NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @05:09AM 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.

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Re:How is this really news? by ckatko · 2015-04-15 06:28 · 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.