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NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly

Posted by Soulskill on from the returning-to-par dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Nouveau driver developers working on open-source support for the GeForce 900 Maxwell graphics cards have found this new generation to be "very open-source unfriendly" and restricting. NVIDIA began requiring signed firmware images, which they have yet to provide to Nouveau developers, contrary to their earlier statements. The open-source developers have also found their firmware signing to go beyond just simple security precautions. For now the open-source NVIDIA driver can only enable displays with the GTX 900 series without any hardware acceleration.

3 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And this is news... by tlambert · · Score: 4, Informative

    IIRC, This has always been the case.

    The news is that NVidia's behavior is getting worse.

    Well, given that one of the linked articles on NVidia's firmware signing is now 7 months old (September 2014), it's not getting worse all that quickly, it's just that the people who were complaining about it before are complaining about it again. And as they point out, there's a perfectly fine proprietary driver; they just don't like those drivers. The problem, of course, being that the Open Source driver can't legally use the Sorenson CODECs, or the MPEG-LA patent pool without violating the law in many countries.

  2. Re:Valve needs to use their clout by Jax+Omen · · Score: 2, Informative

    Valve basically owns PC gaming marketshare.

    They literally have more power than any other company, without exception, when it comes to mindshare of people who actually BUY PC games and games hardware.

  3. Re:How is this really news? by ckatko · · Score: 5, Informative

    >Why sould a GPU manufacturer spend a lot of time supporting such a small user base

    I don't know, maybe because most super computers on the fucking planet use GPUs? Why would scientists want a GPU manufacturer to support the operating system they do most of their work on? Oh, I can't think of a reason.

    Meanwhile, we're trying to do some work in ROS. I certainly don't want CUDA cores to help speed up the processing and filtering of tens of thousands of LIDAR points. Nor could I possibly use shaders for anything outside of gaming.

    This much sarcasm is killing me. Please get better opinions before I die.