Torvalds Slams NVIDIA's Linux Support 663
New submitter jppiiroinen writes "Linus Torvalds received the Millennium prize last week for his work on Linux operating system. He was already in Finland, so Aalto University arranged a talk session with him (video). During the Q&A, a person asks why NVIDIA does not play well with Linux. Torvalds explained shortly that NVIDIA has been one of the worst companies to work with Linux project — which makes it even worse that NVIDIA ships a high number of chips for Android devices (which use Linux inside). Torvalds even summarized that ('Nvidia, f*** you!') in a playful manner. What has been your experience on NVIDIA drivers with Linux?"
Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nvidia cards are the only way to reliable game on Linux, either natively or through wine. Look at the winehq.org appdb for any game, then notice how most reported problems are on Ati video cards.
Case closed, unfortunately.
I have no experience with arm nvidia graphics drivers though.
Which is why I find it doubly funny (Score:5, Insightful)
There was all this chatter about how if the GPU companies would just open up, legions of extremely smart programmers would make grad-A OSS drivers, better than the Windows counterparts!
So AMD does and... Nothing. We have a broke ass, "sorta works" OSS driver. Apparently the legions of programmers are either busy playing WoW or maybe, just maybe, writing a graphics driver for a modern card is way harder than people give it credit.
I think part of the problem is you get people who've written something like a NIC driver and say "Oh this driver writing isn't bad." The problem is most hardware is peanuts compared to a GPU. They are just amazingly complex. You can see it in driver sizes. A NIC or RAID driver will generally be 100ish kbytes, sometimes less. On my system, the primary WDDM nVidia driver file is 20MB, and it won't even work completely with that alone. It's driver to support OpenGL is another 25MB, another 10MB for D3D10/11 components, 7MB for CUDA, and so on, never mind support stuff like the control panel.
Basically it is a really complex problem, and of course each new version of the graphics hardware brings in a new setup to deal with. So it isn't so easy to bash out a high quality driver for graphics cards.
Thus the OSS AMD drivers really aren't any good, despite AMD playing nice. The community has not managed to produce some amazing driver that is fast, stable, feature complete, that makes Windows people say "Man I wish I had that." Had that happened, I'd be more inclined to say "Get with it nVidia." However as it stands, nVidia is able to produce a Linux driver that is in every way as good as their Windows driver, and that is damn good. Given that, I'd say they are doing it right.
Re:Which is why I find it doubly funny (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically it is a really complex problem, and of course each new version of the graphics hardware brings in a new setup to deal with.
I think particularly the last part. Unlike CPUs that have to be 99.9% the same to support already compiled binary code, graphics drivers only care about the DirectX/OpenGL layer. Everything about how you accelerate those commands is being rewritten constantly. For example the AMD OSS drivers cover three very different architectures, VLIW5, VLIW4 and GCN. And within each architecture you have different generations with different ways of doing things and instruction sets. The hardware API is changing because they're working closely with the driver team, who are the only ones talking to the hardware - until you try writing an OSS driver. Third party chips like HDMI change both suppliers and versions so the hardware API changes, without code changes practically nothing works on a new card. There's a lot of upkeep.
The other part is that the generic code is woefully behind the times, regardless of the driver code. Mesa still only supports OpenGL 3.0, which was released in July 2008 and that support only came first this year - at that point 5.5 years behind the specification. So if you want to run recent OpenGL code you need closed source drivers because the whole stack is missing, not just the driver code. Basically even if AMD is doing the same bits as AMD does for Windows, nobody's doing the OpenGL equivalent of Microsoft's work on DirectX. Or well obviously some are working on it, but not enough to keep up.
The last part which makes sharing code between the open and closed source driver hard is DRM. AMD simply can't let the open source driver have any code that would make it easy to poke at what the closed source driver is doing like for example patch it to dump a BluRay to disk (despite AACS, BD+ and HDMI all being broken). Same goes for audio and PAP. Even just keeping the DRM bits in a little blob by itself would be painting a big sign saying "reverse engineer this". This means things have to go back and forth with the lawyers all the time, and you need this information because of what I wrote in the beginning.
On the bright side Intel seems to want to use more of their own graphics in coming Atoms - google "Intel Valley View" for more - because PowerVR has been the absolutely worst of the bunch when it comes to Linux support - and pretty terrible at Windows support too from what I gather. And at least according to AMD their OSS support is getting better with each generation, even though it has a long way to go...
Re:Which is why I find it doubly funny (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Which is why I find it doubly funny (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an understatement. GPUs and baseband processors are some of the most hellishly complex programmable devices ever created (I'd say baseband processors are far worse than GPUs, for long and complex reasons that I couldn't be bothered typing up here). For example a typical ATI GPU several years ago had around 4,500 registers, many of which were documented with a single-line entry in a data sheet containing a name/description like SCL_DAX_ENABLE. Each functional unit had its own group of developers who knew it inside out and didn't meddle with any other functional unit. If you needed help, you picked up the phone and called the guy who'd done that part of the silicon. Two days later, the two of you had finally agreed on how a particular hardware feature was supposed to be used.
No matter how enthusiastic you are about OSS, you can't open-source that.
Commitement (Score:3)
AMD has comitted in trying to improve the whole process for open sourcing future generatino of graphic cards. Anything which wasn't in the pipeline until after AMD started to help open sourcing the drivers is more and more being designed with collaboration with open source in mind, so there is going to be less ping-pong between lawyers and designers before specs can be released.
Also the process of releasing specs and helping the OSS drivers is also becoming more streamlined.
All this mean that the delay betw
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about the NVIDIA/Android problems but on the desktop NVIDIA has always been waaaaaay better than ATI. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know because I stopped buying ATI stuff a long time ago.
So, you've no idea what you're talking about. Good to know.
