5 ms·

NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver

52 points by JshWright 17y ago

JshWright 17y ago
Sorry, just noticed this was a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354)
- jpwagner 17y ago
  No worries since there was zero discussion there...
makmanalp 17y ago
This is sort of a big deal, I assume nouveau will keep going, although they are still lacking in support. On the other hand, the ATI / AMD open drivers are relatively recent and are moving pretty fast.
hartror 17y ago
Disappointing but not life changing it was poorly supported and I don't know anyone running the open driver over the propriety one. However it would be nice to know that someone was working on the driver that actually gave a damn about Linux.
- _delirium 17y ago
  I think they do care about Linux for the proprietary driver, since Linux workstations are a pretty decent share of the market for their high-margin Quadro cards.
- JshWright 17y ago
  For me, the issue isn't that they're dropping their open source driver (as other commenters have mentioned, it was nothing more than a token "get something on the screen" driver in the first place). However, it would have been nice if the announcement had pointed people towards (or at least mentioned) the reasonably solid Nouveau driver, rather than just telling people to use vesa until they can download the propriatary driver.
jrockway 17y ago
I didn't know nVidia even had an open driver. When I read the title, I thought they were completely dropping support for non-Windows Oses, which would have been disappointing. Maybe Intel will buy nVidia and fix this problem for us. Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  > Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source Something that is quite astonishing, I must add. I can only wonder how horribly constructed a piece of hardware must be for a company to refuse to publish enough specifications for able and willing community to produce open-source drivers.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    It's usually because they didn't license the linked-list patent, and they don't want anyone to find out. (Etc.) Alienating the Free Software community is cheaper than getting on the wrong side of a patent troll, I guess.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      You say that jokingly, but I am sure things equally ridiculous could be to blame for this.
pmjordan 17y ago
This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time. The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far from perfect, and apparently not getting better. I've had a couple of crashes and corruption issues with them just for window compositing. Meanwhile, the open source AMD drivers have been making massive improvements.
- mbreese 17y ago
  Did you run the open source or closed drivers in the first place? Their proprietary drivers have always been better than the open source ones.
  - pmjordan 17y ago
    The proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all. Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really aren't a good replacement at all.
- duskwuff 17y ago
  You mean ATI, surely?
  - wmf 17y ago
    Did you notice that AMD bought ATI?
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  There's an open-source 3D driver making massive improvements for nvidia too called Nouveau. I wouldn't get ATi with Linux, it's all nvidia straight across for me. They have excellent driver support for Linux and I strongly like it. AMD's drivers still don't support X Server -1. Yeah, there's open-source drivers out there that work OK, but they still don't approach the performance of the proprietary ones. There are also a lot of applications that are buggy with Catalyst Linux. Linux users are still much better off with nvidia for high-performance graphics. Intel is nice and cool and provides good support but their GPUs are exclusively low-end, which is fine for low-end users, but not fine for gamers et al.
DrJokepu 17y ago
To be fair, the open source nv module wasn't used by anyone I know for anything else besides having something rendering the screen while they have downloaded and insalled the proprietary nvidia module. It did provide some basic 2D acceleration but it was largely inferior to the proprietary driver anyway. I think that open source purists never really favoured NVidia cards anyway due to this reason so it's not like they're going to lose an awful amount of customers because of that. I think it's likely that this was a purely economical (cost cutting) decision. Unrelated but still related reading about the current problems of Linux graphics drivers is this post on Linux Hater (offensive language): http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...
jws 17y ago
They lost to Intel for me a long time ago. I don't need a proprietary driver to cause me compatiblity problems or a second rate lip service job of an open source driver. I want one that just works. I presume they are on such shaky patent ground that they can not expose the workings of their chips to scrutiny.
dfghjkg 17y ago
So what ? I'm perfectly happy to have a driver that works, I don't really see the community advantage of an opensource driver as compared to an opensource framework or application. People are happy to use Intel cpus rather than opensparc!
jorgecastillo 17y ago
Not something I will miss. I don't even see why companies make this half baked attempts at open sourcing code. If they are going to open source something they should put real effort in their endeavor. We don't even need hardware companies to open source anything. What we need is good enough documentation so that interested developers can make open source drivers with out having to reverse engineer the hell out of the hardware.

