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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.
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.
IIRC, This has always been the case.
The news is that NVidia's behavior is getting worse.
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?
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.
It looks like Nvidia's starting to abuse their market status by trying to force everyone onto their systems or at least to make it difficult to have alternatives. You can see a similar situation in the current adaptive sync Gsync / Freesync conflict where one became VESA standard (Freesync) and the other became proprietary and in general more expensive. I'm honestly considering avoiding Nvidia products at the rate they're going.
>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.
My post wasn't a question of "what does 2 teraflops mean", it was a question of what the fuck "there's no way you can remotely use that level of performance and features in games with an open source driver anyway." is supposed to mean.
It's a gibberish sentence.
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.
I don't know, maybe because most super computers on the fucking planet use GPUs?
Still a very small market. Lets see, they can spend resources working on the next card that can make them million or spend the same resources suppoting a small market that may make a few $100K. If you ran the company which would you choose?
Why would scientists want a GPU manufacturer to support the operating system...
It is not NVIDIA's job to support scientists. Their job is to make money for their stockholders.
Nor could I possibly use shaders for anything outside of gaming.
How is a private company obliged to support your project?
Sorry but "they re not allowing me to do what I want" just sounds very entitled to me.
PS. Using profanity just makes you appear to be an illiterate idiot.
But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes?
A common misconception, with complex products there's always so many environments and conditions you never get all the corner cases worked out. So what you want is ten million people playing GTA V on Windows (7/8/Vista), not all these niche users finding subtle ways to break it on their special snowflake of a Linux setup. It costs time and money, hurts your brand and most companies would rather just sell to the 95%+ doing mainstream tasks.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hardware and firmware often has a maze of IP behind them, not all of which is in nvida's power to ignore. Third party software, logic blocks, or even tools can make open sourcing things trikcy, and clearing such releases by the legal department can take non-trivial amounts of time and effort. It costs more than nothing to do it, and they have to weigh that against the possible benefit, which in this case is pretty small.
Valve has little to no Linux gaming clout. Ya they released a rebadge of Ubtunu with Steam on it. Yay. So far it has had very little influence. Most people continue to game on Windows (and to a lesser extent OS-X). They are not migrating in droves, nor are there droves of people who used Linux but didn't game that are now. Valve has changed very little in the Linux gaming space, as of yet,
The Unity engine and Kickstarter have done a lot more for driving any sort of Linux gaming than Valve.
Most of nVidia's gaming customers play on Windows, and they don't care about closed source drivers. Indeed, binary drivers are the way of things, the users would be extremely mad if you gave them source packages and told them to download a compiler. On OS-X it is all Apple's way, all the time. You gets the drivers you gets from Apple and live with it. Only in the Linux arena is there any wish for OSS drivers, and then only form a minority of their customers. Most of nVidia's Linux customers are high end enterprises, doing simulations or CAD work. They want certified binary drivers, because they want everything to be verified to work.
Valve really doesn't have much they can do to change nVidia's mind. I mean maybe if Valve themselves made Steam Machines and they could threaten to change vendors, but they don't, all kinds of hardware companies make them and they all do business with nVidia.
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.
The ten cards you sell ($4000 revenue) by spending 80 hours of developer time ($4000 expense) to fix extreme edge cases aren't worth it, as they still have to pay to manufacture the cards. Those developers could be fixing issues that will shift hundreds of thousands of units instead.
(Numbers based on $400 / card, $50/hr developer - not out of the realm of possibility)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
How much does it cost to migrate all your users to "any decent country"?
It's been doing okay. NVIDIA is making money, but it is only up 4.5% over the last year. Compare this to 6.6% for Intel, 13% for the Dow Jones, and 16% for the S&P 500. It's only doing well when compared with smaller chipmakers like ARM (up only 4.2% in the last year), Qualcomm (down over 12% in the last year), and AMD (which has lost over 26% in the last year).
But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes? So why try to restrict that in any way whatsoever?
Some of their most expensive hardware is almost identical to their cheapest ones, with the main difference being what the driver allows.
That being their drivers suck. Also that writing GPU drivers is hard and the OSS community hasn't done a good job.
AMD released a bunch of hardware info, and what code they could (they can't just open up all of their proprietary driver, there are things in it they legally can't release). There were claims of an absolutely amazin' driver that would be made, better than Windows, that there were thousands of skilled OSS programmers who were chomping at the bit to work on it.
Well that was mostly just people bragging on places like /. who didn't know what they were talking about, someone who'd fooled around writing a NIC or SATA driver and thought it was easy. Turns out graphics drivers are REALLY COMPLEX and each generation of hardware needs a new one. So the AMD OSS driver has been pretty poor quality. I mean it works, and supports some features, but it has some stability issues and is nowhere near the full feature set.
So ya, not really helping them. What the OSS community wants is for someone to write an nVidia quality driver, and open it up. Do all the work and then hand it out. Doesn't seem like anyone is interested in doing that. In part that is because some of what makes those closed drivers good is IP that gets licensed that can't be open sourced.
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.
Because they have TRADE SECRETS to protect.
No. They don't want to protect the binary blobs from your eyes. They're not encrypting, they're signing. They want to prevent you from developing your own blob, by having your video card reject firmware not written by them.
I don't think they are anti-open source,
It's not a matter of opinion. They are anti-open source by definition, it's a fact dictated by their actions. They're locking down the cards that they manufacture in order to prevent their owners from writing open-source software to drive them. You can't get more anti-open source than this. Nvidia have always been anti-open source, and they are getting worse and worse with time.
But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes?
Closed source means customer lock-in. So they lose 0.0001% of their sales today to a tiny fringe that care about OSS. But they get far more sales in the future, and customers are locked-in to "NVIDIA-only" solutions. This isn't just a problem with graphics drivers. It is also a problem with GPU computing for things like neural nets, which tend to be based on CUDA rather than OpenCL. When Skynet arises, it will likely be running on NVIDIA GPUs.
Intel continued to sell these to Atom users years after they should have been killed.
Killing the Atom users seems relatively merciful rather than continually being sold Intel video cards...
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
It's still an okay deal. The alternative happens to be the "open source" door opener guy, who fails to pick some items from inside the fridge, and opens the door very slowly.