What I know is when nvidia came out, I was seeing thousands of posts from people desperately seeking answers on how to get them to work, and thousands more on how to make their X Window survive upgrades. Nvidia is the reason they came up with the mantra, "Don't use a GUI package manager!", because if it upgrades X, it'll kill the pkg. mgr. doing it.
Meanwhile, I've been using ATI for more than a decade with zero problems past their initial teething
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
> What I know is when nvidia came out, I was seeing
> thousands of posts from people desperately seeking
> answers on how to get them to work, and thousands
> more on how to make their X Window survive upgrades.
Yeah, and they solved that problem. An entire module rebuild facility for kernel upgrades was probably developed just for Nvidia.
That benefits ATI blob drivers too. This is a good thing since you are unlikely to get suitable performance (if you care about that sort of thing) without the blob driver.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The thing that cause you to be "fucked" is not being able to boot a new kernel.
The idea that you won't be able to compile your own kernel modules because of Microsoft's locked booter is a novel and interesting concept.
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If that's the case, then you probably heard about UEFI secure boot? You know, that thing where everything, including the kernel AND the kernel drivers will have to be signed?
I swear, kids should learn history, because they keep coming back with the same old bad shit over and over again until a clueless generation accepts it. Back in the late '80s there was a boycott against copy protection, and companies dropped it -- for a decade or so, when it was reborn as DRM, and you kids pretty much accepted it.
Ten ye
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Nvidia drivers were actually the driving force behind the concept of kernel tainting where an oops dump reports that non-free modules were in use. Nvidia drivers were creating a huge number of oops reports that couldn't be debugged due to being closed source.
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What I know is when nvidia came out, I was seeing thousands of posts from people desperately seeking answers on how to get them to work,
The first time I ever used linux semi-seriously was in a computer class in like 2004. During downtime, since the comps had nvidia cards, I wanted to play Unreal Tournament, so i decided to install the drivers. The steps: .\driverinstaller
1)Go to nVidia.com, and download the driver installer.
2) run
3) play unreal tournament.
Ever since then I have periodically gone back to Linux, each time with an nVidia card, and each time the process was the exact same. Download the installer (helpfully linked here! [geforce.com]), run
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Been saying that for years. ATI/AMD did what the community wanted and guess what the community found out? Writing good graphics drivers is really freaking hard.
I also agree that an ABI is not badly needed. Even if you are going to produce your own FOSS drivers and an ABI is a big help.
The current FOSS solution makes a good enduser experience really hit or miss for a desktop user.
1 Write a driver for your hardware as FOSS.
2 submit it to the Kernel.
3 wait for it to get put into the Kernel.
4 Hope that the big
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been established for a while that nVidia is not going to open source their driver. It's not like this is a surprise. In the past, Linus has gone on record to say that binary blobs are better than no driver at all.
The turnaround on a kernel release would need to be a month or so for a company like nVidia to make the required changes to their driver and have it ready when a new kernel is launched. Hell, even the Evil Microsoft provides developers access to pre-RTM builds with enough time to make sure that their drivers work at launch.
What kind of OS changes their driver API so much that a driver compiled for one version doesn't "just work" with an incremental update? An immature one. Frequent kernel updates are basically patches. If your driver API is changing that much, you need to re-examine how you're doing your development.
We have every right irritated with Linus here. I've written software for Linux, Windows, and embedded RTOSes. Linux was by far the most painful. Boost was the only thing that made it tolerable. Berating a company that supports a user base which represents 1% or less of their market without any modern-day language tools at their disposal (STL, Boost, a decent IDE) is just counter-productive.
If Linus wanted to do something productive, he'd help to stabilize the various APIs in the kernel so that this stops being an issue.
Bottom line: this goes both ways. Either you allow binary blobs and give the providers of those blobs a chance to get their drivers working before you put out a new kernel, or you launch a kernel whenever you feel like it and live with the fallout.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linus isn't talking about gaming, performance or anything else like that. The point is : nVidia ships a binary blob and an obfuscated source portion that needs to be built outside of the vanilla kernel. That is what Linus is talking about, nVidia's lack of cooperation with the kernel people at integrating their drivers into the main line kernel in a way that respects the project's goals and visions.
Why you people are discussing the performance when that is not at issue, I have no idea. It was all pretty clear to me what Linus meant.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should Nvidia subscribe to the projects "goals and visions"? Thats the projects concern, not theirs.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hence why it's Linus (the project lead) that's talking about it ? He's voicing his concern... I don't get what you're even trying to get at here...
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Did you watch the video ? At all ? Linus is voicing is concerns, not telling nVidia how they should operate. He's describing the problem basically... What nVidia thinks and does is out of bounds and plainly obvious, you're restating what Linus is stating...
Hence why I don't get your point.
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I made no points. I explained to people what was being discussed in the video. Why are you responding to me ? I framed the context. You don't agree with the context I framed ?
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it costs them money to support Linux and they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, then what incentive is there to continue even supporting them at all?
Because they feel the Linux market is worth supporting. They don't do it to make Torvalds happy.
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Absolutely, you're dead right.
My point is if the Jesus Christ of Linux, Torvalds, is attacking them for their support, then that risks harming their marketshare. It may actually lead to the Linux not being worth supporting, that's kind of the point.
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Actually it costs them more to develop their own binary drivers in house, than it would to open source them and allow third parties (including the kernel devs) to take up some of the slack...
Not supporting linux would lose them business, almost certainly more than it costs them to support the drivers... Linux may not be huge on gaming desktops, but GPUs are also targeted at high performance computing, and Linux is very big there.
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Actually it costs them more to develop their own binary drivers in house, than it would to open source them and allow third parties (including the kernel devs) to take up some of the slack...
