8 ms·

Nvidia drivers on Linux are trash

95 points by ddtaylor 8y ago

sidlls 8y ago
I sometimes think Nvidia goes out of its way to screw with Linux users. Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. They just have crap support for a market that realistically they don't even need to support. Except for their GPU drivers for machine learning: that's a fairly hot market right now.
- currymj 8y ago
  I mean, technically, they are a manufacturer of Linux boxes (the DGX Station has Ubuntu preinstalled), so intuitively one might expect they would offer good Linux support.
- notatcomputer68 8y ago
  > Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. CUDA
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    I'm curious to know what the bifurcation is between the pieces of the driver used for Cuda, and the pieces used for gaming. I think most people running Cuda are running it on Linux, and I've never had a problem with it. So I'm wondering if all these issues are really targeted at gamers only?
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Yes, but the types of bugs/issues that plague actual graphics don't necessarily apply to CUDA.
- mishurov 8y ago
  They don't have dedicated drivers for machine learning, the driver is the same for graphics and gpgpu. CuDNN and Tensor RT run on top of the drivers. Lots of DNN frameworks use CuDNN as a base for GPU training. Corporate clients use the hardware for clouds. I doubt that any sane person would run a cloud using Windows Server or Mac OS X Server.
huntie 8y ago
I was hoping this would have a big picture of Linus giving Nvidia the finger. An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.
- thinkingemote 8y ago
  Giving corporate bodies the finger is a violation of the Code of Conduct. Contributors should respect developers from corporations and not abuse them
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder. This makes no sense, do you understand the actual cause enough to explain it?
  - nAwYz 8y ago
    I had the same problem, it has something to do with Plymouth, if you use the classic console boot it works
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Oh, so you can still boot, they just don't support (or have broken support for) DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB. But what does that have to do with encrypted root? Just plymouth not being available for the LUKS passphrase entry? I'd expect you to be able to get around that fairly trivially by disabling plymouth, LUKS works without it in any initrd I've encountered.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        That effectively is breaking the boot process. Of course, you may be able to tinker with it in order to make things work again, but you have to do that.
anontechworker 8y ago
I’m not justifying their lack of efforts for Linux users but I can understand why they limit their resources towards creating better drivers. According to Wikipedia(1), the amount of Linux usage worldwide is barely even a blip compared to windows + macOS. From a business standpoint, it’s hard to see the benefits of correcting these issues. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...
- setr 8y ago
  Ofc, thats a self-fulfilling prophecy: nvidia should never see high usage in linux if they’re not spending money there, except by accident (ie a cheap, good card also happens to be cracked open enough for good open source drivers to be written, or something like bitcoin crops up again, and linux/nvidia is necessary enough that people use it despite the shoddy drivers). But it always has to be because the lack of interest by nvidia was overcome
- Keyframe 8y ago
  What I don't understand is how come driver for their cards works just fine on Windows AND MacOS then? Maybe it isn't Nvidia at fault alone here? TBH, I only had problems installing their drivers on Linux, but once they were up and running all was/is good... Except Wayland. But, wayland's gonna way no matter what, so no Wayland for me.
  - setr 8y ago
    Doesn't apple handle the creation of most of the MacOS drivers itself? I'd assume its the case for graphics cards as well. Windows ofc is windows, it justifies itself
    - Keyframe 8y ago
      Nvidia provides their own drivers on their site for MacOS - you need those for newer cards.
- lasagnaphil 8y ago
drewg123 8y ago
Honestly, I've had fewer problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware. Both of my wife's desktops (home and office) started locking up randomly with a kernel oops due to the nouveau driver after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. I realized that she had this bug, but in Ubuntu 18.04: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178. No problems since switching to the proprietary drivers. I use FreeBSD, and also run the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
- this_user 8y ago
  Same here. I have also had fewer problems than with both the old proprietary or open source AMD drivers (never tested the new AMDGPU one). This went to far that I had to sell an AMD card to buy an Nvidia one, because features would not work the way there were supposed to. Eventually, I decided to stop buying AMD cards altogether. In contrast to that, the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been a godsend: Features just work, including complex multihead configurations. So, they may not be perfect, but, for the most part, they actually work.
- sevensor 8y ago
  I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD. Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.
  - drewg123 8y ago
    The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels. I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them. Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.
danaos 8y ago
Curious to know how does that compare to AMD drivers?
- aurelian15 8y ago
  AMD actively contributes driver code to the mainline kernel. So with recent Linux kernels, AMD graphics cards and APUs based on the GCN architecture (launched about 2011/2012 if I recall correctly) work out of the box with full 3D acceleration, just like integrated Intel graphics. There was a time a few years ago when the mainline kernel driver was significantly worse performance-wise (mainly due to missing power management), but this should no longer be the case. There still exists a proprietary AMD driver, but this driver is going to be phased out and only required for "Pro" features. See this AMD slide deck for more information: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/attachments/slides/2251/export/events/attachments/amd_graphics/slides/2251/fosdem2018_amdstack.pdf https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/...
