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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

321 points by trulyrandom 8y ago

audio1001 8y ago
What is nouveau
- switch007 8y ago
  “Accelerated Open Source driver for nVidia cards” https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- dclusin 8y ago
  Open source driver for nvidia graphics cards it looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nolok 8y ago
For anyone interested, the link really should be the full bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 The current link says it as if Chrome was not being fair, but reading their reasoning it makes total sense. Key quote from said bug report: > We thought about blacklisting nouveau driver long time ago, and decided to let more adventurous users to play around. Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. > We received quite some bug reports on other rendering issues with Nouveau, and this bug is just one of them. So we will disable all GPU acceleration by default. If someone wants to bypass that, there are two options: 1) install proprietary NVidia drivers (see #24) 2) run Chrome with --ignore-gpu-blacklist, but be aware you are taking a risk here > Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux, let alone investigate & fix bugs in drivers. We want a stable & secure browser first, a GPU-accelerated one second, only if possible. > The default driver on Ubuntu LTS has severe issues, asking non-technical users to update their driver is just not acceptable as a prerequisite to use Chrome. > If someone is interested in well-scoping the brokenness (version range and/or devices affected), we're happy to take a patch to the blacklist. So the driver fails in some (common enough) cases, they let it run anyway but now it's default on ubuntu so a lot of non tech users are/will be affected, so they block it but you can still bypass the block if you want. And if newer version fix it and someone can help them figure out which versions work for what, they are willing to limit the blocking.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  >Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. I don't get this. All linux distros under the sun ship with nouveau, and always have. It is a kernel driver afterall. What else are they going to ship ?
  - amyjess 8y ago
    The VESA driver?
    - geofft 8y ago
      How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card. Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.
        ajross 8y ago
        I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.
        geofft 8y ago
        But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.
bubblethink 8y ago
This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?
- cheald 8y ago
  The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    Yes, but does chromium play nice for acceleration ?
    - cheald 8y ago
      Seems to be. From about:gpu: Graphics Feature Status Canvas: Hardware accelerated Flash: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated Compositing: Hardware accelerated Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled Skia Renderer: Disabled Surface Control: Disabled Surface Synchronization: Enabled Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Viz Service Display Compositor: Disabled WebGL: Hardware accelerated WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
    - andrewcchen 8y ago
      For rendering yes. For video decoding no. Chromium needs a patch to use VA-API[1]. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...
  - moonbug 8y ago
    Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.
abrowne 8y ago
Doesn't hardware accelerated graphics on Firefox on Linux require modifying a preference? AFAIK you need to go to about:config and enable layers.acceleration.force-enabled. (This is speaking as someone who uses Firefox on Linux as my main browser.) The bug for enabling hardware rendering by default on some systems appears to still be open: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876
- shmerl 8y ago
  Yes, Firefox is stuck with blacklisting basically everything. I guess developers didn't revisit drivers situation in the recent times. Just set these in your $HOME/.profile export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1
  - jammygit 8y ago
    Thanks! Edit - will that work for the snap version BTW?
    - shmerl 8y ago
      You'd need to figure out how environment variables work in Snap and set them there, I haven't used it myself.
  - staktrace 8y ago
    Please don't encourage people to turn on WebRender without at least warning them that it is experimental, still under development, can cause your computer to blow up, etc. Also the environment variables you specified will force it on even on non-Nightly builds which is very undesirable since those builds are not getting fixes uplifted. (I work on WebRender for Firefox)
    - shmerl 8y ago
      I've been using WebRender on beta builds on Linux for several months already - it works quite well (AMD / radeonsi). WebRender is more raw indeed, but regular layers acceleration should surely be re-evaluated instead sweeping blacklisting like it happens now.
fhrow4484 8y ago
Will this make Firefox the best browser on Linux by default then? Also, as mentionned in the bug thread, if nouveau is actually stable on Newer versions, similar to User Agents, the newer nouveau versions could change their name to bypass the blacklisting. No need to pretend to be NVIDIA, just something different that nouveau, like 'nuevo' or something.
- marcinzm 8y ago
  Per the comment from abrowne Firefox does not do hardware acceleration by default on Linux for any hardware. So same as Chrome for Nouveau but Chrome does support acceleration for other drivers out of the box. It seems slightly easier to enable it for Firefox but both browsers provide a way to enable acceleration if you want to take the risk.
- geofft 8y ago
  Can't they also use GL_VENDOR / GL_RENDERER and parse version numbers out of it?
  - marcinzm 8y ago
    Chromium said they'd do that if someone tested which Nouveau versions work fine and provided a test suite to use. Ilia Mirkin (in the link) said he tried to run their test suite but got errors on the latest Nouveau (possibly due to a browser issue). So as it stands now Chromium doesn't know which if any versions of Nouveau are stable.
bhaak 8y ago
Both projects seem to put the blame on the other project. IMO, there are at least two other factions that can be blamed equally well. First, nvidia for not providing OSS drivers and second, the user who runs an OS on hardware that can't be properly supported on this OS at the moment. For years I have the rule that I prefer hardware that has proper Linux support. Even going a bit further that I try not to buy hardware that doesn't have OSS drivers unless there really is no other option (nowadays, that means mostly smartphones).
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  > nvidia for not providing OSS drivers It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau. Phoronix link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Well, not quite. The charitable way to put it is that they are requiring signed firmware in hardware, in order to help stem fraud by 3rd party resellers (where some card model X is sold to naïve buyers as a more desirable model Y, with a hacked firmware to match) and project noveau is obviously impacted.
    - SXX 8y ago
      Problem is that Nvidia did much more than just signing firmware: * Separated firmware that needed for basic and fully functional driver and given Nouveau only bits they wanted. * Obfuscated and hidden firmware files within the driver binaries so they harder to extract. * Changed loading process so GPU read it via DMA to make reverse engineering of firmware loading harder. It's pretty clear that all of that was exclusively done to harm Nouveau.
  - 8y ago
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
From: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com> To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor the nouveau developers for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Google's budget. Instead of doing any of the right things, you chose to become a bad actor on Linux. Closing bug reports from nouveau users and directing them to the freedesktop bug tracker? Fine, you don't need to fix someone else's bugs. Blacklisting the driver? Not even remotely okay. I strongly condemn your decision and I expect it to be rolled back as soon as possible. -- Drew DeVault