No, it wouldn't and even AMD agrees on this. Between licensed code, patents, DRM and a host of other reasons an OSS driver could not fulfill their customers' requirements on Windows. That is to say OEMs who have obligations to Microsoft who have obligations to the MAFIAA, not you. Not to mention the FPS junkies would probably not enjoy the performance hit because the third party IP would have to be ripped out.
Effectively you can either share closed cross-OS code like the Catalyst/nVidia driver does, or you
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
> If it costs them money to support Linux and they're damned if they do, damned if they don't, then what incentive is there to continue even supporting them at all?
It doesn't.
I think people nowadays just don't understand what Linux is anymore.
This discussion has nothing to do with desktop, performance or even servers.
Nowadays, Linux is shipped on 900000 phones every days and that's a very lucrative business.
Nvidia has a share of this with its Tegra chips but their way of supporting it makes it a pain in the ass for others inside the kernel development community.
From that point, Linux complaining is totally fair. PR is basically his only weapon.
In defence of Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Linus. He speaks his mind, and that is good. He does not strive to be a politically correct suck-up like most of the soulless corporate speaking heads you see all over the place.
He has every right to say "Nvidia, fuck you". How should his message be sugar-coated? Should he write a 500-page NY Times bestselling book about the matter? Hold a seminar? Issue a press release? Have a meeting with Nvidia CEO, CTO and CIO, presenting empty Powerpoint fluff and wanking around the issue in such abstract terms that it can be interpreted in any which way, after which everyone thinks they've done their part but nothing happens as a result? No. It suffices with three small words. Why waste more time and effort? To not hurt someone's feelings? Don't be such a baby.
I think part of how Linus comes through as he does is a cultural thing. Although he has lived in the USA a lot, he's still a Finn. If you need to deliver a message to someone who is not behaving, you deliver a message, wrapping it up in a pink box with a greeting card full of hearts is pointless. And let's face it, Nvidia hasn't been a model citizen - if you're a dick, don't be surprised that others are dicks towards you.
And you ask: what incentives does Nvidia have to support Linux? Well, how about not making life hard for the people who pay actual real money for Nvidia's products? And not making life hard for the people who try to support the Nvidia products on a great OS on their free time?
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Torvald's is carrying out the unproductive one.
Your so-called productive approach has been entirely unproductive for more than a decade. It is way past time to say "fuck you".
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".
But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".
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Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project
Except that's bullshit. Linux Torvald's project is generating bad publicity because it's bad at graphics drivers. ATI is more than accommodating and helpful--and the open source community fails miserably at creating stable drivers. So just about everybody demands Nvidia or ATI *fix* Torvald's failed project. If Nvidia opened up their specs more there's nothing to suggest that the drivers would be any better than the Open Source community's crappy job with ATI drivers. At least Nvidia offers a workab
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Graphics cards are, nowadays, a bit more than 3D gaming. Nowadays there are a number of markets that companies such as NVidia may cater and are of fundamental importance, such as smartphones/tablets (remember Tegra?) and HPC (remember CUDA/OpenCL?).
What these markets have in common is that linux is the only reason they exist and are relevant. Windows is,at the very best, a "also ran" in mobile devices. In the HPC world linux is essentially the only game in town. In fact, there is currently only a single entry proprietary OS entry in the Top500 list.
Do you expect NVidia to abandon any of those markets in protest of Linus Torvalds pointing out that NVidia sucks at supporting linux? Think again.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:4, Informative)
This is only true if your definition of "full-featured" does not include KMS or complete XRandR support.
They added XRandR 1.2/1.3 support in 302-series.
See e.g. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMDk [phoronix.com]
Yes, problems. (Score:3)
I've had problems with a NVidia card that I have, and the last time it gave me problems was with the latest upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04. With this upgrade, NVidia's very own proprietary driver either rendered 3D scenes excruciatingly slow or never rendered them at all, instead presenting only a black window. Strangely enough, 2D rendering worked without any noticeable hitch.
The fix came only about a month ago, with an upgrade to NVidia's proprietary driver.
Re:Problems? Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Both systems duel boot the OSs.
Well there's your problem, having your OSes walk 10 paces, turn around, and shoot each other is bound to lead to problems. I would suggest trying to dual boot instead.
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Ok so you don't know how to setup graphics on Linux
We are WAY past that being a valid statement. It isn't 1990 anymore.
Compromises (Score:5, Insightful)
I have had to make a compromise in using the Nvidia driver. It's a "black box", so you don't know what is in it or how others might be able to improve on it, but on the other hand, it does the 3D work for stuff like KDE, Google Earth or 3D games like Brutal Chess or BZflag.
In Mageia, there is the Nouveau [freedesktop.org] free driver, it works very well for 2D stuff, but does not work for 3D stuff.
So it depends on your requirements, and how wedded you are to the "Free" concept. Having said that, if there was a free driver that does 3D on Nvidia cards, I'd take it.
Re:Compromises (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Compromises (Score:5, Insightful)
And when people use that tool to make you do things you don't want, then remember what you agreed to. But it's not a religion, so that makes it okay.
Re:Compromises (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, computers are a tool, not a religion. So I am OK with a "black box" that works better than an "open box" any day.
The tool analogy is great and people often make it. There's alot of sense to it. As long as you are only involved in very basic or simplistic consumer level computing, that is fine. However, if you think in terms of cars, there comes a point where any serious use ends up wanting to travel long distances, wanting to travel through wild areas and wanting to transport non standard goods. At that point, you want a car where you know you can find spares. You want a vehicle where you know that in every little village in Azerbaijan you will be able to get a person who can fix your car.
With things like device drivers and graphics, you will come accross strange problems where a piece of code outside the device driver interacts with a piece inside in an unexpected way. If you have the source to both, you will be able to debug that problem much more easily. This means, that your normal programming team will be able to see what's gooing wrong and, most likely, find a work around even if the bug is inside the device driver and they aren't capable of fixing it. It's similar to having a vehicle where the local service people are able to swap and replace parts themselves, rather than one where you have to have it taken back to the original manufacturer to make every fix.
