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Ouch, that's mean. IMHO the only way to react to that is to close down shop. Ideally including Linux throwing out support for Nvidia cards. I have a strong opi

by bhaak 8y ago

Ouch, that's mean. IMHO the only way to react to that is to close down shop. Ideally including Linux throwing out support for Nvidia cards. I have a strong opinion on this as I was involved a few years ago in the Kindle homebrew community. After a while I decided that my time could be used better than on a product by a company that tries to prevent us from making his product better and more interesting to its users. There is so much energy and time wasted when you have to fight against the manufacturing company and in the case of a graphics card, the result is that it just works as well as the other graphics card option that is fully supported OOTB. And then that's just for a piece of hardware that you can replace on average for a few hundred bucks. Is that really worth the hassle?

zanny 8y ago
I've personally actively avoided buying anything with Nvidia hardware in it for 8 years now because of how awful their software business is. That has meant I've even skipped over tablets and phones using their chips and will never buy a Nintendo Switch because... well... firstly consoles are bullshit crippling perfectly good computers with proprietary OSes but secondly because it has an Nvidia chip in it. I tell everyone I know not to buy Nvidia, I have built gaming computers both professionally and for family that I've actively advised against buying Nvidia parts for because of their business practices, and when I buy notebooks its a real PITA to get one without some Nvidia GPU in it but I do that too. But Linux cannot "throw out" support for Nvidia. Nvidias driver is wholly independent of Linux, its why its such a PITA to work with. Its a DKMS blob driver and way too much other useful stuff depends on that interface to break it just to stop Nvidia. Fortunately nobody is going out of their way to support Nvidia either, such as their stupid attempt to fragment Wayland development with eglstreams nonsense. The most valuable thing any of us can do is constantly decry Nvidia for being the reprehensible company they are and use what influence we have over those we know to distance them from buying their products the same way you should distance friends and family from buying Nestle or Exxon products or should avoid shopping at Walmart.
- tntn 8y ago
  Would you mind giving an overview of their reprehensible business practices for those of us who just buy GPUs without following the companies?
  - SXX 8y ago
    I'm nowhere as fanatical about it since when it's come to corporations there is no black and white, but there at least few cases I can recall: * Even decade ago they did a lot of shady stuff when they initially separated GeForce and Quadro series. There was time when you can make little hardware mod on Geforce product that make driver think you have Quadro and magically a FP64 become twice faster and CAD application performance was doubled and tripled. * Their OpenGL implementation was ever non-standard and allowed both code and shaders to work in situation where it's clearly should not. As result games and apps that was debugged on Nvidia hardware would never work on more conformant Intel / AMD drivers. * In terms of Nouveau back in 2014 Nvidia started to require signed firmware files [0]. They promised shortly after to provide Nouveau with the files with clear licensing, but it took years. When files were finally released everything related to power management was missing and still not released until this day. So Nouveau can't implement recloking. On top of that they intentionally obfuscate the way firmware files stored within driver binary and also make GPU load firmware via DMA to make extraction much harder. * Sabotaging of OpenCL in general by not implementing spec for years and keeping it generally much slower that it's supposed to be. * Several years ago Nvidia twice added checks to their Windows drivers to stop consumer GPU drivers to work when passed into virtual machines. Both bypassed by hiding KVM identifier and changing HyperV hv_vendor_id, but it's was annoying [1]. * Nvidia forbidden to use consumer hardware drivers in datacenters [2] * Nvidia tried to push some crazy anti competitive program to make exclusive deals with GPU vendors so they can't sell AMD GPUs in any kind of "gaming" product lines [3] Again it's not like AMD is perfect, but that's a lot of shady stuff and I likely not even listed half of it. [0] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-begins-requiring-signed-gpu-firmware-images https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-... [1] http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002068 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675557
xvilka 8y ago
If everyone from FOSS world will show them the middle finger like Linus did, maybe, just maybe they will become friendlier a bit. But our only true hope if this company will go bankrupt and out of the market.

by bhaak 8y ago

zanny 8y ago

I've personally actively avoided buying anything with Nvidia hardware in it for 8 years now because of how awful their software business is. That has meant I've even skipped over tablets and phones using their chips and will never buy a Nintendo Switch because... well... firstly consoles are bullshit crippling perfectly good computers with proprietary OSes but secondly because it has an Nvidia chip in it. I tell everyone I know not to buy Nvidia, I have built gaming computers both professionally and for family that I've actively advised against buying Nvidia parts for because of their business practices, and when I buy notebooks its a real PITA to get one without some Nvidia GPU in it but I do that too. But Linux cannot "throw out" support for Nvidia. Nvidias driver is wholly independent of Linux, its why its such a PITA to work with. Its a DKMS blob driver and way too much other useful stuff depends on that interface to break it just to stop Nvidia. Fortunately nobody is going out of their way to support Nvidia either, such as their stupid attempt to fragment Wayland development with eglstreams nonsense. The most valuable thing any of us can do is constantly decry Nvidia for being the reprehensible company they are and use what influence we have over those we know to distance them from buying their products the same way you should distance friends and family from buying Nestle or Exxon products or should avoid shopping at Walmart.

tntn 8y ago
Would you mind giving an overview of their reprehensible business practices for those of us who just buy GPUs without following the companies?
- SXX 8y ago
  I'm nowhere as fanatical about it since when it's come to corporations there is no black and white, but there at least few cases I can recall: * Even decade ago they did a lot of shady stuff when they initially separated GeForce and Quadro series. There was time when you can make little hardware mod on Geforce product that make driver think you have Quadro and magically a FP64 become twice faster and CAD application performance was doubled and tripled. * Their OpenGL implementation was ever non-standard and allowed both code and shaders to work in situation where it's clearly should not. As result games and apps that was debugged on Nvidia hardware would never work on more conformant Intel / AMD drivers. * In terms of Nouveau back in 2014 Nvidia started to require signed firmware files [0]. They promised shortly after to provide Nouveau with the files with clear licensing, but it took years. When files were finally released everything related to power management was missing and still not released until this day. So Nouveau can't implement recloking. On top of that they intentionally obfuscate the way firmware files stored within driver binary and also make GPU load firmware via DMA to make extraction much harder. * Sabotaging of OpenCL in general by not implementing spec for years and keeping it generally much slower that it's supposed to be. * Several years ago Nvidia twice added checks to their Windows drivers to stop consumer GPU drivers to work when passed into virtual machines. Both bypassed by hiding KVM identifier and changing HyperV hv_vendor_id, but it's was annoying [1]. * Nvidia forbidden to use consumer hardware drivers in datacenters [2] * Nvidia tried to push some crazy anti competitive program to make exclusive deals with GPU vendors so they can't sell AMD GPUs in any kind of "gaming" product lines [3] Again it's not like AMD is perfect, but that's a lot of shady stuff and I likely not even listed half of it. [0] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-begins-requiring-signed-gpu-firmware-images https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-... [1] http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002068 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675557

xvilka 8y ago

If everyone from FOSS world will show them the middle finger like Linus did, maybe, just maybe they will become friendlier a bit. But our only true hope if this company will go bankrupt and out of the market.