that are not dependency-aware.

Re: Some help is better than none.

[symbolset]

Not really. What is needed is hardware that can be documented. Nice of nVidia to confess they are "not it". Spares having to consider them.

Re:Of course

[ethan961]

Yes, it's their own fault that they're hindering the progress of the community. But corporations are corporations - the way I see it, we're lucky they're offering help at all in response to it, even if only to save their image. Truthfully I haven't bought Nvidia in years, it's been AMD/ATI for me for the last decade. Just remember that our wallets are the most powerful tool we have.

Summary of Previous Discussion

[peanutious]

Here's a summary of some of the most insightful discussions posted on slashdot when this discussion came up last week:

nVidia Issues:
*Proprietary drivers that don’t always survive kernel upgrades. 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. (from UnknowingFool) nVidia only provide a binary blob driver which makes bug fixing for it dependent on Nvidia's whims. (from AC)
*open source drivers – nVidia refuses to 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 everything to get a workable driver. (from AC) As a result, open source drivers are unable to use full card functionality like full 3D acceleration (from UnknowingFool)

Summary of graphic chip vendor support (from Lonewolf666):
*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.

From rajafarian: 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.

From jmorris42 : Name another major chip vendor who hasn't figured out that getting into the Linux kernel is a required checkoff for market success. Doubly so for any product used in the enterprise vs the fanboi market. NVidia's CUDA is about the entire list these days, the last major holdout.

From basscomm: Windows users who have SLI and multiple monitors have been able to enable SLI and use both of their monitors at the same time since about 2008. But under Linux, no dice. So if I had two monitors (which I do), and two Nvidia GPUs in SLI mode (which I do), and I wanted to run some 3D app that took advantage of SLI, I would have to: reconfigure X to disable my second monitor and enable SLI, restart X, play the game/use the app I wanted, when I was done I would have to reconfigure X again to enable my second monitor and disable SLI, restart X again, and reopen all my apps. Hardly ideal.

Given all of this discussion, here are a few ways nVidia could work better with the community:
*Open Source drivers - 1) provide specs 2) provide developer team that works on the OS drivers 3) provide rep to interface with the OS community 4) provide enough detail to get 3D working well
*Proprietary drivers - 1) monitor upcoming kernel builds and proactively update drivers before the next kernel release or 2) have a dedicated nVidia contact to work on updating drivers ASAP when notified that an upcoming kernel build breaks them
*Overall - enhannce SLI and multiple monitor support,

Re:Summary of Previous Discussion

[kthreadd]

Sounds like the situation could improve if Linux exposed a more stable API toward drivers.

Re:Summary of Previous Discussion

[bersl2]

That's not the Linux driver model, though. The model is that drivers are expected to be at least working towards integration into the kernel tree, so that the kernel devs can easily know if they're breaking something and maybe even fix or help fix it. Failure to do this results in long-term pain for everyone, while being in the tree or working towards being in the tree keeps everyone communicating on a regular basis and working together.

In other words, developing hardware for Linux actually requires communicating with people who are much closer to the end user than the typical direct customer of a chip design company. I know, it's a major paradigm shift for companies who (understandably) can't contemplate money except if someone plans to give it directly to them, never mind the needs of those who participate in the actual creation of demand for what they sell.

Re:Summary of Previous Discussion

[rtfa-troll]

Sounds like the situation could improve if Linux exposed a more stable API toward drivers.

Allowing and partially supporting hidden APIs is a mistake that has been often repeated in the computing industry. This is something where I think the kernel developers should learn from Apple. Apple, during old MacOS days used to deliberately, repeatedly and gratuitously change their hidden API calls even with minor point releases. This meant that software which used the API in ways that it shouldn't (in this case, by providing a binary blob) would break often and quickly. Users would be unhappy with their software and vendors would be forced to change. Software developers learned to read and respect the documentation. When they rewrote their O/S and even migrated to completely different architectures this meant that, merely by reimplementing the well defined published interfaces, almost all Apple third party software vendor's software was compatible.

I think that somewhat perversely, the actual mistake is that the unsupported linux APIs are too stable. This is the same mistake as Microsoft has often made and is something where the Linux Kernel developers and other free software vendors could learn from Apple. Microsoft's main benefit is plausible deniability when they want to have hidden interfaces for their own software. Free software doesn't need or benefit from such underhand tactics. There's no need to repeat Microsoft's mistake.

Same thing as always: DRM.