It's good to think about computers as tools, but you have to understand that they are more like fully automated drilling machines than like simple screwdrivers. Even if you personally don't have to understand them, someone else likely will. If you bought a drilling machine, you would expect to get the service manual with it. The source code serves in the same way in software and you should insist on it for anything you rely on.
There is another important difference; with computers one solution tends to end up as the basis for another more complex one. The solutions add and add, often without much review or chance to rebuild. This means that even if a system seems like a one time non business critical solution, you should always bear in mind the possibility that something else more important gets layered on top of it later.
Only good experiences, using the binary blobs (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had far less issues with any nVidia card than ATi/AMD. i have had both for more than ten years.
Problem being... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a world of blind men, the one eyed man is king....
If I want to have decently supported video offload and remotely respectable 3D performance, nVidia drivers are about the only choice.
AMD drivers to this day cause my system to panic on shutdown attempt. MythTV's OpenGL painter and video renderer don't work correctly with AMD drivers, leaving me with video playback with XV and no recourse to sync to vblank. They do have XvBA out there, but I have to go into a more 'bleeding edge' xbmc and then be greeted by very bad artefacts with videos that are profile 5.1. AMD's open source interaction seems better, but none of the open source drivers come close to the 3D performance and notably no video decode offload is available.
Intel I heard great things about, but at least with Fedora 17 I can't seem to find the best way to get vaapi driver on there. All I see are requests to get it in being met with 'too messy'. It's also not in rpm fusion. I dug up a module from an old rpm and got vainfo running, only to find out rpmfusion xbmc build disabled vaapi support anyway, and only went with vdpau. Now I could recompile, but the point being that the larger community seems to not be bothering with trying to test Intel's solution as much.
Meanwhile, my nVidia system does vdpau beautifully, has pretty much no-brainer 3d support, and tear-free XV playback (even though I never use it anymore in favor of opengl rendering). Everything about the experience shows that both nVidia as a company and the userbase at large are developing and testing with nVidia primarily.
I could see as a developer being frustrated at supporting a kernel where a large portion is running kernel-mode code that you can't see, but from a user perspective, nVidia is about the only viable solution for Linux graphics.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
At least they're better than Intel's drivers... (Score:3, Informative)
I have nothing but problems with Intel's drivers not working right under Linux... I only wish that they were as stable as NVidia's drivers.
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Mark my post as a troll if it makes you feel better, but the simple fact of the matter is that the drivers that NVidia DOES put out are have more features and are more stable than the open source drivers that Intel makes available.
That said, let me join Linus and say "Fuck You" to NVidia for not helping to make drivers available for the Optimus laptop graphics chipset. I have one in my Dell XPS as well, and it sucks that I'm stuck with using the Intel integrated graphics on it.
misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
Linus did give Nvidia the bird and a "fuck you" but he never slammed the quality of the Nvidia's hardware. His gripe with Nvidia is how hard it is for Linux to work with the company since they only provide a binary blob driver which makes bug fixing for it dependent on Nvidia's whims. Plus they refuse to even provide specs and API's for their hardware which make writing open drivers much more difficult and time-consuming because of having to reverse-engineer everthing to get a workable driver. In this case, Linus is absolutely correct.
Experience: Intel, NVidia, and ATI. (Score:3)
I've had some problems with all three (I run OpenSuse) ... but NOT since I started downloading their own driver packages and building them on the target machine. I most recently did it with the AMD/ATI Radeon graphics on a new HP Probook. Both ATI and nVidia include configuration/tweaking software that will let me fine-adjust, and I just don't have problems with either.
BUT ... disclaimer: I haven't bought a *video* card in years. I always buy integrated graphics, because it's cheaper and does what I want. Your mileage will vary. But my Big Test(tm) of any graphics system under Linux is to see how well it runs Celestia. If it will run it at reasonable speed without flickering or other annoyances, I consider it Good.
Actually, I've had considerably more trouble with Intel's 9xx series of built in graphics than with ATI and nVidia combined. My previous laptop had the 945 graphics kit (I think I remember the number correctly) and I suffered through everything from flickers to outright hangs.
And the worst experience of all was with an old S3 card many years ago. Wow, what a piece of joy.
"My name is Juha, I work for nvidia" (Score:3, Informative)
What has been your experience on NVIDIA drivers? (Score:3)
Whatever (Score:3)
But, I haven't had issues getting nvidia cards working under EFI either; particularly those in Mac's. On the other hand the only way I have gotten ATI cards to work properly is by using fbdev. I have seen supposed ways to get this working by dumping the bios when booting in legacy mode and then using loadbios in grub 2, but have never personally gotten it to work.
So, they may not be great to work with, but at least they're throwing us a bone, which is more than I can say for ATI in most cases.
Tao Presentations on Linux (Score:3)
Tao Presentations [taodyne.com] is a 3D presentation software that runs on Linux as well as on Windows and MacOSX. We had mixed experience with nVidia support. Sometimes, it just works. In other cases, major functionality is missing (e.g. a laptop where the HDMI port is simply not detected). That being said, except when we hit a major bug, OpenGL performance is overall rather close to what we get on the same machine on Windows, which indicates that nVidia takes Linux somewhat seriously.
Actually, I don't think nVidia has any kind of anti-Linux strategy in place. It's rather that their portfolio is big and their overall strategy is sometimes confusing as a result. Consider stereoscopy for example, which matters a lot for Tao Presentations. Both nVidia and ATI have this puzzling idea that only "pro" customers can have stereoscopic support for OpenGL. This leads to situations where a machine with an nVidia chipset will connect to a 3D projector perfectly... as long as it runs MacOSX. The exact same hardware won't offer quad-buffer OpenGL support when running Windows or Linux. Why not?
