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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.

16 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: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Valve needs to use their clout by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Stop making sense and be outraged, dammit!

    3. Re:Valve needs to use their clout by Jartan · · Score: 5, Funny

      "or we'll release Half Life 3 as AMD only and spam AMD all over Steam"

      That exactly.

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

      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)

    5. 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.

    6. Re:Valve needs to use their clout by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:And this is news... by Carewolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IIRC, This has always been the case.

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

  3. Re:How is this really news? by jklovanc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Re:So? by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:And this is news... by Minwee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:And this is news... by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How much does it cost to migrate all your users to "any decent country"?

  9. 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.

  10. Re:nvidia/ATI should keep their new stuff propriet by fibonacci8 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.