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    And the unlucky owners of pre GCN cards, like the Brazos APUs just get a driver that kind of works, with less features than the fxglr one.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  Would AMD's drivers being bad justify Nvidia making bad drivers too? How is Intel able to make great drivers and fund the development of Mesa?
bscphil 8y ago
The Nvidia drivers are infamous, to be sure, and Linus and others have spent a good bit of time ranting about how terrible Nvidia is. But I don't think the existence of a bunch of support requests are much evidence of anything either way. It's pretty easy to find similar problems with AMD drivers, for example. https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  I am pretty active on the Ask Ubuntu stack exchange and to be frank I see many more Nvidia related posts. Also consider that sometimes the request isn't even about Nvidia at all, but then we determine that the Nvidia drivers are causing the problem. A good example would be strange compositing glitches and bugs with KDE or other compositors.
trulyrandom 8y ago
Nouveau, on the other hand, works just fine! Don't expect to run any games on it, but if you're like me and you're stuck with an Nvidia card on the desktop, nouveau will suffice. Even modern stuff like wayland works well with this driver.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Caveat: NVIDIA waits a long time to release firmware blobs that they can use, and may never release some.
eggsome 8y ago
Just purchased a ThinkPad E585 with Ryzen 2700U because the nVidia card in my ancient laptop is no longer supported. Worked fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and then one day I do an "apt-get update" and hit this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-304/+bug/1737750 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr... Yes, I should not expect indefinite support for old hardware, but this would not have been a problem if the drivers were open source (hence my move to AMD).
hamandcheese 8y ago
From someone quite removed from low level development: How much effort is it to develop these drivers? I.e what’s the breakdown for resources allocated toward hardware vs people allocated for driver dev.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  For some time their Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) was touted as the solution: https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html Its been around since at 1999.
htfy96 8y ago
The same crappy driver applies to AMD on Linux too. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261 is open for nearly three months and nothing has been done.
_em6m 8y ago
Try AMD just for the lulz
starsinspace 8y ago
Given all the frequent complaints, would Linux users prefer if nvidia just pulled the plug and stopped offering their driver altogether? Maybe some other long-term Linux users will remember how the situation was with accelerated graphics on Linux before the binary nvidia driver existed... (and personally, it never gave me trouble, but maybe that's just me.) Here's a different idea: if Linux had stable ABIs for drivers, across kernel versions and distributions, creating a good driver would certainly be easier for third parties.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  Intel is able to make it work really well. AMD went through a bad time but is now in the Kernel and getting much better. Nvidia seems to be the odd-man-out here.
- mishurov 8y ago
  The OP and some geezers here don't represent the whole Linux community, I'm happy with nVidia drivers and their maintenance in the Debian packaging infrastructure. If some people are unable to turn their cognitive activity on for some simple reasoning and reading docs and wikis, there's no point in using Linux. Mac OS and Windows should be their tools of choice: those are excellent at spoon-feeding.
sdinsn 8y ago
Are AMD's any better?
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  I think the golden standard here are Intel's graphics drivers.
- majewsky 8y ago
  The new amdgpu driver (which has been in mainline Linux for a few years now) works really well for me, on X11 and on Wayland, for all applications that I tried with it (for games, that includes Cities Skylines, Civ 5, various other games based on Source and Unity). AFAIK it works with all GCN models, so basically all graphics cards manufactured by AMD after ca. 2012/2013.
TheChaplain 8y ago
I will go against the grain and say that I never had any issues with nVidia drivers ever since I got my first GeForce card more than 10 years ago. For the first years I manually installed it on Fedora Core, until finally the ak-version were stable enough. Once I switched to Ubuntu, the proprietary drivers always worked without a flaw. I don't think they read HN but a shout-out to Zander and AaronP, I've spent many hours OpenGL programming and playing games on Linux throughout the years thanks to their work.
kjullien 8y ago
From experience, everything works fine until you have two GPUs on Linux. If your processor has an integrated graphics chip, as do about 95% of any laptop that came out less than say 5 years ago, then you are basically stuck to either using one or the other. You have many ways of switching and configuring this, that are tediously hard to configure obviously or this wouldn't be Linux UX... And even then you often get stupid problems for seemingly no reason, say you have one of the two GPUs disabled on boot, then your computer won't boot. You need to do it after the kernel booting... Add to that the fact that any Linux machine will run about 5 to 10 degrees hotter than the same machine on Windows or MacOs and you got yourself the current state of affairs regarding Linux and GPUs. My stance is that Linux cannot be used as a daily driver for personal or work on a consumer-grade machine (unless built specifically for it like the XPS Developer Edition or some ThinkPads). I've tried so hard to make it happen for more than 10 years and always end up switching back after about half a year. It's perfect for servers though.