[Ostracus]

It's unnecessary, and likely impossible, for Nvidia to open source its proprietary driver, due to licensed software they don't own (they have stated in the past).

It also can break DRM.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely!

However, AMD/ATI is a PR stunt. The drivers just wrap non-free software and can't be utilised at all on truly free software platforms. Intel is the way to go. While you can't buy an Intel card explicitly you can utilise boards and/or laptops without nVidia/ATI and then use an Intel CPU with integrated graphics.

http://www.thinkpenguin.com/ offers absolutely the best hardware for free software users. There are no proprietary drivers or firmware required and even the free software endorsed Trisquel distribution is supported. That isn't just some hardware. It's everything. An impressive feet given the selection of hardware available.

Actually. ThinkPenguin has the largest catalog of GNU/Linux hardware by far. There really isn't a comparable offering anywhere else.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[DrJimbo]

Years ago I got good support from Nvidia. I had a problem and sent a bug report and got a response late on a Saturday night (West Coast) that involved a kernel patch to fix a bug in the kernel that was causing the problem. I was an Nvidia fanboy for many years after that. I helped dozens of people get things like Twinview working.

In recent years, working with Nivida has been very frustrating and I can no longer recommend them for Linux systems. For example some interaction between closed-source Flash and the closed-source Nvidia drivers turns people blue in Youtube videos but not other sites.

There has also been a heart breaking struggle to remove video "tearing" (vsync problem) when watching dvds and blurays. The last time I checked I needed to use the GL video to remove tearing when watching dvds but I still have some tearing when watching blurays which is kind of heart breaking. At the very least Nvidia should have a sticky post in the Linux forum explaining all the hoops one must jump through to try to get rid of video tearing. Also, having the sticky posts show up on all pages, not just the first page is a big PITA. It wastes my time and attention. It is disrepectful.

I don't understand why video tearing is such a recurring problem. Are these environment variables still needed?

export VDPAU_NVIDIA_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export __VDPAU_NVIDIA_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1
export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1
export GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"

When an nvidia driver update causes tearing to start again, or worse, if it causes X (or the entire machine) to crash, it feels like you are telling me "F- you!"

I get it that opening up your drivers is not an option. The problem is that this decision causes a lot of breakage and you do not make it easy to fix this breakage. Please just make it easy for me to get your drivers to work. Is Twinview plus non-tearing video playback really too much to ask for? Also, what about the problem with non-tearing and composite? Has that ever been fixed? If not, maybe that's something you could help with.

Years ago I felt like I was getting support. Nowadays I'm not feeling the love.

Stop developing a closed kernel module...

[iCEBaLM]

Move everything to userspace, and use an existing driver, or a very small open driver, to access the card. There should be no reason, even if they're crying "trade secrets" for this to happen. If nouveau can do it, and they're not crying trade secrets over it, then nvidia proper can do it too.

Re:Stop developing a closed kernel module...

[kthreadd]

Move everything to userspace, and use an existing driver, or a very small open driver, to access the card. There should be no reason, even if they're crying "trade secrets" for this to happen. If nouveau can do it, and they're not crying trade secrets over it, then nvidia proper can do it too.

Everyone is free to keep secrets, even you. If you have a problem with their actions then use other chipsets.

Re:Of course

[ppanon]

However, AMD/ATI is a PR stunt. The drivers just wrap non-free software and can't be utilised at all on truly free software platforms.

Seriously? What do you think this is about? What's the licence on this that makes you think it's non-free? You seriously don't think this licence cuts it?

Re:Of course

[ArcherB]

It's everything. An impressive feet given the selection of hardware available.

Must be a Gnome user...

Re:stable driver ABI

[unixisc]

Does Nvidia's driver exist for the BSDs, which do have a driver ABI?

Well, they lost me.

[lattyware]

It's funny, when I used to buy graphics cards, I bought nVidia because the driver was that much better - TwinView meant good multi-monitor support, etc... Now all that has changed. I replaced two nVidia cards with an AMD card, because AMD support their Eyefinity tech even on low-end cards, and my triple monitor setup works perfectly with 3D acceleration on the open drivers, which means I get KMS and no binary blobs. By comparison, I had to use xinerama to get triple monitors with the nVidia driver, no KMS, no 3D acceleration.

It's obvious what we want, open source drivers. If they can't handle that, documentation, but we all know they'll spout the same stuff about NDAs and 3rd party stuff they are licensing and can't reveal, and tell us binary blobs are the only way - well, I don't buy it. Intel manage it well, and AMD are definitely getting there. Binary blobs just don't give the experience any more, that's the reality.