So it's not about Linux, it's about lining up so many little pieces that sometimes, one of them is missing and the whole thing collapses. Linux is probably at the bottom of the list of things to fix, so that's where you see more problems.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't code reliably for complex hardware without specifications.
Which are not released.
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The problem is that nvidia doesn't even provide a documented interface to build a driver on top of. If they want the software working with their card, then it is up to them to provide the glue. I imagine they could more of the logic into the firmware and then make the driver a basic shim.
The other alternatives is for Nvidia to come out and indicate what they need from Linux to make their lives easier.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Informative)
AMD provides specifications and a small developer team that actually works on open source drivers.
Intel provides open source drivers.
NVIDIA makes good binary drivers, but those have problems when a new kernel version comes out with changed interfaces:
Only NVIDIA can adapt them, and until they get around to it, NVIDIA may not work with the latest kernel version.
Stable driver ABI - not a good idea (Score:3)
There's a couple of points here.
1. Should the driver API be stable? Usually not: a long term stable API means that it's hard to make changes when necessary. For example, the Linux USB subsystem has been substantially re-written 4 times. This is never a problem, because when someone changes the kernel API, they also are responsible for updating all drivers in the tree that are affected by it. It means that Linux's USB support isn't hamstrung by lots of legacy cruft.
2. Should the ABI be stable? No. This bre
Re:Stable driver ABI - not a good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
This is simply a comment on how poorly the design of components in Linux is done in the first place.
Only on Linux. Other OSes manage just fine.
Because you can't always guarantee access to a compiler, to highlight but one obvious reason.
Didn't you just spend a few paragraphs telling us how this sort of "legacy cruft" "hamstrings" new development ?
Re:Stable driver ABI - not a good idea (Score:4, Informative)
I don;t think you can argue that Linux's design is fundamentally poorly done...the USB subsystem for example was originally written for USB 1.0 devices (basically mice, keyboards and serial ports); usb 2.0 and 3.0 didn't even exist then. The redesign for 3.0 changed the implementation of 1.0, as did all the power-management stuff for laptops. Yes, other OSes can cope, but Linux can go one better!
Also, I don't buy your argument about not always having access to a compiler: everyone does: I'm not arguing that the end user should recompile (though they can), but that it's easy enough for the person doing the porting.
You also rather miss the point about syscalls: there are plenty of things that would ideally be changed - but it's impractical to do so, because it would need a coordinated change across *all* of thousands of different userspace programs, run by different projects - and a coordinated deployment across millions of machines. However, keeping the kernel drivers synchronised and updated in parallel is easy: they're all in the same git tree.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that's because they're major releases, when it's OK for the ABI to change. Again, something that every other remotely OS manages quite well.
Yes it does, and yes it is. Drivers breaking between minor revisions within a major release is very uncommon on pretty much every platform except Linux.
Heck, it's not unusual to see drivers working across even major revisions.
Windows, OS X (more recent versions, at least), Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. It's a struggle to find any remotely major OS other than Linux without stable ABIs.
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Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Informative)
I think you and many here misunderstood what Linus was talking about. Linux specifically said NVIDIA is one of the worst companies with whom they worked. Period. There is no need to bring up ATI into the table. There is no need to bring up that your card has always worked beautifully. This is talking about his and the kernel maintainer's experience in dealing with hardware vendors, something that we ourselves never have to deal with. Their proprietary drivers may be the best ever but that has nothing to do with!
If the kernel maintainers have a question about the hardware, they can't ask NVIDIA they have to test and reverse engineer to find the answer whereas with other companies, they may get an answer directly from the manufacturer. Get it? "...NVIDIA just made the damn drivers. Now that is not good enough." Not from a kernel maintainer's or Stallman's point of view, I'm pretty sure.
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To be fair, the summary article asks what people's experience has been with NVidia drivers, so take a pill. The article is not just about the kernel developer's experience; it's asking about deployment experiences.
And on that note: I've never had anything but rock-solid performance from NVidia's drivers. However, the only custom kernel building I've had to do for several years is building the wanpipe module for telecommunications.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect your definition of "realistic time frame" is a bit different than some people (especially those who consider Linux their primary OS, and won't touch Windows).
I only run Linux on my desktop, laptop, media PC, and work PC. Also, my fiancée only runs Linux. Last time I rebuilt my Desktop, about a year ago, I used a GTX550Ti, and the drivers were prebuilt in a PPA for Ubuntu.
When I buy new hardware, I wouldn't want to wait months/years to use it... So nVidia clearly considers Linux a second-class citizen, which may be OK for you, but not for some.
Everyone considers Linux a second-class citizen. nVidia just threats their second class better than most. Even HP takes a while to release drivers for new printers...
It doesn't mean that the companies are any better - but nVidia's "high road" as you make it out to be really just makes them the bottleneck when it comes to hardware driver support. It puts them in a position where they MUST create the drivers in a timely fashion, because there is no other choice.
Whereas, with other vendors, the existing reference drivers can often be fiddled with to gain partial support for new hardware, and as specifications are released, anyone with the know-how can begin adding support for that hardware - the bottleneck becomes the availability of talent and motivation.
So that is why the ATI drivers are so amazing, and support the latest stuff! No, wait a minute... They only support a narrow range of product before they fall off, and you get the 2D only version.
Anyhow, I take a different road - I avoid high-end graphics hardware entirely, and since I'm not a "gamer", it doesn't matter to me. I just use hand-me-down hardware that people give me and I'm content with it - but I do usually favor AMD's graphics chips since they are more open by nature.
For someone not that interested in graphics drivers, you sure have a strong opinion. And actually, for your case, I would recommend Intel over ATI. PErhaps because to me, graphics are important, and stability more so.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:4, Interesting)
> They only support a narrow range of product before they fall off, and you get the 2D only version.