52 points by JshWright 17y ago

Sorry, just noticed this was a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354)

jpwagner 17y ago
No worries since there was zero discussion there...

makmanalp 17y ago

This is sort of a big deal, I assume nouveau will keep going, although they are still lacking in support. On the other hand, the ATI / AMD open drivers are relatively recent and are moving pretty fast.

hartror 17y ago

Disappointing but not life changing it was poorly supported and I don't know anyone running the open driver over the propriety one. However it would be nice to know that someone was working on the driver that actually gave a damn about Linux.

_delirium 17y ago
I think they do care about Linux for the proprietary driver, since Linux workstations are a pretty decent share of the market for their high-margin Quadro cards.
JshWright 17y ago
For me, the issue isn't that they're dropping their open source driver (as other commenters have mentioned, it was nothing more than a token "get something on the screen" driver in the first place). However, it would have been nice if the announcement had pointed people towards (or at least mentioned) the reasonably solid Nouveau driver, rather than just telling people to use vesa until they can download the propriatary driver.

jrockway 17y ago

I didn't know nVidia even had an open driver. When I read the title, I thought they were completely dropping support for non-Windows Oses, which would have been disappointing. Maybe Intel will buy nVidia and fix this problem for us. Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source.

rbanffy 17y ago
> Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source Something that is quite astonishing, I must add. I can only wonder how horribly constructed a piece of hardware must be for a company to refuse to publish enough specifications for able and willing community to produce open-source drivers.
- jrockway 17y ago
  It's usually because they didn't license the linked-list patent, and they don't want anyone to find out. (Etc.) Alienating the Free Software community is cheaper than getting on the wrong side of a patent troll, I guess.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    You say that jokingly, but I am sure things equally ridiculous could be to blame for this.

pmjordan 17y ago

This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time. The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far from perfect, and apparently not getting better. I've had a couple of crashes and corruption issues with them just for window compositing. Meanwhile, the open source AMD drivers have been making massive improvements.

mbreese 17y ago
Did you run the open source or closed drivers in the first place? Their proprietary drivers have always been better than the open source ones.
- pmjordan 17y ago
  The proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all. Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really aren't a good replacement at all.
duskwuff 17y ago
You mean ATI, surely?
- wmf 17y ago
  Did you notice that AMD bought ATI?
cookiecaper 17y ago
There's an open-source 3D driver making massive improvements for nvidia too called Nouveau. I wouldn't get ATi with Linux, it's all nvidia straight across for me. They have excellent driver support for Linux and I strongly like it. AMD's drivers still don't support X Server -1. Yeah, there's open-source drivers out there that work OK, but they still don't approach the performance of the proprietary ones. There are also a lot of applications that are buggy with Catalyst Linux. Linux users are still much better off with nvidia for high-performance graphics. Intel is nice and cool and provides good support but their GPUs are exclusively low-end, which is fine for low-end users, but not fine for gamers et al.

DrJokepu 17y ago

To be fair, the open source nv module wasn't used by anyone I know for anything else besides having something rendering the screen while they have downloaded and insalled the proprietary nvidia module. It did provide some basic 2D acceleration but it was largely inferior to the proprietary driver anyway. I think that open source purists never really favoured NVidia cards anyway due to this reason so it's not like they're going to lose an awful amount of customers because of that. I think it's likely that this was a purely economical (cost cutting) decision. Unrelated but still related reading about the current problems of Linux graphics drivers is this post on Linux Hater (offensive language): http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...

jws 17y ago

They lost to Intel for me a long time ago. I don't need a proprietary driver to cause me compatiblity problems or a second rate lip service job of an open source driver. I want one that just works. I presume they are on such shaky patent ground that they can not expose the workings of their chips to scrutiny.

dfghjkg 17y ago

So what ? I'm perfectly happy to have a driver that works, I don't really see the community advantage of an opensource driver as compared to an opensource framework or application. People are happy to use Intel cpus rather than opensparc!

jorgecastillo 17y ago

Not something I will miss. I don't even see why companies make this half baked attempts at open sourcing code. If they are going to open source something they should put real effort in their endeavor. We don't even need hardware companies to open source anything. What we need is good enough documentation so that interested developers can make open source drivers with out having to reverse engineer the hell out of the hardware.