- geofft 8y ago
  > It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions. I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string. The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text. >I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. >It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs This is also a very dumb anti-practice.
baby 8y ago
What is nouveau?
- drewg123 8y ago
  A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use this driver by default, since it is open source. There is an arguably superior driver supplied by Nvidia. It is faster, has better hardware support, and is arguably more stable (1). However, it ships as a closed source binary blob with a source-based shim layer to integrate it into the kernel. (1)My wife has 2 Linux desktops with Nvidia GPUS. She ran nouveau by default. However, on both machines, it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up, but I realized from the stack traces that were recorded that it was the GPU driver. I then switched the machines to the Nvidia driver, and they have been stable ever since. I personally always buy hardware from Nvidia, because they provide a binary driver for FreeBSD. They are one of the few companies in the non-server space to provide good packaged drivers for FreeBSD.
  - mxuribe 8y ago
    > ...it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up... Thank you! I think you might have just solved an issue for me that happens intermittently with my linux mint 18.3. At least we'll see once i dive into output of stack traces, etc.
emersion 8y ago
Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. On the other hand, Intel and AMD have high-quality drivers and are part of the open-source community.
- vfq 8y ago
  Nvidia is already helping the Nouveau maintainers by not suing them for all they are worth.
  - contravariant 8y ago
    Hey, I think you're being downvoted a bit harshly for your statement so I've decided to help you out by not suing you. Cheers.
- gnarbarian 8y ago
  Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period). Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    AMD GPU hardware is definitely competitive, they just aren't top of the line. At the mid range, they are very competitive, and that's what most people need anyway. My next GPU will be an AMD GPU, as soon as my GTX 960 stops being sufficient (and no Wayland is certainly an issue).
  - magic_quotes 8y ago
    > Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering. Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)
kakarot 8y ago
Meh, I typically use Chrome through a virtual machine with Spice which has broken OpenGL support, so I wasn't getting hardware acceleration anyway. I still get screen tearing in Firefox, for Christ's sake.
- alexdme 8y ago
  There is an easy fix for this: Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled: true in about:config. I believe this is because Firefox assumes it's the responsibility of the compositor you are running to properly vsync, but if you're not running a compositor you can turn on this option.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    Thank you for the tip. I still seem to get screen tearing with this option enabled, however.
openloop 8y ago
Doesn't seem like Nouveau wants to own up.
StreamBright 8y ago
#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?
- anfilt 8y ago
  lets see there is wayland. The peopitery drivers do not work with that. Moreover there are issues. Further, its not open source the nvidia drivers. Although, I dont understand why anyone would buy hardware from nividia and feel good about it
- Macha 8y ago
  1. Lacking support for old GPUs in a maintained driver. nvidia drivers approach for old gpu is "use an old driver" for cards as recent as the 6xx. 2. People like to run fully open source systems 3. Adding support for things like kms and wayland are really up to the whims of nVidia as to when it happens with the closed driver, while an open driver is more likely to do so (or at least can be forked to do so). In the past features like config-less X were also much later coming to nvidia drivers which made it harder for people to get started on Linux.
  - frabbit 8y ago
    Your point #2 is especially important: with all the commotion surrounding the various "management engines" (in effect a completely independent system with privileged access to the carefully secured main system) it is surely obvious that a powerful GPU running unverified code is a foolish thing. Point #3 is also really good. Who wants to wait around at the mercy of a corporation which has an active interest in NOT being transparent about "its" IP (as speculated elsewhere most of the GPUs probably infringe on some or other patent)? Anyone buying an nvidia card for Linux should know exactly what they are doing: funding an anti-Free Software company, deeply entrenched in the ethos of secrecy, patents and bullshit; saddling themselves with a white elephant which will suck hours of their precious time.
- willtim 8y ago
  We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.
angry_octet 8y ago
It's not the Chromium team's job to debug nouveau. Switching it to be the default for everything was obviously premature.
- yogthos 8y ago
  Yet I use Firefox with Nouveau just fine...
  - berkut 8y ago
    With hardware acceleration enabled?
    - yogthos 8y ago
      Yeah, I've seen it crap out now and then, but generally works.
  - plorkyeran 8y ago
    Firefox also disables GPU acceleration with it by default.
  - mkoryak 8y ago
    It works on my machine, ship it!
    - yogthos 8y ago
      Uh no, means that you can make it work and some people are willing to spend the time to do it right. You'd think that if Mozilla can afford to do this so could Google. The only way the problems in the drivers can get fixed is through usage, if Chrome flat out refuses to work with the driver then the issues can't be fixed. This also illustrates why it's important to have alternatives to Chrome for anybody who cares about open source.
      - angry_octet 8y ago
sevensor 8y ago
NVidia comes out of this looking very bad. It's not as if a GPU can't have good Linux support (see AMD, Intel), but theirs doesn't. Although I haven't spent my hard-earned money on their hardware since 2005, I have several machines at work that are burdened with it. Some lock up with Nouveau drivers, others crash with NVidia drivers. I can only conclude that the hardware is unstable.
- xvilka 8y ago
  Then it is good. The worse NVIDIA public image is - the better.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    The problem from my perspective is that a major GPU vendor seems to think it's appropriate to paper over hardware problems with proprietary drivers, and they get away with it. While their reputation ought to suffer for that, I'd rather see them mend their ways. I'd love to take NVidia off my blacklist.
larkeith 8y ago
> One idea is to flip GL_VENDOR to some random string if chromium is running. What? Don't do this - never do this. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Chromium's decision, it is their decision to make as the project maintainers; trying to trick the software with falsified data is overstepping your bounds, and both corrodes trust in your driver and leads to whitelists. I thought we had moved past the days of fake user-agents.
- zanny 8y ago
  The problem is that the Nouveau (and Ubuntu) devs have no way to overturn Googles decision in Chrome. Ubuntu can compile Chromium with a modified blacklist but Google distributes Chrome in a deb. You would need some special logic to catch the Chrome .desktop on install and add in the unblacklist flag.
  - bootloop 8y ago
    The user can decide on his own if he wants the application to run on an unsupported driver or not. The application decided by default not to offer support for it. Who should absolutely not decide for the user is the unsupported driver itself so I think the hierarchy is just fine as it is.
  - kps 8y ago
    They could add “--ignore-gpu-blacklist” to their .desktop entry for Chrome.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Ubuntu doesn't have a .desktop entry for Chrome. It comes with the deb. Desktop files are installed by the programs that use them, hence why I said you need to catch the Chrome install and modify the desktop file.