95 points by ddtaylor 8y ago

I sometimes think Nvidia goes out of its way to screw with Linux users. Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. They just have crap support for a market that realistically they don't even need to support. Except for their GPU drivers for machine learning: that's a fairly hot market right now.

currymj 8y ago
I mean, technically, they are a manufacturer of Linux boxes (the DGX Station has Ubuntu preinstalled), so intuitively one might expect they would offer good Linux support.
notatcomputer68 8y ago
> Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. CUDA
- shaklee3 8y ago
  I'm curious to know what the bifurcation is between the pieces of the driver used for Cuda, and the pieces used for gaming. I think most people running Cuda are running it on Linux, and I've never had a problem with it. So I'm wondering if all these issues are really targeted at gamers only?
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Yes, but the types of bugs/issues that plague actual graphics don't necessarily apply to CUDA.
mishurov 8y ago
They don't have dedicated drivers for machine learning, the driver is the same for graphics and gpgpu. CuDNN and Tensor RT run on top of the drivers. Lots of DNN frameworks use CuDNN as a base for GPU training. Corporate clients use the hardware for clouds. I doubt that any sane person would run a cloud using Windows Server or Mac OS X Server.

huntie 8y ago

I was hoping this would have a big picture of Linus giving Nvidia the finger. An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.

thinkingemote 8y ago
Giving corporate bodies the finger is a violation of the Code of Conduct. Contributors should respect developers from corporations and not abuse them
newnewpdro 8y ago
> An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder. This makes no sense, do you understand the actual cause enough to explain it?
- nAwYz 8y ago
  I had the same problem, it has something to do with Plymouth, if you use the classic console boot it works
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Oh, so you can still boot, they just don't support (or have broken support for) DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB. But what does that have to do with encrypted root? Just plymouth not being available for the LUKS passphrase entry? I'd expect you to be able to get around that fairly trivially by disabling plymouth, LUKS works without it in any initrd I've encountered.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      That effectively is breaking the boot process. Of course, you may be able to tinker with it in order to make things work again, but you have to do that.

