Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Goes Stable On Linux 231
An anonymous reader writes "The open source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered incarnation of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver for Linux, has reached its biggest milestone. The Nouveau driver is now being considered stable within the Linux kernel and leaving the staging area, with the pledge of a stable ABI. Phoronix has summarized the state of the Nouveau driver, which works fine if you don't care about performance or are fine with running hardware that's a few generations old."
"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, this is kind of off, but still interesting and related as this was work done by reverse engineering. How do you reverse engineer on Linux, or other UNIX systems like OS X and BSD? Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG, but seems there's just no such things available for Linux or UNIX. The problem isn't even about using console programs, it's about showing the debugging process and being able to put breakpoints.
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:4, Informative)
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Development [freedesktop.org]
I'm no engineer, not even a reverse engineer, but I'd probably start with a bus analyzer, gdb, and follow some kernel/driver debugging lists.
Dear reader, feel free to tell me how wrong this approach is.
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strace, gdb, etc...
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you are an idiot!
On Linux, you have a small piece of proprietary software running on an open source system entirely controlled by the developer. Most of reverse engineering is non-interactive, by running a driver/hardware combination while its interactions are watched by other software.
On Windows, everything but your own code is proprietary, including reverse-engineering tools themselves, and you have no way to modify most of the environment or include any kind of automated logging. You are pretty much forced to single-step through giant blobs while watching disassembled code in a multitude of little windows.
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, IDA is available on Linux.
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Informative)
We don't reverse engineer the code, we reverse engineer what is sent to the card. Linux can dump everything going through the PCIE bus, that's the so-called mmiotrace.
We only reverse engineer by taking the binary driver as a blackbox, sending commands and seeing what comes out.
Martin Peres - Nouveau developper
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Informative)
For one thing, DMCA only fits if they actually implemented some type of protection scheme which may or may not be the case. In either case, this does not apply at all as the DRM isn't being broken. The blackbox driver is working as intended and not taken apart in any way, it's like trying to see how a car works without actually taking it apart by systematically doing what you normally would do anyways and recording it's response.
Instead of running a program that sends a large set of commands to the driver and having it returns random responses, you send 1 specific command at a time and recording each response so you are able to reproduce it in their own driver.
What they are doing, is basically mapping the interface (doorway as you will) to the blackbox driver. An interface can not be copyrighted (this has some precedence in court rulings and is done often like emulators). It's only illegal once you start copying either parts of the source code or machine code. If you copy the outside, the inside really doesn't matter in the greater scheme (though of course there are issues of performances and driver specific bugs)
Yes, this is an insane amount of work and these people should be respected greatly especially if they are not being paid to help improve linux.
(Different Anon)
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Insightful)
Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?
What nouveau development does is feed data through the API and look at the I/O ports and what data they get. The developers are feeding data they "own" [e.g. the address of a frame buffer they created] and then retrieving it after it is transmuted. Virtually all devices in a system (e.g. disk controllers, etc.) have a port list so just having that is not novel (i.e. not patentable). Since nVidia isn't publishing a document on the port list, no copyright either. Might be claimed as a proprietary trade secret, but it's okay to reverse engineer in this manner [reverse engineer is a protected activity under the right "clean room" circumstances].
The "clean room" methodology has been court tested many times. In this instance, we have three groups that do not communicate, except in controlled ways. Group A does the above "port probing" and writes a document of their findings. Group B writes an API document using only Group A's report. Group C uses the API document generated by Group B to write the device driver code.
If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?
No doubt nVidia has a license to H.264 patents. Under the exhaustion doctrine, anyone can benefit from using the API to output H.264 video. If that were not the case, any end user [even using nVidia's proprietary driver], would be required to pay H.264 patent licensing fees. Likewise for the use of one's home entertainment system.
However, that doesn't mean some folks don't try. Lodsys [a patent troll] licensed a patent to Apple. Apple incorporated the technology under an API that software developers can use. Lodsys has been trying to extract license fees from all software developers that use the Apple API. Apple is intervening in court to stop Lodsys using the exhaustion doctrine as the basis for their challenge against Lodsys in defense of the developers.
Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.
It's not so much the patent mess (as I mentioned above), but rather the difficulty of deducing the port list, API doc, etc. using the clean room method. The 2D case is [relatively] easy enough. The 3D case [with a large number of acceleration modes, etc.] is a lot more work, many more test cases, etc. Sheer scope of such an undertaking is the biggest limiting factor.