Asking for the empty set?

[jejones]

From TFE (email): "Within the constraints I have, what should I and perhaps other NVIDIA employees be contributing to in the kernel?"

I suspect those constraints essentially preclude what would really be useful, so what's the point?

Re:Of course

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

AC may be referring to the firmware blobs without which newer AMD chips are good for little more than spartan 2d... That said, you really end up picking your poison with firmware. Some vendors include enough flash to store the blob, some demand that the kernel hand them the blob. There are exceptional cases, where the firmware is OSS, or where the vendor is a real asshole and forbids the blob to be distributed(for no obvious reason, since somebody always whips up a script that grabs the windows driver from the vendor site and gouges the firmware out of that.) In this unfortunate vein, it is probably worth noting that Intel is better about not making the firmware stuff visible, but AMD has historically been overwhelmingly nicer about coreboot vs. BIOS.

Small things for me

[Knuckles]

Get rid of the nvidia-settings application and provide something that resembles modern support for multimonitor setup, preferably by tying into the desktop environments' infrastructures. And support KMS.

Re:Of course

[bhcompy]

I take it you hate gaming for Linux, since Intel is worse than Matrox for gaming.

Re:"Just specs"?

[Gordonjcp]

If Linux had a platform share of 50% of the hardware market, they'd have sufficient grounds for biting the bullet and betting on staying ahead of the competition by being the best at doing the hardware part of their architecture.

The thing is, they could open their specs, wait a couple of months until open-source driver support catches up or even exceeds their closed-source drivers, and take pretty close to 100% of the Linux market.

Now, because Linux has at that point got as good or better accelerated video support than Windows, it will overtake Windows even faster than it's already doing for things like home theatre PCs. Valve will be happy, since their Linux-based console will be able to rock the cheap, powerful NVidia chips, and they will port more games to Linux since it's a pish easy job because of the improved 3D acceleration.

Yes, that's a bit idealistic.

Re: Some help is better than none.

[Tough Love]

for whatever reason, if their higher ups don't want to be telling the world how their drivers work, and so they won't.

That's nothing a good firing wouldn't fix.

If the engineer knows it will never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

and we ought to just accept it, then he should know a better perception will never happen and just accept it and the consequent loss of sales.

The REALLY DUMB thing about both the engineer (and NVidia) and you is that you don't seem to even consider "Hey, lets tell them why it can't ever be done.".

Except that was tried a long time ago, where NVidia said something like "SGI owns some of the stuff we use and they won't let us release it". Well, given specific goals, the FOSS people went to SGI and asked "Can NVidia release the stuff they got from you?" SGI answered "We cannot conceive of anything that NVidia has off us that we wouldn't be happy with them releasing.".

Now, given that, did NVidia release specs?

No.

And, having been caught out in a porkie-pie, they have refused since then to do other than let their fanbois (and I use their cards too) say "Oh, maybe they can't for contract reasons" because, not being party to any secret NDA, the fanbois cannot supply any information on who/what or why and therefore it can't be rectified.

Re:If the engineer knows it will never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that was tried a long time ago, where NVidia said something like "SGI owns some of the stuff we use and they won't let us release it". Well, given specific goals, the FOSS people went to SGI and asked "Can NVidia release the stuff they got from you?" SGI answered "We cannot conceive of anything that NVidia has off us that we wouldn't be happy with them releasing.".

First, this is common... company A says "I cannot do X because I have an agreement with company B" and then some person allegedly from company B (but who may not be in a position to know, or who knows but just feels like lying) says "nah, we're not the bad guys here!". If you have not seen ALL contracts between the two companies, then you have no way of knowing the truth... however IF such an agreement exists, Nvidia will never breach it even if goaded into it by statements from the other vendor, because then the other vendor could sue them.

second, AFAIK Nvidia has never said that the ONLY reason for the closed nature of their stuff was one agreement with SGI. In fact, I once worked at a company then got into talks with Nvidia and we attempted to negotiate for certain info and I was told (this is third-hand info) that our people were told that Nviida could not release what we wanted even under NDA because they had contracts with multiple IP owners. I have no Idea of how true that is other than that I trusted the person I heard it from at the time... but my point is that nobody other than Nvidia and anybody they have inked deals with truly KNOW what is involved. One thing is certainly true however: Nvidia gains no sales by holding the info private and loses sales by not opening it up, so the odds are that they truly are unable to open it up and no public statements by anybody else will change that. In fact, Nvidia may well be contractually forbidden to even publicly divulge the identity and/or existence of some contracts and partners.