anontechworker 8y ago

I’m not justifying their lack of efforts for Linux users but I can understand why they limit their resources towards creating better drivers. According to Wikipedia(1), the amount of Linux usage worldwide is barely even a blip compared to windows + macOS. From a business standpoint, it’s hard to see the benefits of correcting these issues. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

setr 8y ago
Ofc, thats a self-fulfilling prophecy: nvidia should never see high usage in linux if they’re not spending money there, except by accident (ie a cheap, good card also happens to be cracked open enough for good open source drivers to be written, or something like bitcoin crops up again, and linux/nvidia is necessary enough that people use it despite the shoddy drivers). But it always has to be because the lack of interest by nvidia was overcome
Keyframe 8y ago
What I don't understand is how come driver for their cards works just fine on Windows AND MacOS then? Maybe it isn't Nvidia at fault alone here? TBH, I only had problems installing their drivers on Linux, but once they were up and running all was/is good... Except Wayland. But, wayland's gonna way no matter what, so no Wayland for me.
- setr 8y ago
  Doesn't apple handle the creation of most of the MacOS drivers itself? I'd assume its the case for graphics cards as well. Windows ofc is windows, it justifies itself
  - Keyframe 8y ago
    Nvidia provides their own drivers on their site for MacOS - you need those for newer cards.
lasagnaphil 8y ago

drewg123 8y ago

Honestly, I've had fewer problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware. Both of my wife's desktops (home and office) started locking up randomly with a kernel oops due to the nouveau driver after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. I realized that she had this bug, but in Ubuntu 18.04: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178. No problems since switching to the proprietary drivers. I use FreeBSD, and also run the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

this_user 8y ago
Same here. I have also had fewer problems than with both the old proprietary or open source AMD drivers (never tested the new AMDGPU one). This went to far that I had to sell an AMD card to buy an Nvidia one, because features would not work the way there were supposed to. Eventually, I decided to stop buying AMD cards altogether. In contrast to that, the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been a godsend: Features just work, including complex multihead configurations. So, they may not be perfect, but, for the most part, they actually work.
sevensor 8y ago
I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD. Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.
- drewg123 8y ago
  The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels. I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them. Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.

danaos 8y ago

Curious to know how does that compare to AMD drivers?

aurelian15 8y ago
AMD actively contributes driver code to the mainline kernel. So with recent Linux kernels, AMD graphics cards and APUs based on the GCN architecture (launched about 2011/2012 if I recall correctly) work out of the box with full 3D acceleration, just like integrated Intel graphics. There was a time a few years ago when the mainline kernel driver was significantly worse performance-wise (mainly due to missing power management), but this should no longer be the case. There still exists a proprietary AMD driver, but this driver is going to be phased out and only required for "Pro" features. See this AMD slide deck for more information: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/attachments/slides/2251/export/events/attachments/amd_graphics/slides/2251/fosdem2018_amdstack.pdf https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/...
- pjmlp 8y ago
  And the unlucky owners of pre GCN cards, like the Brazos APUs just get a driver that kind of works, with less features than the fxglr one.
ddtaylor 8y ago
Would AMD's drivers being bad justify Nvidia making bad drivers too? How is Intel able to make great drivers and fund the development of Mesa?

bscphil 8y ago

The Nvidia drivers are infamous, to be sure, and Linus and others have spent a good bit of time ranting about how terrible Nvidia is. But I don't think the existence of a bunch of support requests are much evidence of anything either way. It's pretty easy to find similar problems with AMD drivers, for example. https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu

ddtaylor 8y ago
I am pretty active on the Ask Ubuntu stack exchange and to be frank I see many more Nvidia related posts. Also consider that sometimes the request isn't even about Nvidia at all, but then we determine that the Nvidia drivers are causing the problem. A good example would be strange compositing glitches and bugs with KDE or other compositors.

