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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. Valve needs to use their clout by Jax+Omen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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.

    1. Re:Valve needs to use their clout by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Valve basically owns PC gaming marketshare.

      Which is only around a couple of percent of all PC users. Translated to Linux that's a fraction of a fraction of one percent. And Nvidia's highest margin customers are those who buy their workstation and GPGPU cards.

      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.

      The flaw in your logic is that you think that PC gamers are the reason Nvidia makes a Linux driver. It isn't and never has been. Consumers are supported by the fact that Nvidia shares source code between their drivers, but were not the prime motivation. As I said previously, Nvidia made their *nix driver for commercial and GPGPU computing customers.

  2. Re:And this is news... by r1348 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The open-source radeon driver has hardware media coding/decoding working since a long time, with both VDPAU and OpenMAX interfaces. The codecs actually reside on the card and you already pay for their license when you buy it, what is missing is just an API to use them.