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The NVIDIA driver is most certainly not a piece of shit. NVIDIA is a bit behind on things like Wayland, but it has been way ahead of AMD for the last 10+ years

The NVIDIA driver is most certainly not a piece of shit. NVIDIA is a bit behind on things like Wayland, but it has been way ahead of AMD for the last 10+ years on Linux for people running mission-critical software that requires good OpenGL drivers. Try running with AMD hardware on RHEL/CentOS 6/7 (the OS many major VFX facilities use), you'll have a Bad Time (tm). I am speaking as someone who has been maintaining software & hardware running Linux making heavy use of NVIDIA hardware for the last ten years. The NVIDIA driver on macOS on the other hand, now there is a lamentable situation...

bryanlarsen 9y ago
RHEL 6 was released in 2010. At that time Nvidia was way better than AMD. In the last 7 years AMD has improved dramatically, but nVidia has gotten worse. Ubuntu and Red Hat will probably have new LTS versions using Wayland coming out in 2018. Which means that 2017 is the time to start testing for them. And it's not really a glowing endorsement if Nvidia is only the second worst driver on Linux, not the absolute worst.
LunaSea 9y ago
So NVIDIA's drivers are good because AMD's are worse?
- CreepGin 9y ago
  Just not a piece of shit
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    That choice of terms was my frustration leaking through. Those drivers wasted 4 hours of my day yesterday, and several whole days this last month.
    - moonbug22 9y ago
      Whatchya doin updating them in the first place? Pick a version, install it against dkms and forget about it.
      - slizard 9y ago
        CUDA version compatibility, for instance. Every new release requires new series of drivers.
- baldfat 9y ago
  > "What AMD's seeking to do by changing up their high-performance Linux driver is having a completely free kernel driver that's relied upon by Catalyst and would live within the mainline Linux kernel in order to ease support for Linux consumers." https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_cata... I think AMD has gone above and beyond, especially since 2014's above announcement. I think today's AMD are better than NVIDIA's and they are a much better company for Linux
baobrain 9y ago
My experience with consumer cards may not apply, but AMD drivers, especially their open source ones, have been very good for the past two years or so, especially after AMD's announcement of their intention to mainline much of the graphics driver. From Phoronix's test, they seem to have promising performance as well. Is enterprise hardware extremely different?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  The main things that Mesa lacks for "pro" customers are support for OpenGL compatibility profiles, and ISV certification. You also generally will want to use AMD's proprietary OpenCL until ROCm stabilizes and the requisite patches are (of a quality suitable for) upstream. Though as a professional, and a user of a "professional" AMD card (Radeon WX Pro 7100, bought entirely for the amount of VRAM), I opt for Mesa.
winter_blue 9y ago
What about the open-source drivers? The state of Nouveau (open source Nvidia drivers) is pretty terrible[1], right? The proprietery AMD Catalyst™ (fglrx) drivers are known to be bad[2], but AMDGPU[3] is supposed to be the best, when it comes to open source GPU driver support on Linux, based on what I've read. Better than Nouveau or Nvidia's proprietery blobs. Don't people sometimes buy AMD cards just for its excellent native/open-source driver support? [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-410-blob&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openclose-amdnv-2017&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openclos... [3] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMDGPU-Driver https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMDGPU-Driver | https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
- jamesfmilne 9y ago
  I'm not arguing that AMD's new open-source drivers appear to be pretty good, but you can't use them on current RHEL 7 since the RHEL kernel is frozen on the 3.10.x line, which locks out a lot of people from using AMD GPU hardware on Linux.
  - nbanks 9y ago
    It is possible to compile your own Kernel in Red Hat. You may loose some customer support, but at least everything will be familiar.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > People buy AMD cards just for its excellent native/open-source driver support. I can confirm this being my main reason for going with AMD. They have discrete GPUs which meet my performance requirements, and the Mesa-based drivers perform very well, with very few issues (none on my own workloads). There has been a bit of a gap in display output features, specifically FreeSync support, but that's coming along too, and should be at least of "experimental" quality in Linux 4.15.
saltcured 9y ago
We have used previous Titan cards in lab workstations with Fedora Linux to get reasonably current versions of many different numerical libraries and apps. A frustrating aspect of the NVIDIA drivers is the poorly thought out update protocol. For our academic lab environment, admins want to run nightly package updates as a general practice to get most network-facing security updates as soon as possible. However, this doesn't mean we expect to logout or reboot every machine every night. Lab users keep odd hours and run jobs at unpredictable crunch times. In practice, nightly automated updates just work, since most lab apps lack dynamic library loader shenanigans which would get confused by new libraries on disk being swapped into place while an older process is still running older libraries in their memory space. The update experience is that one day everything works, and then next all commands fail to get an OpenGL context because the NVIDIA-related package update replaced the user-space libraries with ones that are apparently not ABI compatible with the still running kernel module. It seems absurd to me that the kernel interface and user-space library are not designed to allow seamless updates. The new user-space driver should be willing to talk to the previous kernel shim as well as the new one which may have more features. It should not expect a flag-day update for every little periodic update. The users have had to learn to reboot the workstation and hope that it will resolve the problem. Once in a while, the kernel shim apparently fails to recompile on the latest kernel update, and the reboot does not help. The admins then have to intervene to find some temporary solution such as downgrading the libraries or finding a previous kernel version where the latest kernel module successfully recompiles.
- slizard 9y ago
  Your story sounds very familiar. Add to that list the regular regressions in new driver release that require rollback, but the binary blob drivers sometimes forget to clean up properly and you can end up in a library mixup hell... no fun. On the other hand, in terms of robustness and reliability on the compute side of things, the NVIDIA drivers are decent. I've only experienced 1-2 hard kernel crashes the last year -- which used to be an at least weekly event 5+ years ago. I still wish they'd split their driver and contributed upstream parts of it if for nothing else, to make compatibility layers and shims more robust, but knowing NVIDIA I doubt that's on their roadmap for the coming century. :)
robotresearcher 9y ago
Nobody is buying this card for graphics. It's completely irrelevant.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  I wish it was irrelevant, but CUDA requires the NVidia binary driver. Why can't CUDA work with nouveau? All the special sauce is in the CUDA libraries, I'm sure all the driver does is init the card and do some resource management.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    I understand that you have to run their blob driver, but the comment I replied to was complaining about OpenGL performance.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