The real problem here, however, is NOT Nvidia...

Nvidia makes hardware. The hardware has a hardware interface (but not an "API" as some mistakenly claim). The hardware must be compatible with the host PC, which has a clearly published hardware spec. Clearly Nvidia hardware interfaces well with the host machine because both sets of hardware conform properly to the hardware "binary/digital" spec.

Nvidia makes a software driver. On Windows, there is an ABI spec that Nvidia can adhere to so their driver will play well with Windows. On Linux, things are either so poorly implemented that the driver interfaces are in constant flux and no ABI is possible, OR the architecture itself is so incomplete that no ABI has been completed, so Nvidia goes out of their way to make a driver wrapper that can be re-built at install time to adapt their solid and high-performance code and hardware to the unsettled platform. The simple solution is for Linux to finally mature to the point that it has a stable, well-documented ABI. Refusing to do this is immature/political not practical. The refusal to have a stable ABI is not just a pain re Nvidia, it is the reason why any minor update of linux can trigger a tidal wave of package updates and result in an unstable system. Adding another unstable pile of incomplete "open" code like nouveau does nothing to advance linux into a modern mature state... it's a not-work-around for a broken/missing ABI and all the anti-Nvidia FUD on earth will not make the nouveau driver fully-functional. With a proper ABI, old hardware could continue to be functional on future Linux releases even when a maintainer for the device's driver code cannot be found. Without a proper ABI, such hardware will inevitably be dropped as maintainers lose interest.

Software patent troll problem

[dbIII]

I think some of the SGI people that were burnt very badly by software patent trolls ended up at Nvidia. Currently there is nothing to stop it all happening again if Nvidia describe their methods in enough detail to let opportunists go after them in court. It appears they don't think they can afford to open up the specs while broad software patents that should never have been granted still cover everything obvious in computer graphics.
That appears to be the "big deal".

Wayland?

[ChunderDownunder]

Retrofit your monolithic binary blob into a wayland capable architecture and you'll have addressed many concerns such as KMS, EGL, etc.

Supporting it on Tegra would be a step towards running standard accelerated Linux on an ARM phone or tablet and you'll be the slashdot nerd's platform of choice ahead of Adreno, Mali, PowerVR, VideoCore etc.

Re:Of course

[nashv]

It is not nVidia's job to do ANYTHING for X or Y operating system. If they make crappy drivers for a certain OS, they lose market on that OS. Maybe they don't care about that market.

Good news. . .

[JSBiff]

Hey, good news. China is changing.

Now, they tell you up-front that in order to sell a small number of units in China, you must hand over all your technical documentation so that they can start making and selling them after the initial sale.

No more nvidia for me

[trevelyon]

After my optimus experience I will simply not buy another closed source NVIDIA graphics solution. In the end I much like others and the internet in general route around broken parts. I will be curious to see how kernel module signing some distros are doing now for secure boot will effect NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

Re:Of course

[JamesP]

Oh please, it's firmware whining again

Dear open source zealots, no one is obliged to add more circuits to a computer just because you can't be bothered to give the embedded card some data.

ALL computers depends on some amount of closed source data, deal with it.

There are exceptional cases, where the firmware is OSS, or where the vendor is a real asshole and forbids the blob to be distributed

Absolutely. Dear manufacturers, if you complain about distribution of fw at the same time anyone can download your "windows driver" off your website, You Are An Asshole

Re:Of course

[gbjbaanb]

you don't quite understand the problem here - the HW manufacturer can offer a single Windows binary (or 2 or 3 at worst). But with Linux, they have to recompile a version for every (well...) version of the kernel that's out there. If the driver system had a stable ABI that never changed, then the HW manufacturers could deliver a single binary built "for linux" and would expect it to work. Currently, they have no such guarantee.

You wonder why Linux on the desktop never took off? There's no business benefit to the manufacturers to support it. Sure, its technically better, but that means diddly squat in the real world especially when the answer is to recompile from source. You're never going to get Nvidia's source code, so accept that and start to deal with it with a technical solution rather than an idealistic one.

Re:Of course

[KZigurs]

Linux still uses X. Regardless of how far away it's abstracted with dirty ugly hacks, it's still X.

So - for desktop use - no, it's NOT technically better. And it has little to do with the drivers not being open, but rather the religious insistence of nutters to keep the useful, flashy, graphics, you know - desktop, bits out of where they could work.