- belorn 8y ago
  What we have is two side accusing the other of overstepping their bounds. Chromium making decision about drivers which normally is the domain of the operative system, and the driver making decision of what kind of systems the browser will support. The more rational behavior is for chromium to let the operative system decide what software and drivers they want to use, and do what they want with bugs from operative systems that they don't want to support. Whitelists won't work since all that will happen then is that project will do what Internet explorer did, ie call it self "compatible" and use the GL_VENDOR string of that compatible driver.
richardwhiuk 8y ago
Isn't this the key quote: > I did run the WebGL CTS suite, but that resulted in some > hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent test, and some > browser-level weirdness after some tests where later tests all fail > (due to what I have to assume is a browser bug). Isn't it more likely that they are noveau bugs, and are part of the problem here?
- slacka 8y ago
  > hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent tes I reported this bug back in 2015 and they have made no progress on it. It seems Nouveau just doesn't have the resources or man power. I can't really blame Google here. You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic SysRq will reboot it) [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    > You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic SysRq will reboot it) Wait, this isn't just rendering bugs a la "some WebGL things will show green instead of red", it kills your system entirely? I thought the only effect this blacklisting had was making WebGL unavailable for everyone instead of buggy for a small minority. This just flipped my opinion. Related, this might also explain the strange bluescreen bug my girlfriend had with Windows 8 + Firefox on her laptop. She switched to Google Chrome a few years ago because every time she used Firefox, her laptop would bluescreen within a few hours (either while Firefox was still running, or at some point later). I didn't know bugs outside of the OS could still do that kind of thing (I thought they started squashing such bugs with Windows 95 and finished somewhere around Vista) and wrote the Firefox thing off as triggering some extremely obscure Windows OS-level issue. Maybe I should check if there is a driver blacklisted by Chrome, though it seems more likely Chrome just doesn't happen to trigger it (like all other software running on it, it really is only Firefox).
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      Driver crashes can easily take down a system. That's why driver quality matters so much. This is true on every OS. (Although, Windows 7+ has mechanisms to help recover from GPU driver crashes specifically, which usually work.) Also, Chrome can render WebGL on the CPU. It's slower but will still work.
techntoke 8y ago
This is another reason why we shouldn't let current web browsers decide the future of the web... which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware and horrid markup languages.
- canttestthis 8y ago
  > which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware and horrid markup languages Did you read the bug report?
  - techntoke 8y ago
    I didn't see anything about a black box, except that users had reported issues and they didn't feel that they could investigate them because there were to many variances in Linux distros.
    - canttestthis 8y ago
      There are screenshots of the issue in the report. They've also said that there is a pattern of Nouveau instability that you don't see in proprietary drivers. Its all in the bug report.
      - techntoke 8y ago
        The screenshot was from Ubuntu. I haven't experienced the issue on Arch at all.
microcolonel 8y ago
Buy an AMD or Intel GPU. They're cost-effective (or non-negotiably bundled, sometimes), they're well supported, and the vendors make a considerable effort to ensure that stable, compliant drivers are available on every major operating system, and that the free ones are no less stable nor any less compliant. AMD's performance is competitive dollar-for-dollar, and the top of their lineup is about 80% as good the absolute highest-tier competitor most of the time.
shmerl 8y ago
I'd say, if you care about using open source driver, you'd avoid Nvidia to begin with, and use AMD or Intel instead. Here is a very good post from one of the key Nouveau developers, about why you should do exactly that: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better?p=998316#post998316 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...
- craftyguy 8y ago
  And avoid chromium, because there are a number of dependencies under 'third-party' with no/unclear licensing (and thus are assumed to be non-free).
- alacombe 8y ago
  AMD cards for anything advanced are crap, they couldn't recogize one of my monitor (>2 monitor setup), and they're not playing fair with their AMF extension on Linux (works great on Windows though). Even on Windows, I cannot get the card to properly get my minitor resolutions (it's sitting beyond a multiplexer, though there no problem with nvidia).
  - shmerl 8y ago
    AMD cards work just fine. Not sure what kind of issues you are having with your dual monitor. May be you are using an ancient kernel? What's an AMF extension?
    - alacombe 8y ago
      Triple monitor on two physical screen, and no AMD cards do not work, in this case using the display port output and DVI->HDMI adapter, and yes, it works with a third physical monitor (not acceptable in my setup). Nvidia/nouveau are not showing these problems. AMF == Advanced Media Framework.
      - shmerl 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jchw 8y ago
>We can also just take this, as yet-another nail in the nouveau coffin. I don't understand the dramatics. Nouveau is great but being blacklisted on Chromium is not the biggest issue for it right now imo. A lot of Linux users (myself included) use Firefox anyways, and it's still a default in many operating systems. And you can of course override this. I would place lack of reclocking support much higher than this in terms of issues. And of course, the bugs that caused Chromium to decide to blacklist Nouveau in the first place are still going to affect other accelerated applications. I'm a big fan of Nouveau, it is what I use on my laptop when in Linux. At the very least, it performs more than adequate for running a compositing desktop environment, and for many common configurations I've had few issues booting things up, the few issues I have had generally solved by using a newer kernel. If we really want Nouveau to succeed though, the support needs to start coming from Nvidia. AMD and Intel both have in the past supported open source drivers to an extent and it really shows. Nvidia's contributions have been pretty piss poor, and unfortunately it seems they just don't care, which is sad. I guess I do understand the frustration, but given the fact that this is in response to Ubuntu shipping Nouveau as a default, I think Nouveau's death is a bit overstated.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Its weird to work on a project to support hardware when the manufacturer actively tries to thwart you with signed firmware. We need more efforts going into open hardware imho
pablo-massa 8y ago
Slightly unrelated but can anyone speculate on the reasons why Nvidia doesn't open source its drivers? I'm curious.
- doublepg23 8y ago
  My understanding is _a lot_ of stuff in Nvidia drivers isn't _technically_ owned by them. As in they license out A company to make Y thing with Z license. After 20+ years of legacy those weird licenses add up, and no-one feels comfortable with releasing the code. Whether or not that's true? Hard to say... For comparison AMD has been (since 2015) working hard to make nearly all parts of their drivers upstream in some fashion (amdgpu). While that's not a 1:1 comparison there (AMD has less capital than Nvidia) it shows it _is_ possible to free these drivers.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    When the question of "Why not just open source it?" comes up this is nearly always the answer.
  - altfredd 8y ago