News to me. I have pre AMD buyout ATI 9200's on AGP slots still in production. The run Compiz pretty well. And they ran right out of the box, no futzing with odd repos, limiting to specific kernels etc. Just install and go.
Avoid the newest and AMD just works. Nvidia doesn't. Yet.
On the other hand I have an Nvidia in in my MythTV and I do have to futz with drivers in exchange for accelerated HD playback with GPU assisted deinterlacing.
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Interesting)
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
When I worked for a chip company, we weren't allowed to release specs.
Why? Guess.
Patents. We had no idea whether we were violating some obscure patent that no-one had ever heard of, and we weren't willing to put the specs out there where any troll could sue us for millions.
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> Point 1. PPAs are not official nVidia's work
So? The only relevant question is whether or not they work. This they do very well. They work because Nvidia decided to release a driver. The fact that Canonical or some power user decided to put a pretty bow on that driver really isn't relevant.
The drivers in the PPA has to come from somewhere.
> Linux doesn't offer a way to keep using the same binaries between releases
Sure it does. That's all automated now and has been for awhile. Hardware vendors don't h
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:4, Insightful)
> but I do usually favor AMD's graphics chips since they are more open by nature.
We've been hearing about AMD's opening specs and drivers drivers for what, close to 5 or 6 years now?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/09/06/1335230/amd-to-open-ati-specs [slashdot.org]
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/12/30/0337204/amd-releases-open-source-r600700-3d-code [slashdot.org]
And even after all that, getting 3D accel, multimonitor etc. to reliably work has been extremely painful compared to Nvidia binary blobs which pretty much work for common scenarios like fully accel 3d gaming(I remember playing UT2004 a very good FPS on Linux with those drivers). So this means that either AMD/ATI has failed at providing open specs and code or that the community hasn't fully stepped up to convert those specs into "Working(TM)" drivers. Which is it?
Meanwhile, I hope someone sensitive at Nvidia does not take this tongue-in-cheek comment personally and decrease the priority and allocated to the Nvidia binary drivers development because they feel that's it not helping them in the community to do more than their rivals in the business.
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So I can yank out one of my nvidia cards and put it in a Mac then and all will be sunshine and roses?
If some Lemming troll wants me to test his assertion that support for Linux lags, it's no problem for me to go down to Frys and prove him wrong. It's not quite so easy with a Mac.
Most of them simply aren't designed to accomodate any random video card I might pick up at a flea market.
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>> "Linux needs Nvidia. Nvidia doesn't need Linux."
Android is Linux. If Nvidia wants to eventually deal itself out of the cell market they can be my guest.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were nvidia, i'd be glad to make drivers. An unusable card does not sell very well.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Informative)
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Drivers are not an OS.
NVIDIA should make the hardware and firmware that runs it. The main CPU should be the realm of the OS. These two should talk to each other. NVIDIA is not cooperating with that.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't NVIDIA's job to make drivers for someone else's OS.
If nVidia does not make drivers for someone else's OS who, how do they make it for? They don't have their own OS. Their entire business relies on someone else's OS. So does nVidia make drivers for Windows and OS X or not?
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Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary. Have you seen the size of NVIDIA's (and AMD's) drivers lately? Even after scraping out the bloat they're huge - they're on the scale of Windows 95/98, and all of that is code.
At this point they are an OS; they're performing code compilation, thread scheduling, power management, memory management, providing APIs, etc. Video drivers have become a sub-OS to manage the GPU in a fashion very similar to what Linux does with the CPU, which is just insane if you think about it. But it's also why both NVIDIA and AMD are so sheepish about open sourcing their existing drivers.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Then who's job is it?
Who's job is it to create reference drivers and release specifications for the hardware that nVidia makes?
nVidia seems to make it their job by refusing to release specifications for the hardware they create. They create this hardware to work with other open-specification hardware and software, and yet, they intentionally keep their own specifications secret.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
A reference driver is fine. Open source it. Then the Linux source tree can include it. Then when the hardware maker adds new hardware or firmware features, submit patches. If they make a whole new architecture that is not compatible, submit a whole new driver ... as source code. Then it's in the Linux tree and it can be maintained by kernel developers when the kernel changes that requires something to change in the driver (for example a change in number of parameters needed for some kernel function call to support some new feature).
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> When the OS is mostly a loss to the company. Linux then it's Linux's job.
Nvidia sells a lot of their high end gear to Linux customers.
That's why there's drivers for their consumer grade kit.
The idea that Linux doesn't make Nvidia any money simply ignores the facts. This seems to be more of a "purity" issue than a "support" issue.
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I think you've got it reversed.
It's bad hacks like Optimus that get dropped on the floor because they are marginal and offer little real benefit from a business point of view.
Most people buy nvidia kit to get rid of crap like Intel and are happy not to run it even if it is force bundled on whatever laptop or desktop they happen to have. Optimius is a peculiar beast not worth the noise you're making over it.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, but the point it still there. No one owes anyone anything. Nvidia has absolutely zero responsibility to make their chips work with Linux. They are free to decide exactly which platforms they want to support. Some people in the Linux community is however so used to getting everything they want for free that they for some reason think that they should have everything for free and that companies that don't do that are somehow evil. No they are not evil, it just happens that they are not especially friendly either. It is fair.
No, it's totally unfair. Have you ever shopped for a graphic card recently, with the goal to put that in your Linux box? There's currently only 2 choices: Nvidia or ATI. Both have totally horrible drivers in Linux, because the chip makers aren't being COOPERATIVE. That is, just not giving enough so that someone can make a decent driver. The problem isn't that Nvidia isn't helping, the problem is that they aren't helping AND we have no other choice.
