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NVIDIA GeForce driver deployment in datacenters is forbidden now
- TheRealPomax 9y agoSounds like one of those hilarious EULA clauses that is void in many countries with laws around companies not having the right to control the use of their product after sale.
- steanne 9y agodiscussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587
- tenryuu 9y agothanks
- LyalinDotCom 9y agoIt's beyond sickening to see one more product you buy attempt to control you via license. when will this shit end for hardware or is it just the start?
- naikrovek 9y agoThis is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NVidia do. This is the kind of thing they ALWAYS do. Don't be surprised. NVidia are assholes.
- jey 9y agoWhat are some other examples?
- lucaspiller 9y agoIf you want to pass-through a consumer Nvidia card to a VM, you need to hide that you are running a VM from the guest OS, otherwise the Nvidia drivers will fail with some obscure errors. https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher/blob/master/REA...
- Patrick_Devine 9y agoI've run into this before and gave up and just ran things on physical hw. It baffles me that we're running in to this crap in 2017.
- chrisper 9y agoWorks fine for me. Now there is even software that doesn't require changing the HDMI input for this.
- ago 9y agoIf you wanted to use a secondary nVidia card for PhysX, all was fine until nVidia changed their driver to disable PhysX when it detected an active AMD card.
- strgrd 9y agoNVIDIA GameWorks is probably the most cancerous thing to happen to the gaming industry. Partnering with UE4 to fuck games for AMD at the engine level :(
- userbinator 9y agoHere is another interesting read: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into... The difference between their "professional" GPUs and regular ones is literally a few sub-cent resistors.
- andars 9y agoSometimes. The GeForce GTX 690 used the same chip as the Quadro K5000 (the GK104). More recent generations typically have different silicon (or bins with defective regions) in the pro and gaming lines. For instance, high end pascal gaming cards use GP104, but Tesla P100 uses the GP100. For more details, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proc... (Notably the "code name" columns).
- dan1234 9y agoYou used to be able to upgrade AMD CPUs with a pencil. http://www.overclockersclub.com/guides/tbird/ http://www.overclockersclub.com/guides/tbird/
- iamcreasy 9y agoIs that why Tesla is building their own chip for Autopilot?
- dang 9y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive rants to HN. We're looking for thoughtful conversation, not venting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ebrewste 9y agoThis is value based pricing. It is just the start, it isn't new, and it isn't limited to computer hardware. *aaS (anything as a service) is the newest flavor of this. Expect it to explode as IoT becomes more mature.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's not a start - we're way into that situation now. But things are getting worse. This is legal-level restriction. If they wanted to be complete assholes, they'd tie the driver to an on-line service instead, like almost everyone on the IoT market does these days. Not sure what's the way out. The market doesn't and won't care (that's exactly why they're doing it), and you can't legislate things as vague as "don't be an greedy asshole", which is what all of this boils down to.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- trishume 9y ago1. Write a Tensorflow wrapper that mints a new private cryptocurrency where the proof of work is training your deep learning model. 2. Sell it to companies who bought racks full of GeForce GPUs for deep learning. 3. Profit!
- ascom 9y agoAlternatively, you could simply have your GPUs calculate a few hashes every hour. So technically, you're doing blockchain processing...very slowly...
- dnautics 9y agoyou couldn't do that. Because you're deploying the GPUs for other purposes besides blockchain processing 99% of the time. What you could do, is write a very trivial blockchain and Have it require a couple of ledger entries that are DL "input data/gradient". Hard to argue what exactly constitutes "processing". This way, every cycle of the software is dedicated in some way to the blockchain.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThey don't care. But more importantly, courts won't care. Your compute is all tainted and has the wrong colour, due to your intent of working around the licensing restrictions.
- O_H_E 9y agoThat's how we do stuff :D
- rollcat 9y ago4. NVidia changes the EULA again to forbid $X ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- arcanus 9y agohttps://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hiptensorflow https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hiptensorflow Everyone on HN knows to always go with free, open software. Without competition any company (Intel, nvidia, etc.) starts to exploit the consumer.
- Nition 9y agoThe NVIDIA website has a whole section on Data Center graphics cards: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/ Won't this just be hurting their own sales possibilities? I can only guess they'll be announcing some datacenter-specific version of the software soon, which is essentially the same but mysteriously more expensive.
- Scaevolus 9y agoThose aren't GeForce cards. They don't want their consumer line (GeForce) competing with their datacenter line (Tesla). They previously reduced the FP64/FP16 performance on GeForce cards (making them much worse for neural networks), but it's easier to limit the losses legally than by reducing hardware. Modern games don't want artificially limited ALUs!