RHEL 6 was released in 2010. At that time Nvidia was way better than AMD. In the last 7 years AMD has improved dramatically, but nVidia has gotten worse. Ubuntu and Red Hat will probably have new LTS versions using Wayland coming out in 2018. Which means that 2017 is the time to start testing for them. And it's not really a glowing endorsement if Nvidia is only the second worst driver on Linux, not the absolute worst.

LunaSea 9y ago

So NVIDIA's drivers are good because AMD's are worse?

CreepGin 9y ago
Just not a piece of shit
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  That choice of terms was my frustration leaking through. Those drivers wasted 4 hours of my day yesterday, and several whole days this last month.
  - moonbug22 9y ago
    Whatchya doin updating them in the first place? Pick a version, install it against dkms and forget about it.
    - slizard 9y ago
      CUDA version compatibility, for instance. Every new release requires new series of drivers.
baldfat 9y ago
> "What AMD's seeking to do by changing up their high-performance Linux driver is having a completely free kernel driver that's relied upon by Catalyst and would live within the mainline Linux kernel in order to ease support for Linux consumers." https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_cata... I think AMD has gone above and beyond, especially since 2014's above announcement. I think today's AMD are better than NVIDIA's and they are a much better company for Linux

baobrain 9y ago

My experience with consumer cards may not apply, but AMD drivers, especially their open source ones, have been very good for the past two years or so, especially after AMD's announcement of their intention to mainline much of the graphics driver. From Phoronix's test, they seem to have promising performance as well. Is enterprise hardware extremely different?