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, I created an account. It will be simpler for others to follow. Comparing me to Linus or Eric Raymond is really over-the-top. I'm just a PhD student who has been working on power management in nouveau for little more than 1.5 years.
Anyway, the answers to your post are right, clean-room REing is legal. The shady part is for the firmwares that you have to decode in order to re-implement them. Fortunately, we know nvidia used a compiler to compile them. As we write them in asm only and don't use the same interface, I guess we are pretty covered.
As for video decoding, nVidia though about us and added a "safe" for the encryption keys. So yes, we can re-implement video decoding (it is an on-going work, but it's ugly) but the compliance with hdcp will never come.
As for software patents, we do our best not to do things covered by them but sometimes we have to. In this case, we think about the sane countries that could benefit our code (most of them are "sane" ;)).
Lastly, nVidia said they would neither help nor hinder the project. If there is something they don't like, I'm sure they will let us know before going to court. If they wanted to go to the court, that would be one hell of a pain since they would have to sue individuals from many countries, mostly european. :D
Most of us are students, that would be bad PR to sue us
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Ok, I created an account. It will be simpler for others to follow. Comparing me to Linus or Eric Raymond is really over-the-top. I'm just a PhD student who has been working on power management in nouveau for little more than 1.5 years.
I'm not hairyfeet that you did the reply to. But, since you referenced info from my post in your reply to his, I'm assuming you just tried to consolidate things. One of the advantages to having an account is that your posts start at level 1 (vs 0 for AC) and people are more likely to "mod you up" and improve your "karma" if you post as yourself (or even a pseudonym as I and many others do--slashdot!=facebook). Eventually, if your karma goes high enough, your posts automatically start at level 2.
Anyway, the answers to your post are right, clean-room REing is legal. The shady part is for the firmwares that you have to decode in order to re-implement them. Fortunately, we know nvidia used a compiler to compile them. As we write them in asm only and don't use the same interface, I guess we are pretty covered.
I was fam
Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up, hairyfeet, you are supposed to write pages and pages about horrors of not having a single unchanging ABI for kernel drivers, so poor proprietary drivers developers can write shit drivers.
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Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG
Real programmers use od.
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Sorry, this is kind of off, but still interesting and related as this was work done by reverse engineering. How do you reverse engineer on Linux, or other UNIX systems like OS X and BSD? Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG, but seems there's just no such things available for Linux or UNIX. The problem isn't even about using console programs, it's about showing the debugging process and being able to put breakpoints.
Even if that was true... couldn't you do the reverse engineering on a Windows machine?
Doesn't cut it on my hardware... (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides spotty hardware supprt, AFAIK it is also missing VDPAU (HD video decoding) support, which is the main reason a lot of HTPC types use Nvidia cards in their linux machines. It is also fairly hard to remove. I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.
As a Linux (and other *nix) driver guy, I have tons of respect for how Nvidia deals with the constant, gratuitous changes in the Linux kernel APIs.
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I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.
Or you could have blacklisted nouveau and rebooted, which would have taken about thirty seconds plus the reboot time. However, it IS offensive that you have to do this.
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I just switched back to the proprietary driver, because Nouveau doesn't control my fan's speed, and can't adjust brightness contrast. All it took was removing the driver with apt-get, putting nomodeset back in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, and running the nVidia installer again. 5 minutes, tops.
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Having open source drivers in the kernel is better for 99% of people...
If you are a user, things are more likely to work out of the box, your hardware will be more widely supported and is likely to continue working for a lot longer.
If you are a developer then you can fix bugs in the drivers, and make improvements to the system without being constrained by needing compatibility with an old abi (note even microsoft have changed their driver abi several times, because what seemed sensible 10 years ago no longe
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they don't plan to support it, yet.
When wayland is the way to go, they will adapt their driver. But they will not create a driver for beta versions of a maybe successor of X.
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i do not know about this problem.
My information was, that nvidia said when asked some time ago, they do not have plans to support wayland at the moment.
Which is quite logical, as there are too little users of wayland to encourage anyone to update his drivers for wayland. When wayland is THE graphics system on every distribution, i bet there will be nvidia drivers.
Or if you care about free software... (Score:2)
Which I do, but I also care about performance. I've found myself having to switch back and forth between it and the propreitary Nvidia driver on some machines.