I hate to be in such a position that I'm forced into buying a product that:
1/ I don't like (cards are too big, often with stupid fans)
2/ Is too expensive for what it does (I'm just asking for my computer output on DVI / HDMI / VGA... what's that hard and expensive to make?)
3/ Has features which I don't care about (eg: 3D and gaming shit...)
But there's simply no alternatives.
The only thing I'd like would be to have a fucking decent card that I can plug on a screen (if possible, multiple, all supported). But in this day and age, it's not possible to have simply THAT, working correctly. So yes, we do have all the reasons to hate Nvidia and ATI/AMD.
Oh, another one. Again, nobody asks for software, just documentation. It'd be even better if they were not even shipping at all a Linux driver, because their non-free stupid software is crap. In fact, I HATE as well the bloated screen configuration that Nvidia delivers on their site. It's simply not convenient at all. To switch from the laptop's screen to TV, you need around 15 clicks. Also, why should we use something special for Nvidia, and not the screen manager that's in Gnome by default? This proprietary software needs to DIE, especially that we have no choice but that one.
Re:THEN YOU DO IT MISTER HIGH AND MIGHTY !! (Score:4, Insightful)
Did Intel cease to exist in in the past 24 hours, or am I in a parallel universe?
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Last I heard nVidia wasn't keen on disclosing technical specs for their chips, even under NDA, so only nVidia can release Linux device drivers that stand a chance of working under pressure (yes I'm aware of Nouveau). This means Linus can't write the driver himself.
Anyway compared to ATI, nVidia has always been a breeze. Every time I've put an ATI card in, I've had a headache. And, at risk of offending Linus' sensibilities, ATI's driver quality hasn't been very good, for any OS, since they sent it all overse
Once upon a time (Score:5, Informative)
This story starts more than a decade ago. There was a hugely popular software vendor concerned that maybe one day people might choose to not use their software. They had vast sums of money and controlled access to the immediate future for software and hardware vendors alike.
Foreseeing a potential difficult future they chose to defend themselves in a particular way. They formed subsidiaries they controlled and gave them patents, and filled them with developers skilled in the finer (and secret) nuances of how to interact with their software, and they kept them informed with advance knowledge of how it would work in the future.
These subsidiaries approached hardware designers with a simple message: they would accept the patented technologies and use them; they would let the subsidiaries write the drivers that had special hooks into the software; they would do this under non-disclosure and never tell - or they wouldn't. If they accepted they would not be able to publish open specifications about how their own hardware worked because that would be exclusively cross-licensed with the subsidiaries in exchange for access to the patents. The hardware makers who wouldn't play along wouldn't get as good compatibility with the big company's software, nor inclusion in their distribution CD and OEM images. The refusers would be plagued with difficult installation, buggy drivers and unhappy customers and fail in the market. The software would change in ways the refusers could not predict, but the accepters could. Some accepted, and some refused. Those who accepted survived, those who refused mostly died.
This has continued to the present day and as the hardware has evolved the agreements persist in ways that are now not removable.
Nobody involved in Linux wants hardware manufacturers to write the device drivers for them. They only want open and clear specifications for how the hardware works so they can make their own drivers. They aren't going to get that from NVidia, nor ATI, nor any others whose technology is intertwined with this compromise from yesteryear. This boon is now beyond their ability to grant without starting again from the beginning.
Re:Once upon a time (Score:5, Interesting)
I was looking for an excuse to expand on this already overlong story but didn't want to be rude and self-reply. Thanks for giving the opportunity.
One must be mindful that these offers were all carrot and no stick. The developers came with a plausible story: we have experience and insight into the big company's software, as many of us came from there. We know how to pass validation. We have the inside track to getting on the CD, and can speed your way to market. We can use our secret ways to optimize it because we have special insight we can't share even with you. All we ask (other than pay) is that the interfaces become private between us. We will help you develop your hardware so that the hardware interfaces presented are optimal for interfacing with the software, and we don't want to share that work with others for no pay, which is fair, right? They had good stuff to offer too: the benefits of some deep research into compositing that the hardware vendors couln't get some other way - but it always came with this catch. And it seemed like such a little catch at the time since there were no credible challengers to the big company's ware. And it seemed quite reasonable to work together and not share with outsiders. But the devil is in the details.
Only rarely would the stick come out, in reference to some other company: "oh, that seems to be a smart way to think. So-and-so thought so." So-and-so being a dead company who failed to come around to the "right" way of thinking. The threat implied was never stated outright.
Later, when hardware vendors want more, they get more committed. Implement that new hardware feature in the OS game engine rendering interface? Sure.. but there's more cost than just money. Want the standard user interface to leverage high-end blurring, transparency and shadow features... sure.. but how that works has to remain private between us. That requires a specially committed level of partnership. Along the way there were more patents to incorporate and license, and a stronger bond to build until the hardware manufacturer is committed to the big vendor's software and none other - in a way they can't be free of even if they want to be. These aren't just patents and copyrights: they're trade secrets too, and those are immortal. Each is as much to blame as the other, as they used each other to mutual advantage. There's enough dirt in there to get mud all over everybody and nobody wants that.
Every now and then some PFY trying to implement a feature for X will call up the hardware vendor hoping for some help. "So I've got some app in the debugger, and I can see it load a texture in the buffer and trigger the interrupt that submits it to your hardware. But there are mode-setting things in here that have been deserialized and I can't see which one goes first, or the right grammar for the call so when it doesn't crash it looks like crap. Throw me a bone. Feed me just a tiny little hint please, I'm dying here." These calls used to be fielded by actual developers who might be conflicted and want to say the easy truth but would instead give the same bored answer every time: "sorry, but that's a trade secret." And never would they say the big secret: "and it's not our trade secret so we'll never be able to answer these questions." Now it's probably handled by some flunky in Bangalore who couldn't give the right answer if he wanted to. It might as well be a recording - but they still want to pretend that they care.