- Nition 9y agoAh sorry, I see, so there's already that split in consumer vs. datacenter and they're now forcing the line to be drawn.
- shaklee3 9y agoThis is not technically correct. I think you're referring to cases of Pascal cards where the GeForce version had poor fp64 performance. This is because it's a different asic Rev. Same reason the more expensive p100 Tesla didn't have int8 support -- certainly not because they did it in software. There's no reason a GeForce card for gaming needs high fp64 support. The reason you're seeing it on the Titan v is because it's literally the same asic, but now you're also paying a premium and it's not made for gamers.
- Scaevolus 9y agoI'm referring to the GTX 1080 running FP16 at 1/64th the rate of FP32: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-... "GeForce GTX 1080, on the other hand, is not faster at FP16. In fact it’s downright slow. For their consumer cards, NVIDIA has severely limited FP16 CUDA performance. GTX 1080’s FP16 instruction rate is 1/128th its FP32 instruction rate, or after you factor in vec2 packing, the resulting theoretical performance (in FLOPs) is 1/64th the FP32 rate, or about 138 GFLOPs."
- sremani 9y ago>> No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. I thought they were trying to mitigate the diversion of gaming gpus towards mining, apparently not.
- make3 9y agoit's for deep learning
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- andars 9y agoAnyone else bothered by the 2009 in the url? Edit: Some driver download pages currently link to this page.
- ixtli 9y agoWhile these EULAs are head bangingly dumb, generally untested, (and sometimes totally unenforcable) i just wanted to say that i think that's just a CMS artifact. Can confirm that this is still linked as the "software license agreement" throughout the site for current driver downloads
- kovariance 9y agoThis is why open source drivers are important.
- acd 9y agoSo it will be profitable for a third party company to develop a GeForce driver. This will also not be enforceable in all countries. It is probably not enforceable at sea where maritime law rules.
- hamilyon2 9y agoDeep learning ship!
- mtanski 9y agofirmware needed by modern nvidia cards is cryptographically signed
- cube00 9y agoThe keys will leak eventually.
- raphaelj 9y agoCouldn't Nvidia add the same clause to their product's license (instead of the driver's one) and thus having it enforceable even if you use some 3rd party drivers?
- slrz 9y agoWhat product license? As the producer of some physical item, you don't get a say in what I can do with it after I bought it. Especially not if I never did any deal with you in the first place, but bought the thing through a long distribution chain of middlemen. It's only with software that people consider it acceptable for the vendor to tell you what you can and can't do.
- electic 9y agoThis is a great time to remind everyone that AMD does not have this restriction for their Radeon graphics cards. Also, AMD has always been very supportive of the community and they've always respected their customers. After decades of being the principled underdog, hopefully everyone can rally around them and make sure their open source projects work well with AMD products and contribute to their new open source initiatives.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoThat would have been hard to write out and genuinely support a couple years ago, when NVidia ruled the top-of the line as well as the best value-for-money most of the way down the chain. It was a hefty hit to your framerate or your wallet to support AMD. But these days AMD is a serious contender at all levels! If the performance or value isn't actually in AMD's favor, it's near enough to be undetectable outside of a benchmark, and very easy to support the good guys.
- chrisseaton 9y ago> very easy to support the good guys But AMD doesn’t run CUDA? Is it very easy to switch a stack relying on CUDA to OpenCL? I don’t think so.
- zdw 9y agoAMD's ROCm suite has a tool for converting CUDA to C++ code: https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP How well it works is likely codebase and application dependent.
- frozenport 9y agoHere was my experience. Everything in ocl ended up slower, with 30%+ longer (walltimes) on nvidia hardware. Also some problems with floating point precision. Real problem was there was no business case to switch because we could always make customers eat the cost of taking nvidia gpus. The added code complexity was not worth it - we originally did it as NRE for a big client who wanted OEM capabilities to our IP.
- otakucode 9y agoIs this even at all legal? Wouldn't the First Sale Doctrine and the extremely, extremely limited rights to use software that courts have defended (the implied license to use software necessary for a purchased device HAS been defended in court) protect the purchaser? I really don't think nVidia would be able to go after anyone legally for deploying the software in a datacenter. Companies can put whatever they want in software licenses and most of it is totally unenforceable bunk that just hasn't been tested in court. And if it comes to it, they will normally drop the case or do whatever they can to avoid it ever being tested.
- sandworm101 9y agoNot first sale as this isnt the sale of a copy. This is a contract.
- fleitz 9y agoA better question is whether it’s enforcable. If you put a GPU into a DC rig, how are they going to know / sue you?
- fencepost 9y agoThis may be a case of "you can put the cards wherever you want, but you can't use our drivers (and associated card firmware) in datacenters."
- jsonmez 9y agoJust laugh and do it anyway.
