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NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly
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.
IIRC, This has always been the case.
The news is that NVidia's behavior is getting worse.
Valve needs to use their clout
What clout? Is Valve some sort of major customer of Nvidia GPUs? Valve has no clout over Nvidia.
With Valve pushing for Linux gaming, they need to apply some inside pressure on AMD/Nvidia to make their shit work at 100% with Linux.
Nvidia's drivers do work 100% with Linux.
Since we know neither company is willing to do the work themselves, that means they need to release full documentation so the FOSS people can develop/maintain proper Linux support.
They don't need to do any such thing. Their important *nix customers are people doing CAD, rendering work or GPU computing not the tiny fraction of people playing games.
How many of those linux machines that were required to post this comment also requires a high end GPU. I would venture to guess close to zero. Why sould a GPU manufacturer spend a lot of time supporting such a small user base?
Imagine, for a moment, Valve talks to AMD/Nvidia about open source support, and AMD actually follows through on open source support (stifle that laughter and bear with me).
Nvidia doesn't.
Steam starts running ads promoting AMD.
SOMETHING LIKE 90% of ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS are seeing ads for Nvidia's competitor. Valve refuses to run Nvidia ads until they improve Open Source.
THAT is how Valve can use their clout.
Will they? Probably not. But they *should*, if their stated goal of legitimizing Linux Gaming is true. Otherwise they'll still be stuck at the mercy of Microsoft, which is the whole reason Valve is pushing for Linux gaming (they view the Windows Store as a HUGE threat to their livelihood)
Bad analogy.
This is exactly the way it already is in the car industry and is going even more so as cars get more and more computierised. Car manufacturers are (ab)using the technlogy in the car to limit access to who can work on it.
Its only the branded dealerships and service centers that can even get the special tools and software necessary to talk to the car to diagnose, clear and repair faults properly. ith new cars You can't even replace a major compnent yourself since with many brands, the car won't even start if it sees an unrecognised serial number on the network, which you need a dealer tool to set.
Bad analogy. Everyone opens their trunk from time to time. Very few people write their own video drivers. A better analogy would be a car manufacturer who does not allow you to reprogram the Anti-lock Braking System.
Linus just copied his ideas
Uhm, Linus helped create those ideas.
They *should*, if their goal of legitimizing Open Source video drivers is true.
Legitimizing Linux gaming is not really dependent on having open source the drivers. It is dependent on having good drivers. Valve does not have a stated goal of supporting open source. Their goal is to sell games.
That's funny. They had no trouble ignoring these problems before last September, which is when they started requiring signed firmware images.
Nobody is asking for source code or intellectual property rights related to firmware, all they need is the single signed blob of otherwise unreadable code which the new GM20x cards require before doing anything more complicated than simple mode switching. The kind of thing that nVidia said they would provide last year, but haven't.
How much does it cost to migrate all your users to "any decent country"?