trulyrandom 8y ago

Nouveau, on the other hand, works just fine! Don't expect to run any games on it, but if you're like me and you're stuck with an Nvidia card on the desktop, nouveau will suffice. Even modern stuff like wayland works well with this driver.

microcolonel 8y ago
Caveat: NVIDIA waits a long time to release firmware blobs that they can use, and may never release some.

eggsome 8y ago

Just purchased a ThinkPad E585 with Ryzen 2700U because the nVidia card in my ancient laptop is no longer supported. Worked fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and then one day I do an "apt-get update" and hit this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-304/+bug/1737750 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr... Yes, I should not expect indefinite support for old hardware, but this would not have been a problem if the drivers were open source (hence my move to AMD).

hamandcheese 8y ago

From someone quite removed from low level development: How much effort is it to develop these drivers? I.e what’s the breakdown for resources allocated toward hardware vs people allocated for driver dev.

ddtaylor 8y ago
For some time their Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) was touted as the solution: https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html Its been around since at 1999.

htfy96 8y ago

The same crappy driver applies to AMD on Linux too. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261 is open for nearly three months and nothing has been done.

_em6m 8y ago

Try AMD just for the lulz

starsinspace 8y ago

Given all the frequent complaints, would Linux users prefer if nvidia just pulled the plug and stopped offering their driver altogether? Maybe some other long-term Linux users will remember how the situation was with accelerated graphics on Linux before the binary nvidia driver existed... (and personally, it never gave me trouble, but maybe that's just me.) Here's a different idea: if Linux had stable ABIs for drivers, across kernel versions and distributions, creating a good driver would certainly be easier for third parties.

ddtaylor 8y ago
Intel is able to make it work really well. AMD went through a bad time but is now in the Kernel and getting much better. Nvidia seems to be the odd-man-out here.
mishurov 8y ago
The OP and some geezers here don't represent the whole Linux community, I'm happy with nVidia drivers and their maintenance in the Debian packaging infrastructure. If some people are unable to turn their cognitive activity on for some simple reasoning and reading docs and wikis, there's no point in using Linux. Mac OS and Windows should be their tools of choice: those are excellent at spoon-feeding.

sdinsn 8y ago

Are AMD's any better?

ddtaylor 8y ago
I think the golden standard here are Intel's graphics drivers.
majewsky 8y ago
The new amdgpu driver (which has been in mainline Linux for a few years now) works really well for me, on X11 and on Wayland, for all applications that I tried with it (for games, that includes Cities Skylines, Civ 5, various other games based on Source and Unity). AFAIK it works with all GCN models, so basically all graphics cards manufactured by AMD after ca. 2012/2013.

TheChaplain 8y ago

I will go against the grain and say that I never had any issues with nVidia drivers ever since I got my first GeForce card more than 10 years ago. For the first years I manually installed it on Fedora Core, until finally the ak-version were stable enough. Once I switched to Ubuntu, the proprietary drivers always worked without a flaw. I don't think they read HN but a shout-out to Zander and AaronP, I've spent many hours OpenGL programming and playing games on Linux throughout the years thanks to their work.

kjullien 8y ago

From experience, everything works fine until you have two GPUs on Linux. If your processor has an integrated graphics chip, as do about 95% of any laptop that came out less than say 5 years ago, then you are basically stuck to either using one or the other. You have many ways of switching and configuring this, that are tediously hard to configure obviously or this wouldn't be Linux UX... And even then you often get stupid problems for seemingly no reason, say you have one of the two GPUs disabled on boot, then your computer won't boot. You need to do it after the kernel booting... Add to that the fact that any Linux machine will run about 5 to 10 degrees hotter than the same machine on Windows or MacOs and you got yourself the current state of affairs regarding Linux and GPUs. My stance is that Linux cannot be used as a daily driver for personal or work on a consumer-grade machine (unless built specifically for it like the XPS Developer Edition or some ThinkPads). I've tried so hard to make it happen for more than 10 years and always end up switching back after about half a year. It's perfect for servers though.