    The real answer is that releasing source code means uncovering (some of) their cards. The company, that relies on selling identical hardware under vastly different prices, won't ever do that. Using game-specific speed-hacks to "fix" games, purposefully written to violate standards, is another issue. Especially, when those games were made with help of Nvidia engineers. Why give up such ability? I also suspect, that they make use of multiple patented technologies, both in hardware and software. When Java has been re-licensed to GPL, one of the most prominent pain points, that caused endless whining on part of OpenJDK users, happened to be it's font renderer. And we all know, that font smoothing is tricky business, and all font-smoothing tech in existence is patended by MS/Apple/Adobe. When you start replacing closed-source code with free replacement, those patented pieces tend to quickly come up — especially when open-source projects go to great length to work around patent issues instead of shoving them under the carpet.
superkuh 8y ago
Browsers should not need to have GPU acceleration anyway if they are just browsers. But instead, as is Chrome's/ium's style, it wants to be an OS instead of a browser. All other browsers are trying to follow suite but that still doesn't make it right. The more hardware functionality exposed the less secure a browser is.
peterwwillis 8y ago
(off-topic rant) As a Linux user for over 15 years, this is one of the main reasons I am replacing Linux on my next machine, probably with Windows (sigh). Maybe it's just me getting old, but I'm done screwing around with computers to get them to do what they are supposed to do. It's frustrating and embarrassing. It's not just that some drivers or hardware have obvious problems. It's virtually impossible to get a system where all of the components have vendor-supported open-source drivers, or, when they exist, that a distro supports them out of the box. Many components' drivers only officially support two operating systems. If they don't support your operating system (Linux), then when you have a problem, you're SOL. It's like buying a car that when the transmission blows, you need to hire a mechanical engineer to reverse-engineer it. Better start taking the bus to work, because this could take a while. Some laptops (about 9 product lines from 3 vendors) make official Linux distro releases available. So you're stuck with a small selection of machines and basically only one distro. Even if that is ok with you, the drivers still won't all be vendor-supported open-source. And on top of that, Linux may have wacky, constantly changing ways of handling the hardware, like hybrid GPU support, or low power mode for Intel wifi chips. Your machine will always be an awkward stepchild. A limited hardware selection isn't good. Laptops are hard to design. There are always design and procurement tradeoffs, and the less tradeoffs they make, the more expensive it gets. So to get a good experience on a good machine, you need to buy the most expensive one. At that point you might as well buy a Mac. Finally, there's actual user experience. I've used several distros and environments the past few years, and they all had pitiful user experiences on my laptops. CPU scaling on battery/AC doesn't work out of the box, most of my media keys don't work, hybrid GPU takes a computer science degree to get working properly (with the right combination of drivers and software), echoing the wrong value to a /sys/ entry that had no kernel documentation permanently fixed the cpu fan at top speed, and the latest vanilla kernels with an old kernel config simply won't boot. I know this isn't everyone's experience, but the only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  > The only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby. Not sure if this was just a typo and you meant "laptop", but I imagine most of the problems you're describing could be avoided on a self-built desktop, because you can choose all the hardware for compatibility. I haven't used Linux seriously in years, but this is how I'm able to make Hackintosh work without constant fiddling, which all logic dictates should be more difficult than Linux.
Ayyar 8y ago
As a Linux user, I am happy about this change because Nouveau is just not an acceptable driver. I hope that this puts pressure on both Nvidia and Ubuntu to have a better default.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Agreed. It's very easy to install the proprietary driver in Ubuntu and in my experience it Just Works™. Why not default to that? The vast majority of Ubuntu users aren't open source evangelists who'd choose to use an inferior driver purely for ideological reasons.
atemerev 8y ago
Nouveau is the joke. It _still_ doesn’t work with Pascal cards, which are 3 years old now. Not to mention newer Turing cards. It’s only good for some obsolete hardware more than two generations ago. The first thing I have to do before installing fresh Ubuntu or Fedora is looking up how to blacklist nouveau, as the system won’t even boot otherwise. It’s time to deprecate it for good everywhere.
- xvilka 8y ago
  No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.
  - atemerev 8y ago
    AMD has their own set of quirks, they are not open sourcing their main driver either. Nouveau was always a stopgap measure, to boot the system and make it somewhat usable until you install the official binary driver; so is amdgpu. Even if you are open source enthusiast who wants nothing but FOSS on your system (and this is a very minor use case), these drivers do no better than your integrated Intel graphics, which is integrated into CPU directly since time immemorial. Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working, just enough to get something on the screen — no state of the art 3D acceleration, no CUDA/OpenCL. But there is a big difference between “barely working” and “black screen on boot, always”.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      amdgpu is not a stopgap driver. It's mature and reliable enough driver to play videogames including a lot of windows games via proton. I don't see a single reason to use a proprietary OS or driver anymore.
      - atemerev 8y ago
        CUDA/OpenCL?
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
The author, Ilia, noticed that this is on HN and responded in the mailing list thread. I don't know if I agree with the take, but I'll repost because I found it interesting. --- I've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation [...] and it does seem like people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew that, including the users of nouveau who continue to use it nonetheless. It's that if every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator's or user's wishes, then the user now has to know how to override that behaviour separately in every application. The situation is that Distro X has decided that nouveau is the right thing for its users. A user can disable that by uninstalling or otherwise disabling nouveau if they wish. But now chrome comes along with its own set of rules. What if every application starts doing that? It should also be noted that outside of a few pathological cases, like creating 2GB+ textures which never happens in practice, nouveau works just fine for me. For other people, it dies at random intervals, irrespective of whether they're using chrome or not. While this is a non-ideal scenario, chrome shouldn't be in the business of worrying about things like that. It just confuses the situation for everyone.
- slezyr 8y ago
  They already do this with fonts.
- kanox 8y ago
  > every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator Yes, they do and they have very good reasons for it. Working with distros to ensure they ship the right libraries takes an infinite amount of effort so companies that what to ship a product to their users will work around it. This also happens in the server space with the massive popularity of containers and language-specific package managers. The traditional Linux Distro model is extremely flawed.
ezoe 8y ago
If we are speaking about the fairness. We should blacklist everything. All available GPUs and its drivers whether its official or not on every OSes, cannot be trusted in its current state.
exactly 8y ago
Exactly.
ncmncm 8y ago
For my part, I am blacklisting Chromium and NVidia.