- tensor 9y agoThis is one way to help the competition immensely. The premium nvidia charges for their tesla cards just isn't worth it. It's not enough of a performance advantage to warrant the price increase, and reliability wise you can by 6-10 1080ti's for the cost of one p100.
- andars 9y agoSo, my summary: Unsourced Japanese news outlet published an article claiming this clause was added to the EULA. (Edit: located here: https://wirelesswire.jp/2017/12/62708/ https://wirelesswire.jp/2017/12/62708/ ) This version of the EULA, located at: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licence.php?lang=us&type=GeForce http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen..., has the no-data center clause. Note the "2009". The version linked from the actual driver download page (at https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license ), has no such clause. I think I'll postpone my outrage until the clause appears on the EULA that I actually have to agree to when I download GeForce drivers. Alright, edit: For me, downloading drivers through https://www.geforce.com/drivers https://www.geforce.com/drivers gets me the second EULA that I linked to. However, downloading drivers through http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us gets me a EULA with this data center "limitation". This seems to me to be pretty problematic and an ineffective update.
- anniely 9y agoThe "2009" license is the correct license. If you try to download a GeForce driver from NVIDIA's website today, that is the license that you must accept before in order to download the driver. On Windows, it's also the license you must accept during installation time before you can use the driver, even if you did not accept it during your download. Interestingly, the license inside the Linux package does not include the data centre clause at this point in time. https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license/geforce https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license/geforce http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licence.php?lang=us&type=GeForce http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen...
- andars 9y agoI went to https://www.geforce.com/drivers https://www.geforce.com/drivers and searched for 1060 on Linux. Then clicked through to https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/126577 https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/126577. This page has the standard "*By clicking the "Agree & Download" button, you are confirming that you have read and agree to be bound by the License For Customer Use of NVIDIA Software..." That sentence links to the EULA that I linked to. EDIT: Alright, it matters which site you download the driver from. See the edit to my original comment.
- jimrandomh 9y agoWas this actually an executive-level decision? The announcement of this change (if you can call it that) was so bungled it creates the impression some low-level person in legal did this without coordinating with the rest of nVidia.
- decentrality 9y ago"Datacenter" undefined.
- ixtli 9y agoWhat is a "datacenter"? I try to come to these things with an open mind but EULAs are really the dregs of legal writing :/
- gsich 9y agoIf you label your place "datacenter".
- tzahola 9y agoThen I’ll just call mine “data processing farm”.
- marcoperaza 9y agoThat’s not how contract interpretation works. The vast majority of things are clearly datacenters or clearly not datacenters. Assuming the contract is enforceable for other reasons, if you use it in something that is clearly understood to be a datacenter, you would be in breach. Do you really think a judge would be swayed by your little word game?
- gsich 9y agoI doubt it would come to trial.
- marcoperaza 9y agoMy point is that you’re mistaken in saying above that something is a datacenter only if you call it such. Words must have meanings if we are to have agreements. Whether this particularly contract will result in a court case is beside the point. And I wouldn’t be so sure it wouldn’t. Nvidia’s lawyers might have something to say if you start a business reselling GPU time for ML tasks and run it off thousands of GeForce cards with these drivers. And if they don’t get what they want, they would have good reason to go to court to defend their market segmentation strategy.
- rocky1138 9y agoObligatory Linus Torvalds response, re: NVIDIA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
- ixtli 9y agoLinus tried to warn us! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g
- visarga 9y agoThat "NVIDIA, fuck you!" from Linus comes in expensive now that NVIDIA cares about Linux. They were jerks with Linux before deep learning became famous, and that's why Linus was so French about them.
- snvzz 9y agoNothing's changed, still jerks. No hardware docs, no cooperation with the open drivers beyond ensuring distribution install media do work (i.e. basic modesetting).
- AnssiH 9y agoThere are docs for some things, including beyond basic modesetting: http://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ http://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ They at least used to be responsive to questions a couple of years back when they started publishing the docs, but I'm not up-to-date on the present situation.
- puzzle 9y agoBetween this and the high Tesla prices, they really want to move people to use Google's TPUs...
- popcorncolonel 9y agoQuick question: Why? What does NVIDIA have to gain by forbidding people from using GeForce for ML in datacenters?
- cma 9y agoPrice discrimination. Because they aren't getting effective competition from AMD right now they can sell to multiple tiers of customer for different prices. AMD is competitive in crypto, so they exempted crypto from the ban.
- dragontamer 9y agoThe Titan V is $3000 (GeForce) The Tesla V100 is $17,000: http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?2782569_g10e http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?2782569_g10e We're talking the difference of ~5.5x the price here for otherwise similar cards.