Re:Or if you care about free software... (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary is wrong. The nouveau driver is several orders of magnitude FASTER than the proprietary driver.. Well, for 2D acceleration. It is quite slower for 3D, but I don't really play games on Linux, so 2D is more important to me.
The nouveau driver really solves he Achilles heel of NVidia on Linux. 2D performance.
Cool project (Score:2)
Sometimes causes me headaches when trying to develop CUDA projects... but all in all a wonderful thing for 95% of the Linus user base. Spock would approve.
I only wish Ubuntu didn't ram it down my throat.
Nothng but Hate (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing to me that there is so much flame out there for this. None of you could do this, Not a single one of you have tried, and yet, this small group of dedicated people have actually figured out a piece of proprietary hardware to the point of having their code included in the Linux kernel? Way to go guys.
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It's amazing to me that there is so much flame out there for this.
Not from real people, it's just trolls.
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Yep. People who will never be users or contributors, not matter what they say. They're here because they don't do anything meaningful with their lives, so they have to undermine the work of others.
The only winning move is to ignore them.
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Agreed. I briefly ran a mostly current Nouveau on my work desktop when I updated to Fedora 16, and everything auto-detected and came up nicely.
This was shortly before I pulled the PCIe card out because the Radeon driver finally works too with my display, and now supports the AMD APU I bought last June.
The only thing I acutally want at this point is lower power consumption, by utilizing as much silicon as possible (which will also help the gamers). Functionality seems to finally be mature at least! Sure,
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I wouldn't flame about it — it's cool that it exists — but I wish they would spend their time focused on problems that actually need solving, like support for (original) Xbox graphics. Every so often someone contributes some work on it, and from the comments it looks like it's ALMOST there, but not quite. But meanwhile they're working on drivers for cards that already have official support! That cheeses me off slightly. Not so much that I would actually create a comment and complain about it if
Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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The comments "if only you don't care about performance..." came from the anonymous submitter of the slashdot summary, not from the original article.
The original article is talking about how the nouveau driver is becoming part of the stable kernel, and benchmarks it against the proprietary Nvidia driver. The benchmarks show that for some applications the nouveau driver has quite acceptable performance, and for others it is significantly slower.
Becoming stable is not a claim that it is finished, just that the
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And then there are those that use the least amount of closed source software they can, while still accomplishing the task at hand.
We will re-evaluate if there are some situations that the open source driver may be usable now where it wasn't just a few months ago.
I would expect the days of compiling the nvidia kernel module to be coming to a close in the next couple of years, the driver looks like it might actually be faster than the binary blob when the clock setting issues are figured out.
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Yes, I'd agree with that too. I have some older machines where the blob already does not work because it has not been maintained by Nvidia. Yes, those machines are ready for retirement, but I'll retire them when I'm ready, not when Nvidia decides they are obsolete.
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Why all the hate /.? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously guys why all the hate? Sure it doesn't work for everyone, it works on old hardware. But here's the deal, it works and is sufficient for day to day use. Here's the amazing and nerdy part of it too, they REVERSE ENGINEERED IT. Something as complicated as a video card. That's no small feat and they should be congratulated for their efforts to make linux just that much better. Start hating when you contribute something with any significance at all. BTW I'm not a kernel developer, just a nerd that appreciates a feat such as this.
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Re:Why all the hate /.? (Score:4, Funny)
Dammit, posted AC. That'll learn me to not log in.
Yeah I hate it when I accidentally forget to log in, and then accidentally type in a CAPTCHA, and then accidentally click "Submit", and then realize "shit, I forgot to log in!".
Gets me every time.
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Well, before that I'd honestly never posted AC before :P. I didn't know that the CAPTCHA was just for AC since I post fairly infrequently these days I actually thought it was something new. But when you say it like that, yes it was kinda stupid.
Anyone and I do mean anyone can do a stupid thing. The fact you have a sense of humor about it is strong evidence, in fact proof positive, that you're not a stupid person.
If you were a stupid person you would resent and resist all suggestions that you erred in any way that could be corrected. That is the mark of stupidity. It never admits fault no matter how obvious it may be and never believes it should ever do anything differently. Instead it climbs up on its high horse, acts "hurt" and tries to con
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The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves
First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:
Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm using this driver (well, probably a slightly older version of it) with my desktop now, and so far I've been pleasently surprised. I don't need blazing fast performance on 3D for most things. FlightGear/OpenArena level games are about as far as I'm likely to push, since I'm not into the latest and greatest FPS anymore. Given that, the prospect of an integrated driver that "just works" without having to do anything extra is awesome.