321 points by trulyrandom 8y ago

audio1001 8y ago

What is nouveau

switch007 8y ago
“Accelerated Open Source driver for nVidia cards” https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
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dclusin 8y ago
Open source driver for nvidia graphics cards it looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software)
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nolok 8y ago

For anyone interested, the link really should be the full bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 The current link says it as if Chrome was not being fair, but reading their reasoning it makes total sense. Key quote from said bug report: > We thought about blacklisting nouveau driver long time ago, and decided to let more adventurous users to play around. Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. > We received quite some bug reports on other rendering issues with Nouveau, and this bug is just one of them. So we will disable all GPU acceleration by default. If someone wants to bypass that, there are two options: 1) install proprietary NVidia drivers (see #24) 2) run Chrome with --ignore-gpu-blacklist, but be aware you are taking a risk here > Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux, let alone investigate & fix bugs in drivers. We want a stable & secure browser first, a GPU-accelerated one second, only if possible. > The default driver on Ubuntu LTS has severe issues, asking non-technical users to update their driver is just not acceptable as a prerequisite to use Chrome. > If someone is interested in well-scoping the brokenness (version range and/or devices affected), we're happy to take a patch to the blacklist. So the driver fails in some (common enough) cases, they let it run anyway but now it's default on ubuntu so a lot of non tech users are/will be affected, so they block it but you can still bypass the block if you want. And if newer version fix it and someone can help them figure out which versions work for what, they are willing to limit the blocking.

bubblethink 8y ago
>Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. I don't get this. All linux distros under the sun ship with nouveau, and always have. It is a kernel driver afterall. What else are they going to ship ?
- amyjess 8y ago
  The VESA driver?
  - geofft 8y ago
    How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card. Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.
      - ajross 8y ago
        I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.
      - geofft 8y ago
        But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.

bubblethink 8y ago

This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?

cheald 8y ago
The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Yes, but does chromium play nice for acceleration ?
  - cheald 8y ago
    Seems to be. From about:gpu: Graphics Feature Status Canvas: Hardware accelerated Flash: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated Compositing: Hardware accelerated Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled Skia Renderer: Disabled Surface Control: Disabled Surface Synchronization: Enabled Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Viz Service Display Compositor: Disabled WebGL: Hardware accelerated WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
  - andrewcchen 8y ago
    For rendering yes. For video decoding no. Chromium needs a patch to use VA-API[1]. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...
- moonbug 8y ago
  Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.

abrowne 8y ago

Doesn't hardware accelerated graphics on Firefox on Linux require modifying a preference? AFAIK you need to go to about:config and enable layers.acceleration.force-enabled. (This is speaking as someone who uses Firefox on Linux as my main browser.) The bug for enabling hardware rendering by default on some systems appears to still be open: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876

shmerl 8y ago
Yes, Firefox is stuck with blacklisting basically everything. I guess developers didn't revisit drivers situation in the recent times. Just set these in your $HOME/.profile export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1
- jammygit 8y ago
  Thanks! Edit - will that work for the snap version BTW?
  - shmerl 8y ago
    You'd need to figure out how environment variables work in Snap and set them there, I haven't used it myself.
- staktrace 8y ago
  Please don't encourage people to turn on WebRender without at least warning them that it is experimental, still under development, can cause your computer to blow up, etc. Also the environment variables you specified will force it on even on non-Nightly builds which is very undesirable since those builds are not getting fixes uplifted. (I work on WebRender for Firefox)
  - shmerl 8y ago
    I've been using WebRender on beta builds on Linux for several months already - it works quite well (AMD / radeonsi). WebRender is more raw indeed, but regular layers acceleration should surely be re-evaluated instead sweeping blacklisting like it happens now.

fhrow4484 8y ago

Will this make Firefox the best browser on Linux by default then? Also, as mentionned in the bug thread, if nouveau is actually stable on Newer versions, similar to User Agents, the newer nouveau versions could change their name to bypass the blacklisting. No need to pretend to be NVIDIA, just something different that nouveau, like 'nuevo' or something.

marcinzm 8y ago
Per the comment from abrowne Firefox does not do hardware acceleration by default on Linux for any hardware. So same as Chrome for Nouveau but Chrome does support acceleration for other drivers out of the box. It seems slightly easier to enable it for Firefox but both browsers provide a way to enable acceleration if you want to take the risk.
geofft 8y ago
Can't they also use GL_VENDOR / GL_RENDERER and parse version numbers out of it?
- marcinzm 8y ago
  Chromium said they'd do that if someone tested which Nouveau versions work fine and provided a test suite to use. Ilia Mirkin (in the link) said he tried to run their test suite but got errors on the latest Nouveau (possibly due to a browser issue). So as it stands now Chromium doesn't know which if any versions of Nouveau are stable.

bhaak 8y ago

Both projects seem to put the blame on the other project. IMO, there are at least two other factions that can be blamed equally well. First, nvidia for not providing OSS drivers and second, the user who runs an OS on hardware that can't be properly supported on this OS at the moment. For years I have the rule that I prefer hardware that has proper Linux support. Even going a bit further that I try not to buy hardware that doesn't have OSS drivers unless there really is no other option (nowadays, that means mostly smartphones).

nickysielicki 8y ago
> nvidia for not providing OSS drivers It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau. Phoronix link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Well, not quite. The charitable way to put it is that they are requiring signed firmware in hardware, in order to help stem fraud by 3rd party resellers (where some card model X is sold to naïve buyers as a more desirable model Y, with a hacked firmware to match) and project noveau is obviously impacted.
  - SXX 8y ago
    Problem is that Nvidia did much more than just signing firmware: * Separated firmware that needed for basic and fully functional driver and given Nouveau only bits they wanted. * Obfuscated and hidden firmware files within the driver binaries so they harder to extract. * Changed loading process so GPU read it via DMA to make reverse engineering of firmware loading harder. It's pretty clear that all of that was exclusively done to harm Nouveau.
- 8y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

From: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com> To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor the nouveau developers for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Google's budget. Instead of doing any of the right things, you chose to become a bad actor on Linux. Closing bug reports from nouveau users and directing them to the freedesktop bug tracker? Fine, you don't need to fix someone else's bugs. Blacklisting the driver? Not even remotely okay. I strongly condemn your decision and I expect it to be rolled back as soon as possible. -- Drew DeVault

geofft 8y ago
> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions. I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs, right? It's okay for a user to override their user-agent string, and fine for browsers to mention other browsers for compatibility, but uncool for a browser to not identify itself at all and steal another browser's user-agent string. The OpenGL API includes vendor strings for a reason. Chrome isn't doing `strings` on the library or anything.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text. >I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to deliver a good experience in the domains for which they are responsible. >It's no different from websites looking at user-agent strings to work around known bugs This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

baby 8y ago

What is nouveau?