- andars 9y agoBut you can already not buy a datacenter's worth of GeForce; they have limitations on the quantity per customer. That seems like a far more effective measure than this clause.
- kuschku 9y agoAnd yet, many datacenters run hundreds or thousands of GeForce cards. Hetzner, for example, rents out an i7-6700, GTX 1080, 64GBRAM for 117€/month
- balls187 9y agoIf I understand the underlying issue here, it's that Nvidia presumably doesn't want it's consumer graphics cards used in Datacenters, and instead wants to sell more expensive cards. Isn't this similar to how movie studios used to require Video Rental Stores pay more money for a film, vs the retail cost?
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoNowhere in the document does it define "datacenter," very nebulous term. Perhaps too nebulous to enforce. I have 2 racks in my basement, if I had an NVIDIA GPU in one of my servers for playing games, am I violating their EULA?
- marcoperaza 9y agoThe law is not so obtuse. If otherwise enforceable, the inability to draw an exact line where something starts being a datacenter will not void a contract. The vast majority of things are on either side of that line.
- MichaelBurge 9y agoI think the card itself takes more power and wears out faster compared to the data center versions. Is this true in practice?
- binaryzeitgeist 9y ago[Merry Xmas Nvidia! - Torvalds](https://4bds6hergc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Linus-Torvalds-Fuck-You-Nvidia.jpg https://4bds6hergc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...)
- binaryzeitgeist 9y agoWhat surprised me in the first place is why Tensorflow an "OpenSource" initiative by Google chose proprietary CUDA over "OpenSource" OpenCL. Check Tensorflow issue 22 for more info. Just sayin.
- solomatov 9y agoCUDA is superior to OpenCL. Also NVIDIA provides CuDNN, a proprietary library with very efficient implementation of deep learning primitives. If you want to train models faster, you have to use them.
- solomatov 9y agoThat's a great example of why we need open source hardware. 10-20 years ago this was a norm in software field. Now, you can license world class products with complete source for free.
- jangid 9y ago“No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.”
- KenoFischer 9y agoSomebody should write an adapter that hooks into their GPL shim and forwards requests over the network to a machine not in the data center that runs their binary blob. Trying to limit use of certain hardware via stupid legal means just begs for stupid technical solutions.
- O_H_E 9y agoDid you mean 'GPU' instead of 'GPL'
- KenoFischer 9y agoNo, since the linux kernel is GPL, as far as I understand, their must be some part of their driver that is also available in source form to interact with the kernel API. I haven't investigated this at all, but it feels like it may be possible to hook that. It's a terrible amount of work of course, but would be kinda fun to try. Perhaps an easier thing to try would be to run something like QEMU and have it forward activity on the PCIe bus over the network to a host system. Not sure if that's something people have done before.
- blt 9y agoIs there some legal reason why AMD can't implement a CUDA compiler for their architecture? Seems like the obvious move right now.
- kuschku 9y agoAMD has a CUDA compiler. It requires two-step compilation, though. First into GPU-neutral code, and from there you can use AMDs actual compiler.
- sqreept 9y agoHow does NVIDIA define a datacenter exactly?
- anon1253 9y agoEeh I have quite a few of these in data centers for Deep Learning work. What am I supposed to do now. Swap them out for Tesla/Quadro cards? Switch to AMD or Xeon Phi? Or just ignore it and possibly violate ToS. Nice move Nvidia ...
- O_H_E 9y agohttps://4bds6hergc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Linus-Torvalds-Fuck-You-Nvidia.jpg https://4bds6hergc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...
- kuschku 9y agoFirst step is to disable automated driver updates. The drivers you have installed currently were without this ToS change. This gives you a while to continue using the cards, without violating the ToS. For all new servers you set up, you will have to look at other solutions, though.
- jamesblonde 9y agoIf you want to know what Nvidia are afraid of, look at the last figure in this O'Reilly blog on distributed tensorflow. https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/distributed-tensorflow https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/distributed-tensorflow On a DeepLearning11 server (cost $15K), you get about 60-75% DL training performance compared to a DGX-1 (cost $150k)
- O_H_E 9y agoDoes that blockchain clause target miners? Aren't they called Mining Farms, not Data Centers?
- jacquesm 9y agoThey're nuts and I'd love to see them try to enforce this. Coming soon to a DC near you: The Nvidia inspectors, picking locks on cages and racks looking for humping.
- k3a 9y agoAnd THAT'S WHY it's good for corporations to have closed non-libre drivers :) They can make an easy buck by selling 'more expensive' licenses. You are the buyer, you decided for a closed solution, so pay more for it!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 9y agoI think this is designed to deal with the low prices offered by ovh and heizner. And in favor of Google and Amazon.