microcolonel 9y ago
The main things that Mesa lacks for "pro" customers are support for OpenGL compatibility profiles, and ISV certification. You also generally will want to use AMD's proprietary OpenCL until ROCm stabilizes and the requisite patches are (of a quality suitable for) upstream. Though as a professional, and a user of a "professional" AMD card (Radeon WX Pro 7100, bought entirely for the amount of VRAM), I opt for Mesa.

winter_blue 9y ago

What about the open-source drivers? The state of Nouveau (open source Nvidia drivers) is pretty terrible[1], right? The proprietery AMD Catalyst™ (fglrx) drivers are known to be bad[2], but AMDGPU[3] is supposed to be the best, when it comes to open source GPU driver support on Linux, based on what I've read. Better than Nouveau or Nvidia's proprietery blobs. Don't people sometimes buy AMD cards just for its excellent native/open-source driver support? [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-410-blob&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openclose-amdnv-2017&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openclos... [3] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMDGPU-Driver https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMDGPU-Driver | https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

jamesfmilne 9y ago
I'm not arguing that AMD's new open-source drivers appear to be pretty good, but you can't use them on current RHEL 7 since the RHEL kernel is frozen on the 3.10.x line, which locks out a lot of people from using AMD GPU hardware on Linux.
- nbanks 9y ago
  It is possible to compile your own Kernel in Red Hat. You may loose some customer support, but at least everything will be familiar.
microcolonel 9y ago
> People buy AMD cards just for its excellent native/open-source driver support. I can confirm this being my main reason for going with AMD. They have discrete GPUs which meet my performance requirements, and the Mesa-based drivers perform very well, with very few issues (none on my own workloads). There has been a bit of a gap in display output features, specifically FreeSync support, but that's coming along too, and should be at least of "experimental" quality in Linux 4.15.

saltcured 9y ago

We have used previous Titan cards in lab workstations with Fedora Linux to get reasonably current versions of many different numerical libraries and apps. A frustrating aspect of the NVIDIA drivers is the poorly thought out update protocol. For our academic lab environment, admins want to run nightly package updates as a general practice to get most network-facing security updates as soon as possible. However, this doesn't mean we expect to logout or reboot every machine every night. Lab users keep odd hours and run jobs at unpredictable crunch times. In practice, nightly automated updates just work, since most lab apps lack dynamic library loader shenanigans which would get confused by new libraries on disk being swapped into place while an older process is still running older libraries in their memory space. The update experience is that one day everything works, and then next all commands fail to get an OpenGL context because the NVIDIA-related package update replaced the user-space libraries with ones that are apparently not ABI compatible with the still running kernel module. It seems absurd to me that the kernel interface and user-space library are not designed to allow seamless updates. The new user-space driver should be willing to talk to the previous kernel shim as well as the new one which may have more features. It should not expect a flag-day update for every little periodic update. The users have had to learn to reboot the workstation and hope that it will resolve the problem. Once in a while, the kernel shim apparently fails to recompile on the latest kernel update, and the reboot does not help. The admins then have to intervene to find some temporary solution such as downgrading the libraries or finding a previous kernel version where the latest kernel module successfully recompiles.

slizard 9y ago
Your story sounds very familiar. Add to that list the regular regressions in new driver release that require rollback, but the binary blob drivers sometimes forget to clean up properly and you can end up in a library mixup hell... no fun. On the other hand, in terms of robustness and reliability on the compute side of things, the NVIDIA drivers are decent. I've only experienced 1-2 hard kernel crashes the last year -- which used to be an at least weekly event 5+ years ago. I still wish they'd split their driver and contributed upstream parts of it if for nothing else, to make compatibility layers and shims more robust, but knowing NVIDIA I doubt that's on their roadmap for the coming century. :)

robotresearcher 9y ago

Nobody is buying this card for graphics. It's completely irrelevant.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
I wish it was irrelevant, but CUDA requires the NVidia binary driver. Why can't CUDA work with nouveau? All the special sauce is in the CUDA libraries, I'm sure all the driver does is init the card and do some resource management.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  I understand that you have to run their blob driver, but the comment I replied to was complaining about OpenGL performance.