drewg123 8y ago
A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use this driver by default, since it is open source. There is an arguably superior driver supplied by Nvidia. It is faster, has better hardware support, and is arguably more stable (1). However, it ships as a closed source binary blob with a source-based shim layer to integrate it into the kernel. (1)My wife has 2 Linux desktops with Nvidia GPUS. She ran nouveau by default. However, on both machines, it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up, but I realized from the stack traces that were recorded that it was the GPU driver. I then switched the machines to the Nvidia driver, and they have been stable ever since. I personally always buy hardware from Nvidia, because they provide a binary driver for FreeBSD. They are one of the few companies in the non-server space to provide good packaged drivers for FreeBSD.
- mxuribe 8y ago
  > ...it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up... Thank you! I think you might have just solved an issue for me that happens intermittently with my linux mint 18.3. At least we'll see once i dive into output of stack traces, etc.

emersion 8y ago

Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. On the other hand, Intel and AMD have high-quality drivers and are part of the open-source community.

vfq 8y ago
Nvidia is already helping the Nouveau maintainers by not suing them for all they are worth.
- contravariant 8y ago
  Hey, I think you're being downvoted a bit harshly for your statement so I've decided to help you out by not suing you. Cheers.
gnarbarian 8y ago
Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period). Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  AMD GPU hardware is definitely competitive, they just aren't top of the line. At the mid range, they are very competitive, and that's what most people need anyway. My next GPU will be an AMD GPU, as soon as my GTX 960 stops being sufficient (and no Wayland is certainly an issue).
- magic_quotes 8y ago
  > Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering. Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)

kakarot 8y ago

Meh, I typically use Chrome through a virtual machine with Spice which has broken OpenGL support, so I wasn't getting hardware acceleration anyway. I still get screen tearing in Firefox, for Christ's sake.

alexdme 8y ago
There is an easy fix for this: Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled: true in about:config. I believe this is because Firefox assumes it's the responsibility of the compositor you are running to properly vsync, but if you're not running a compositor you can turn on this option.
- kakarot 8y ago
  Thank you for the tip. I still seem to get screen tearing with this option enabled, however.

openloop 8y ago

Doesn't seem like Nouveau wants to own up.

StreamBright 8y ago

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

anfilt 8y ago
lets see there is wayland. The peopitery drivers do not work with that. Moreover there are issues. Further, its not open source the nvidia drivers. Although, I dont understand why anyone would buy hardware from nividia and feel good about it
Macha 8y ago
1. Lacking support for old GPUs in a maintained driver. nvidia drivers approach for old gpu is "use an old driver" for cards as recent as the 6xx. 2. People like to run fully open source systems 3. Adding support for things like kms and wayland are really up to the whims of nVidia as to when it happens with the closed driver, while an open driver is more likely to do so (or at least can be forked to do so). In the past features like config-less X were also much later coming to nvidia drivers which made it harder for people to get started on Linux.
- frabbit 8y ago
  Your point #2 is especially important: with all the commotion surrounding the various "management engines" (in effect a completely independent system with privileged access to the carefully secured main system) it is surely obvious that a powerful GPU running unverified code is a foolish thing. Point #3 is also really good. Who wants to wait around at the mercy of a corporation which has an active interest in NOT being transparent about "its" IP (as speculated elsewhere most of the GPUs probably infringe on some or other patent)? Anyone buying an nvidia card for Linux should know exactly what they are doing: funding an anti-Free Software company, deeply entrenched in the ethos of secrecy, patents and bullshit; saddling themselves with a white elephant which will suck hours of their precious time.
willtim 8y ago
We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

angry_octet 8y ago

It's not the Chromium team's job to debug nouveau. Switching it to be the default for everything was obviously premature.

yogthos 8y ago
Yet I use Firefox with Nouveau just fine...
- berkut 8y ago
  With hardware acceleration enabled?
  - yogthos 8y ago
    Yeah, I've seen it crap out now and then, but generally works.
- plorkyeran 8y ago
  Firefox also disables GPU acceleration with it by default.
- mkoryak 8y ago
  It works on my machine, ship it!
  - yogthos 8y ago
    Uh no, means that you can make it work and some people are willing to spend the time to do it right. You'd think that if Mozilla can afford to do this so could Google. The only way the problems in the drivers can get fixed is through usage, if Chrome flat out refuses to work with the driver then the issues can't be fixed. This also illustrates why it's important to have alternatives to Chrome for anybody who cares about open source.
    - angry_octet 8y ago

sevensor 8y ago

NVidia comes out of this looking very bad. It's not as if a GPU can't have good Linux support (see AMD, Intel), but theirs doesn't. Although I haven't spent my hard-earned money on their hardware since 2005, I have several machines at work that are burdened with it. Some lock up with Nouveau drivers, others crash with NVidia drivers. I can only conclude that the hardware is unstable.

xvilka 8y ago
Then it is good. The worse NVIDIA public image is - the better.
- sevensor 8y ago
  The problem from my perspective is that a major GPU vendor seems to think it's appropriate to paper over hardware problems with proprietary drivers, and they get away with it. While their reputation ought to suffer for that, I'd rather see them mend their ways. I'd love to take NVidia off my blacklist.

larkeith 8y ago

> One idea is to flip GL_VENDOR to some random string if chromium is running. What? Don't do this - never do this. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Chromium's decision, it is their decision to make as the project maintainers; trying to trick the software with falsified data is overstepping your bounds, and both corrodes trust in your driver and leads to whitelists. I thought we had moved past the days of fake user-agents.

zanny 8y ago
The problem is that the Nouveau (and Ubuntu) devs have no way to overturn Googles decision in Chrome. Ubuntu can compile Chromium with a modified blacklist but Google distributes Chrome in a deb. You would need some special logic to catch the Chrome .desktop on install and add in the unblacklist flag.
- bootloop 8y ago
  The user can decide on his own if he wants the application to run on an unsupported driver or not. The application decided by default not to offer support for it. Who should absolutely not decide for the user is the unsupported driver itself so I think the hierarchy is just fine as it is.
- kps 8y ago
  They could add “--ignore-gpu-blacklist” to their .desktop entry for Chrome.
  - zanny 8y ago
    Ubuntu doesn't have a .desktop entry for Chrome. It comes with the deb. Desktop files are installed by the programs that use them, hence why I said you need to catch the Chrome install and modify the desktop file.
belorn 8y ago
What we have is two side accusing the other of overstepping their bounds. Chromium making decision about drivers which normally is the domain of the operative system, and the driver making decision of what kind of systems the browser will support. The more rational behavior is for chromium to let the operative system decide what software and drivers they want to use, and do what they want with bugs from operative systems that they don't want to support. Whitelists won't work since all that will happen then is that project will do what Internet explorer did, ie call it self "compatible" and use the GL_VENDOR string of that compatible driver.