My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!
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My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!
That about the same space I'm in with the open source Radeon driver, except that it's working well on very recent cards. I can still go back to the Catalyst driver any time I want and I will get a (steadily shrinking) throughput boost. But the number of times I bothered to do that in the last 18 months is zero. Instead, I plugged in a newer card and got much bigger boost that way, incidentally, without increasing power consumption. By the way: this point totally hard to understand for Windows users... when
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See, I told you Windows users would have a hard time understanding this. I didn't even need to plug in a driver disk.
Allows mulitple monitors with rotation (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing which you cannot do with the official NVIDIA driver for GNU/Linux is have mixed rotation monitors. (I would like to be proven wrong - have even tried to prove myself wrong, but given up).
I currently have one monitor in portrait and one monitor in landscape and one monitor in landscape, with the ability to drag windows from one to the other. I have some acceleration, which allows me to see through terminal windows.
Nouveau works, official one does not work. Simple choice.
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Now for some reason the GUI tool doesn't include that option but it can be done by adding that option to the configuration file.
I think there also might be a driver independent way to do with RandR as well instead of in xorg.conf but I haven't touched RandR for a while.
Of course if Nouveau already does what you want then there's no reason to stop using
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It looks like there's no way of doing that on the fly, then - or does anybody know how to do that? I know that nVidia's driver doesn't use xrandr. I want to use rotation, but I could only get it to rotate all the screens at once (
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Nvidia driver doesn't do xrandr? I use it. Here's my xorg.conf:
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Option "RandRRotation
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
There's a cultural side to the open source thing.. (Score:2)
...and it would seem to be a rather persistent thing, at that.
Personally, I think it's great to hear some simple news about a non-trivial thing relating to a driver that also affects the overall performance of my own computer. That it's an article not written in marketspeak covered with a 20 gallon drum full of marketsauce, then, I guess that may also serve to comment to the technological integrity of the open source developer domain.
But sure sure, we can troll, we can. Cheers.
Depressing standard of comments. (Score:5, Interesting)
The comments on this story really do illustrate how the readership of Slashdot really has changed over the past few years.
This is a real "News for Nerds" story, a story about open source development and how we're still not really past the bad old days of winmodems when it comes to (real, not binary blob) hardware support by manufacturers.
A full half of the comments I can see above seem to be troll posts along the lines of "LOL M8 DOESNT RUN UNREAL TOURNAMENT 27".
Oh dear.
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Exactly this. I'm not personally interested about the complexities of reverse-engineering, because I know it's too complex for my feeble brain, but I've a lot of respect for people who can do it even if I'd leave the open source driver another couple of years before using it. (I've no moral compunctions against binary blobs.) But I came to this thread pretty much knowing it was going to have the shit trolled out of it, entirely because of that part of the summary.
which works fine if you don't care (Score:2)
If i didnt care about performance why would I bother to install something aside from whatever the system boots with on install?
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1) if I need linux and do not care about video performance I am just going to drop in the disc and go
2) where the fuck did ubuntu come in? and yes you guys generally do, everyone else moved on to other distros
Very stable (Score:2)
Absolutely fantastic, provided you haven't bought a video card made in the last 3 or 4 years...
Hell, I can't even boot the latest Mint or Fedora live-CDs without derping around nouveau, and I'm not exactly bleeding edge here.
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Hell, I can't even boot the latest Mint or Fedora live-CDs without derping around nouveau, and I'm not exactly bleeding edge here.
Ubuntu users have no end of problems too, they have to actually blacklist Nouveau on several Ubuntu versions to get the nvidia driver to load. I am among them, still on Oneiric though.
I applaud your efforts (Score:2)
I applaud your efforts, but unless we get wirespeed performance on our nVidia hardware in both 2D and 3D modes, thanks anyway, but no thanks until nVidia assists the Noveau folks for real.
Nouveau runs hot (Score:3)
I have no problem with the performance of the nouveau drivers, but compared to the proprietary drivers my card (8500 GT) runs quite a bit hotter. So I tend to stick with the proprietary drivers.