This is all in the desktop and laptop arena of course. Servers are different. The big software company didn't have tyranny over server vendors like they did over desktops. Servers had to support Unix at first, and then Novell, and then Linux - to the point where no server company could survive or even be taken seriously with servers that could only run the big company's software - though they did try, notably with Broadcom network chipsets. The special features of the software/hardware interface just weren't as important in servers. Now in servers we have virtualization and the danger is pretty much passed. For some years when people wanted to run desktop software that was not based on the big company's ware they bought tower servers instead of desktops because those were always fine and had rocking performance as well - though the price was high. This happened so much that server vendors came up with "workstation" designs that were essentially servers designed to be used as desktops. This server thing was always one of two final doors that the big company failed to close that could have made their dominion permanent. The other open door was at the other end of performance and completely blindsided them.
Now we're having a grand migration to mobile, and a huge part of that is just a desire to escape the big company's ware, or have the progress we've been denied for so long. Grown large and complacent, the big company doesn't offer progress as well as they once did - they're more in the defensive mode now of preventing progress they don't control. So progress comes in avenues they don't control like servers and more recently, mobile. The mobile migration has come on so fast and caught them so off guard that they are unable to establish their dominance and manage progress they don't control - and that's mostly Apple's doing. Android has now leveraged this craving for progress, but they're crowding through a door Apple opened. We are dangerously close to once more being free of the big company's control. If we can hang in there for another year or two, we will get the Grand Change we've long been hoping for.
But there is much work to be redone from scratch still, many hardware vendors still entrapped and committed to the big company and unwilling or unable to escape. Freedom is by no means certain. For once though, there is hope.
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Re:Puzzled (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual question that led to the 'Fuck you, NVIDIA' was about hybrid graphics on laptops I believe, which are currently not usable(?)/supported by NVIDIA under Linux, that's was the problem I believe. I recommend rewinding the video a bit for more context.
Re:Puzzled (Score:5, Insightful)
But ... they don't. The majority of my system crashes are due to NVIDIA drivers being poorly programmed. Nouveau has never caused any such problems since 2.6.38.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all about giving to the community (Score:4, Informative)
"Top notch" might be overstating it a bit, there are still a few instances where they seem to be lacking. For instance, Windows users who have SLI [wikipedia.org] and multiple monitors have been able to enable SLI and use both of their monitors at the same time since about 2008. But under Linux, no dice [nvidia.com].
So if I had two monitors (which I do), and two Nvidia GPUs in SLI mode (which I do), and I wanted to run some 3D app that took advantage of SLI, I would have to: reconfigure X to disable my second monitor and enable SLI, restart X, play the game/use the app I wanted, when I was done I would have to reconfigure X again to enable my second monitor and disable SLI, restart X again, and reopen all my apps. Hardly ideal.
Re:Alot better than ATI (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick, let's lash out at Linus!
You've obviously never had to deal with a shitty company before. Nvidia interacts heavily with the Linux world, but any attempts to accomplish things if you aren't a direct customer buying millions of chips from them is goddamn impossible. It's not just getting sources, it's just making shit work and having to deal with the fact that a prominent company whose technology gets used in so many platforms causes you no end of trouble (bug reports, workarounds, etc.) but they won't assist or aid you in the slightest. On top of being entirely closed source. You can't ignore the issue entirely, but your hands are tied in terms of how you can actually look into and resolve a problem.
So yeah, Nvidia cranks out Linux drivers that work decently well. That doesn't make them immune to criticism, especially not at the level Linus probably has to deal with them at.
But hey, Slashdot is rapidly becoming very, very anti-Linux so why not?
Re:Alot better than ATI (Score:5, Interesting)
> OMFG NOOOOO there is no possible way that NVIDIA could operate like every other chip maker on the face of the planet.
No, we want them TO operate like 'every other chip maker' and get with the program. Name another major chip vendor who hasn't figured out that getting into the Linux kernel is a required checkoff for market success. Doubly so for any product used in the enterprise vs the fanboi market. NVidia's CUDA is about the entire list these days, the last major holdout.
A few still maintain a desperate final stand in the embedded market but few new vendors go the closed route and every year brings another of the dead enders over to the open camp. First to fall were the storage products, then ethernet and cpu makers. Wifi is holding out on the blobs due to fear of the spectrum regulators but most now support an open driver for the kernel to firmware interface.
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Name another major chip vendor who hasn't figured out that getting into the Linux kernel is a required checkoff for market success.
So, what you're saying is, NVidia isn't a market success? Strange, it appears the market disagrees with you.
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Then how come when I am running their driver and some issue requires me to Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a console to fix X or something that is bogging down X, I get a total crap video mode with glyphs I cannot read, and bit splatter in the video buffer than X cannot clear up when I Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to X? FYI, this never happens with nouveau ... so it is clear the NVIDIA hardware CAN do text mode well. The NVIDIA programmers need to fix even the text mode or at least arrange for driver splitting where they h
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you are not a Nvidia paying customer, you are a customer of whomever made the laptop. Nvidia supports the laptop maker by providing them technical details and drivers for the operating system the maker wants, which I assure you is not the freetard crap you put on it.
Point is Nvidia is supporting the paying customer, and Linus is whining that they are not getting the same treatment for free
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There should never be intellectual property in an INTERFACE. I don't GAF what is going on inside the video card to accomplish what is asked of it by software. Put the IP in the hardware/firmware, open the interface, and lets move forward. Simple as that. A blob for the firmware image itself is fine if they don't want to store it in flash on the card. Get some memory, load the blob from disk, transfer the blob to the card, free the memory, and move on.
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Actually, there are kernel developers willing to sign an NDA for the specs ... provided they can release the SOURCE CODE they produce. That a compromise that NVIDIA seems unwilling to work with.