richardwhiuk 8y ago

Isn't this the key quote: > I did run the WebGL CTS suite, but that resulted in some > hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent test, and some > browser-level weirdness after some tests where later tests all fail > (due to what I have to assume is a browser bug). Isn't it more likely that they are noveau bugs, and are part of the problem here?

slacka 8y ago
> hangs from the the max-texture-size-equivalent tes I reported this bug back in 2015 and they have made no progress on it. It seems Nouveau just doesn't have the resources or man power. I can't really blame Google here. You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic SysRq will reboot it) [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92136
- lucb1e 8y ago
  > You don't want the browser to be able to hard lock system(not even a Magic SysRq will reboot it) Wait, this isn't just rendering bugs a la "some WebGL things will show green instead of red", it kills your system entirely? I thought the only effect this blacklisting had was making WebGL unavailable for everyone instead of buggy for a small minority. This just flipped my opinion. Related, this might also explain the strange bluescreen bug my girlfriend had with Windows 8 + Firefox on her laptop. She switched to Google Chrome a few years ago because every time she used Firefox, her laptop would bluescreen within a few hours (either while Firefox was still running, or at some point later). I didn't know bugs outside of the OS could still do that kind of thing (I thought they started squashing such bugs with Windows 95 and finished somewhere around Vista) and wrote the Firefox thing off as triggering some extremely obscure Windows OS-level issue. Maybe I should check if there is a driver blacklisted by Chrome, though it seems more likely Chrome just doesn't happen to trigger it (like all other software running on it, it really is only Firefox).
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    Driver crashes can easily take down a system. That's why driver quality matters so much. This is true on every OS. (Although, Windows 7+ has mechanisms to help recover from GPU driver crashes specifically, which usually work.) Also, Chrome can render WebGL on the CPU. It's slower but will still work.

techntoke 8y ago

This is another reason why we shouldn't let current web browsers decide the future of the web... which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware and horrid markup languages.

canttestthis 8y ago
> which to them will become a proprietary black box of slow JavaScript spyware and horrid markup languages Did you read the bug report?
- techntoke 8y ago
  I didn't see anything about a black box, except that users had reported issues and they didn't feel that they could investigate them because there were to many variances in Linux distros.
  - canttestthis 8y ago
    There are screenshots of the issue in the report. They've also said that there is a pattern of Nouveau instability that you don't see in proprietary drivers. Its all in the bug report.
    - techntoke 8y ago
      The screenshot was from Ubuntu. I haven't experienced the issue on Arch at all.

microcolonel 8y ago

Buy an AMD or Intel GPU. They're cost-effective (or non-negotiably bundled, sometimes), they're well supported, and the vendors make a considerable effort to ensure that stable, compliant drivers are available on every major operating system, and that the free ones are no less stable nor any less compliant. AMD's performance is competitive dollar-for-dollar, and the top of their lineup is about 80% as good the absolute highest-tier competitor most of the time.

shmerl 8y ago

I'd say, if you care about using open source driver, you'd avoid Nvidia to begin with, and use AMD or Intel instead. Here is a very good post from one of the key Nouveau developers, about why you should do exactly that: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better?p=998316#post998316 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

craftyguy 8y ago
And avoid chromium, because there are a number of dependencies under 'third-party' with no/unclear licensing (and thus are assumed to be non-free).
alacombe 8y ago
AMD cards for anything advanced are crap, they couldn't recogize one of my monitor (>2 monitor setup), and they're not playing fair with their AMF extension on Linux (works great on Windows though). Even on Windows, I cannot get the card to properly get my minitor resolutions (it's sitting beyond a multiplexer, though there no problem with nvidia).
- shmerl 8y ago
  AMD cards work just fine. Not sure what kind of issues you are having with your dual monitor. May be you are using an ancient kernel? What's an AMF extension?
  - alacombe 8y ago
    Triple monitor on two physical screen, and no AMD cards do not work, in this case using the display port output and DVI->HDMI adapter, and yes, it works with a third physical monitor (not acceptable in my setup). Nvidia/nouveau are not showing these problems. AMF == Advanced Media Framework.
    - shmerl 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jchw 8y ago

>We can also just take this, as yet-another nail in the nouveau coffin. I don't understand the dramatics. Nouveau is great but being blacklisted on Chromium is not the biggest issue for it right now imo. A lot of Linux users (myself included) use Firefox anyways, and it's still a default in many operating systems. And you can of course override this. I would place lack of reclocking support much higher than this in terms of issues. And of course, the bugs that caused Chromium to decide to blacklist Nouveau in the first place are still going to affect other accelerated applications. I'm a big fan of Nouveau, it is what I use on my laptop when in Linux. At the very least, it performs more than adequate for running a compositing desktop environment, and for many common configurations I've had few issues booting things up, the few issues I have had generally solved by using a newer kernel. If we really want Nouveau to succeed though, the support needs to start coming from Nvidia. AMD and Intel both have in the past supported open source drivers to an extent and it really shows. Nvidia's contributions have been pretty piss poor, and unfortunately it seems they just don't care, which is sad. I guess I do understand the frustration, but given the fact that this is in response to Ubuntu shipping Nouveau as a default, I think Nouveau's death is a bit overstated.

jammygit 8y ago
Its weird to work on a project to support hardware when the manufacturer actively tries to thwart you with signed firmware. We need more efforts going into open hardware imho

pablo-massa 8y ago

Slightly unrelated but can anyone speculate on the reasons why Nvidia doesn't open source its drivers? I'm curious.