If the nouveau devs can address this point, I'd be very content to stick with nouveau.
Works for me - my thanks to the devs (Score:3)
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Way to go guys.. you've now given Nvidia massive disincentive to continue to do more work with their MODERN drivers.
Competition is usually a motivation to improve rather than stagnate.
Wouldn't be at all surprised to see things like VDPAU and CUDA recieve even more attention from Nvidia. Maybe even features like KMS might happen now...
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Maybe even features like KMS might happen now...
No it won't. NVIDIA's actual customers on *Nix are people who don't give a flying fuck about KMS. And no, their actual customers are not Linux "gamers" are desktop cube jockeys.
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Competition in you main market is an incentive to improve.
Competition in a tiny side market is an incentive to give up and stop wasting resources on it.
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Not dismissing what's obviously a pretty daunting technical challenge, but still. The problem is...
Why would you buy a $250 3D Nvidia card if you didn't care about performance?
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That's quite a few performance-insensiti
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Not dismissing what's obviously a pretty daunting technical challenge, but still. The problem is...
Why would you buy a $250 3D Nvidia card if you didn't care about performance?
Well, you could dual boot. In this case you would want all the performance you can get while gaming in Windows. Since you are probably not gaming much in Linux, all you really need is enough power for desktop effects, which require a 3D driver.
Or you could just by a $50 Nvidia GPU and use this driver with it. I don't thing it's limited to the latest and greatest Nvidia cards.
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Which is why open source drivers should be discredited everywhere. Because it can be done, but at a disservice to everyone...
Why scratch an itch when the manufactures will stand up eventually and do the right thing? /end sarcasm
Software freedom trumps proprietorship every time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software freedom is important for its own sake. You're better off with a less functional free implementation than a more powerful and reliable proprietary implementation in numerous practical ways programmers and users have known for decades.
If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all. Proprietors control your computer and tell you what you can do with it. Free software gives you the freedom to control your own computer. One can learn to program and understand the Nouveau source code: maintain the code to work on more OSes and work with more hardware, free from the fear of DRM (digital restrictions management). If you're not a programmer, like most computer users aren't, you can still help the effort by giving programmers what they need to help you in return. Often that's money, equipment, good bug reports, documentation translations, and writing documentation for the software.
We're better off relying on each other in freedom than we are depending on a proprietor. Socially, we can't build a better future for ourselves by relying on secret software. We should be allowed to fully own and control our computers and we'll get there with software freedom.
Nvidia should have told their customers how to fully use the equipment they sold. Nouveau hackers are remedying that deficiency. I'm grateful for the valuable work Nouveau hackers are doing for all of us.
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So true. I had a problem with my onboard network card a while ago. I dug up an old 3COM PCI 10/100 card, those cards were awesome and would survive god striking them. I put it in, boot Windows 64 bit and... obviously no driver. It's an old card and no one bothered to create a driver for Windows 7 64 bit. Then I reboot under Kubuntu also running 64 bit and hey, it's working.
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In addition, and this is a big one for me, you don't have to reinstall the open source driver with every kernel upgrade.
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you don't have to reinstall the open source driver with every kernel upgrade.
You don't have to reinstall the Nvidia driver, at least on Fedora with rpmfusion enabled, which is the "easy button" way:
sudo yum install akmod-nvidia
Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti (Score:4, Interesting)
> If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all.
And nVidia does exactly this, they drop old models from their drivers (it isn't that bad, the last time it happened to me, it was really old, and the machine stopped being relevant for desktop usage a long time before). Still, I like the tranquility of mind; that's why I switched to ATI cards everywhere. It's good to have choice again. The work of Nouveau developers is impressive, considering the competing open source ati drivers got a lot of help from AMD.
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They might go under, they might decide to charge for upgrades or new versions.
A free (AIS) implementation is a defence against those things happening.
Re:incredibly bad move (Score:5, Informative)
The last time someone came up with a replacement for an Nvidia driver was for the ethernet drivers and Nvdia ended up discontinuing their own and contributing to the open source driver instead. If this happens again we are all better off.
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Yes, that, and the abandoned SoundForce platform. Sheesh.
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Oh, good point. Is Don still doing clusters? Don't they all use GPU's now ? ;)
No, nVidia isn't stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
They realize their top notch drivers are a big selling point of their hardware. You'll find more than a couple people who have the opinion that AMD has good graphics hardware, crippled by poor drivers.
nVidia will only discontinue Linux drivers if the market shrinks to such a size that it is no longer worth it. If Linux becomes an "embedded only" OS or something they'll stop. However so long as it is being used a reasonable amount, they'll keep making drivers for it (they also have FreeBSD and Solaris drivers to give you an idea).
Particularly since it is a big market for their GPGPU stuff. When people get a big multi-card Tesla system, they sometimes want to run Linux on it. That is only doable with first flight drivers that have all the features supported, work with the latest hardware, and give up nothing in terms of speed.
Re:No, nVidia isn't stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that render farms are a major franchise for NVidia and Linux pretty much owns that space.
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I see you stopped reading his comment at the first line you reached that caused your neckbeard to chafe in rage because you don't think reading comprehension is important.
Maybe you should *keep reading* the comment.
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Way to go guys.. you've now given Nvidia massive disincentive to continue to do more work with their MODERN drivers.
But if they hadn't.. Would you have been able to post anything this whiny?
Moron...
Nvidia is not releasing drivers for gamers on Linux. Shocking I know. But this hasn't and most likely never will be why Nvidia releases Linux drivers.
Nvidia does however, create drivers for their high end workstation cards. Which are regularly used on Unix/Irix/Linux workstations. The consumer grade stuff is an offshoot of this. Not the other way around. They have already written the code for paying customers.. Why not tweak i
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Nvidia is not releasing drivers for gamers on Linux. Shocking I know. But this hasn't and most likely never will be why Nvidia releases Linux drivers.
Nvidia does however, create drivers for their high end workstation cards.
Wrong and right. nVidia DOES release drivers for gamers on Linux. How can you tell? They support old hardware. Look at the supported hardware list for the geforce driver, now compare to the supported hardware list for the ATI driver and laugh. Only the very newest nVidia cards ever lack Linux support, and then only the budget ones, and they get it within a few versions.
Tegra (Score:5, Informative)
2) buy someone elses (likely)
And this is what NVIDIA has done. NVIDIA bought a license for ARM's CPU and built the Tegra SoC around it.
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1) build their own cpu (not likely)
You mean like the Tegra line of processors? I think you should limit your thinking to x86 dimensions.
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Well, if you have hardware which is a few generations old then you generally have 2 choices:
"a driver that works fine if you don't care about performance"
"hardware that doesnt work at all"
Considering that a video card which is a few generations old can still be a useful device for most purposes except gaming, i'd rather use the fully working card i already have than be forced to buy a new one.
Also if your using an old card, you probably aren't concerned with performance.
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The early 2000's called and want their joke back. You're trying too hard.
Thank you for the raving review (Score:2)
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KDE, MATE and gnome 2 all wor
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Huh? I've *never* had to do a reboot or to restart X for this. I plug in the 2nd monitor, it gets detected after about 10 seconds and just works after that.
Running OpenSUSE 11.3 with the Desktop kernel/KDE 3.5.10/nVidia drivers here. Did you not install the nVidia config tool or something?
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I bought this laptop about 2 years ago, installed Linux (and the official nVidia drivers), and multiple monitors--one of them sometimes being my 52" TV via HDMI--have "just worked" for me ever since. I applaud these guys, but I'm also a believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Might give it a burl whenever I get round to a fresh install on this thing, though.
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especially microsoft
Software patents fail (Score:3)
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After fighting with the nVidia installers for years I'm happy with any X solution.
it's called a distribution, and there are several that solve the nvidia driver problem for you, not that I've ever had a problem with an nvidia installer.
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Older cards don't even necessary have a binary driver that will work with them
As an exercise, look up which cards are supported by an official nvidia driver. You will be astounded, especially when you compare it to the shitty supported hardware list for fglrx.
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Umm, the current Nvidia driver supports cards back to the 6*** series. And they do keep versions of the driver for older cards around. With Fedora, all you have to do is insall the rpmfusion repo and install the older driver series via yum.
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While the WINE project relies on testing windows software to see what windows api calls are being used, and tries to mimic them, the Nouveau project actually knows the entire possibility of what can be sent and what calls are and are not implemented.
I would guess that the Nouveau project will eventually succeed in a very ambitious project. I see no reason to believe that wine will ever succeed, that target keeps moving, and is not easy to define.