doublepg23 8y ago
My understanding is _a lot_ of stuff in Nvidia drivers isn't _technically_ owned by them. As in they license out A company to make Y thing with Z license. After 20+ years of legacy those weird licenses add up, and no-one feels comfortable with releasing the code. Whether or not that's true? Hard to say... For comparison AMD has been (since 2015) working hard to make nearly all parts of their drivers upstream in some fashion (amdgpu). While that's not a 1:1 comparison there (AMD has less capital than Nvidia) it shows it _is_ possible to free these drivers.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  When the question of "Why not just open source it?" comes up this is nearly always the answer.
- altfredd 8y ago
  The real answer is that releasing source code means uncovering (some of) their cards. The company, that relies on selling identical hardware under vastly different prices, won't ever do that. Using game-specific speed-hacks to "fix" games, purposefully written to violate standards, is another issue. Especially, when those games were made with help of Nvidia engineers. Why give up such ability? I also suspect, that they make use of multiple patented technologies, both in hardware and software. When Java has been re-licensed to GPL, one of the most prominent pain points, that caused endless whining on part of OpenJDK users, happened to be it's font renderer. And we all know, that font smoothing is tricky business, and all font-smoothing tech in existence is patended by MS/Apple/Adobe. When you start replacing closed-source code with free replacement, those patented pieces tend to quickly come up — especially when open-source projects go to great length to work around patent issues instead of shoving them under the carpet.

superkuh 8y ago

Browsers should not need to have GPU acceleration anyway if they are just browsers. But instead, as is Chrome's/ium's style, it wants to be an OS instead of a browser. All other browsers are trying to follow suite but that still doesn't make it right. The more hardware functionality exposed the less secure a browser is.

peterwwillis 8y ago

(off-topic rant) As a Linux user for over 15 years, this is one of the main reasons I am replacing Linux on my next machine, probably with Windows (sigh). Maybe it's just me getting old, but I'm done screwing around with computers to get them to do what they are supposed to do. It's frustrating and embarrassing. It's not just that some drivers or hardware have obvious problems. It's virtually impossible to get a system where all of the components have vendor-supported open-source drivers, or, when they exist, that a distro supports them out of the box. Many components' drivers only officially support two operating systems. If they don't support your operating system (Linux), then when you have a problem, you're SOL. It's like buying a car that when the transmission blows, you need to hire a mechanical engineer to reverse-engineer it. Better start taking the bus to work, because this could take a while. Some laptops (about 9 product lines from 3 vendors) make official Linux distro releases available. So you're stuck with a small selection of machines and basically only one distro. Even if that is ok with you, the drivers still won't all be vendor-supported open-source. And on top of that, Linux may have wacky, constantly changing ways of handling the hardware, like hybrid GPU support, or low power mode for Intel wifi chips. Your machine will always be an awkward stepchild. A limited hardware selection isn't good. Laptops are hard to design. There are always design and procurement tradeoffs, and the less tradeoffs they make, the more expensive it gets. So to get a good experience on a good machine, you need to buy the most expensive one. At that point you might as well buy a Mac. Finally, there's actual user experience. I've used several distros and environments the past few years, and they all had pitiful user experiences on my laptops. CPU scaling on battery/AC doesn't work out of the box, most of my media keys don't work, hybrid GPU takes a computer science degree to get working properly (with the right combination of drivers and software), echoing the wrong value to a /sys/ entry that had no kernel documentation permanently fixed the cpu fan at top speed, and the latest vanilla kernels with an old kernel config simply won't boot. I know this isn't everyone's experience, but the only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> The only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby. Not sure if this was just a typo and you meant "laptop", but I imagine most of the problems you're describing could be avoided on a self-built desktop, because you can choose all the hardware for compatibility. I haven't used Linux seriously in years, but this is how I'm able to make Hackintosh work without constant fiddling, which all logic dictates should be more difficult than Linux.

Ayyar 8y ago

As a Linux user, I am happy about this change because Nouveau is just not an acceptable driver. I hope that this puts pressure on both Nvidia and Ubuntu to have a better default.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Agreed. It's very easy to install the proprietary driver in Ubuntu and in my experience it Just Works™. Why not default to that? The vast majority of Ubuntu users aren't open source evangelists who'd choose to use an inferior driver purely for ideological reasons.

atemerev 8y ago

Nouveau is the joke. It _still_ doesn’t work with Pascal cards, which are 3 years old now. Not to mention newer Turing cards. It’s only good for some obsolete hardware more than two generations ago. The first thing I have to do before installing fresh Ubuntu or Fedora is looking up how to blacklist nouveau, as the system won’t even boot otherwise. It’s time to deprecate it for good everywhere.

xvilka 8y ago
No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.
- atemerev 8y ago
  AMD has their own set of quirks, they are not open sourcing their main driver either. Nouveau was always a stopgap measure, to boot the system and make it somewhat usable until you install the official binary driver; so is amdgpu. Even if you are open source enthusiast who wants nothing but FOSS on your system (and this is a very minor use case), these drivers do no better than your integrated Intel graphics, which is integrated into CPU directly since time immemorial. Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working, just enough to get something on the screen — no state of the art 3D acceleration, no CUDA/OpenCL. But there is a big difference between “barely working” and “black screen on boot, always”.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    amdgpu is not a stopgap driver. It's mature and reliable enough driver to play videogames including a lot of windows games via proton. I don't see a single reason to use a proprietary OS or driver anymore.
    - atemerev 8y ago
      CUDA/OpenCL?

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

The author, Ilia, noticed that this is on HN and responded in the mailing list thread. I don't know if I agree with the take, but I'll repost because I found it interesting. --- I've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation [...] and it does seem like people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew that, including the users of nouveau who continue to use it nonetheless. It's that if every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator's or user's wishes, then the user now has to know how to override that behaviour separately in every application. The situation is that Distro X has decided that nouveau is the right thing for its users. A user can disable that by uninstalling or otherwise disabling nouveau if they wish. But now chrome comes along with its own set of rules. What if every application starts doing that? It should also be noted that outside of a few pathological cases, like creating 2GB+ textures which never happens in practice, nouveau works just fine for me. For other people, it dies at random intervals, irrespective of whether they're using chrome or not. While this is a non-ideal scenario, chrome shouldn't be in the business of worrying about things like that. It just confuses the situation for everyone.

slezyr 8y ago
They already do this with fonts.
kanox 8y ago
> every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator Yes, they do and they have very good reasons for it. Working with distros to ensure they ship the right libraries takes an infinite amount of effort so companies that what to ship a product to their users will work around it. This also happens in the server space with the massive popularity of containers and language-specific package managers. The traditional Linux Distro model is extremely flawed.

ezoe 8y ago

If we are speaking about the fairness. We should blacklist everything. All available GPUs and its drivers whether its official or not on every OSes, cannot be trusted in its current state.

exactly 8y ago

Exactly.

ncmncm 8y ago

For my part, I am blacklisting Chromium and NVidia.