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#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 ope

#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.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  That is extremely difficult. Lenovo doesn't make any high end laptops without nvidia. You'll be restricted to the X series and the T series. Dell is also quite similar, although at one point they had intel only options for their precision lineup. Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end (i.e., real i7 with 4-6 cores, xeon etc.).
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end Yup. By adding a Nvidia card (or, far less commonly, an ATI/AMD one) they can sell that laptop as a specialty "Gaming" machine - and with margins on commodity hardware being so razor-thin these days, that's exactly what shrewd marketers need!
- zlynx 8y ago
  I have a Dell XPS with an Nvidia 1050, running Fedora 29. The Nouveau driver was so bad here that I blacklisted all the drivers and just use the Intel GPU. It's the difference between 3 hours or 6 hours of battery. It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    >It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it. Are you sure you didn't install nvidia drivers? That is a common symptom with nvidia binary drivers. Nouveau on the other hand is fine with powering the device off when not used. For nvidia drivers, the bbswitch method is more reliable, but is apparently deprecated by distros these days.
MereInterest 8y ago
As I understand it, the latter, and it is completely justifiable to do so. Requiring users to run binary blobs in order to use their hardware is non-free.
larozin 8y ago
Afaik 10 years ago nvidia drivers were most stable and performant on linux. But yes they are proprietary and implemented in userspace for Xorg. Today Linux graphics stack architecture have been significantly revamped and it requires more kernel code than before for DRM/DRI API and Wayland. nVidia just can't fit into this architecture with its proprietary/nda model without violating GPL for kernel modules.
- izacus 8y ago
  So it sounds like that the kernel team implemented the APIs in a way that prevent nVidia from integrating with them without opensourcing the driver? Were those changes made as a political statement?
  - gdwatson 8y ago
    I'm well out of my depth here and welcome corrections: Managing and multiplexing access to hardware is a core responsibility of the kernel. When video drivers are implemented in user space as X11 has traditionally done there are a bunch of issues: the program that includes them has to be setuid root to have the right access to the hardware, opening up the possibility of security bugs; only one such program can run at a time; and if something goes wrong in user space, it can bring down the system. The newer kernel subsystem responsible for handling video cards is the Direct Rendering Manager, with the unfortunately confusing acronym DRM. [1] nVidia declined to support DRM in its proprietary driver for quite some time but eventually chose to do so. They have some quibbles with GBM, one of the parts of the kernel API, but they didn't raise them until after the API was implemented in the kernel, was implemented in the AMD and Intel drivers, and had become a dependency for the Wayland reference compositor Weston. They refused to implement GBM and instead implemented their own alternative, EGLStreams, which is far more complicated. The open source world believes this is the wrong architecture and has had a lot of discussion about how to (reluctantly) support it. The current KDE and Gnome approach seems to be to accept patches from nVidia for EGLStreams support [2][3], but not everyone feels the same way. [4] nVidia has implemented DRM already. They could implement GBM if they wanted to. I'm sure that having their proprietary driver in kernel space instead of user space makes licensing more complicated, but it hasn't stopped them yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager [2] https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland-and-nvidia-2017-edition/ https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland... [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-KDE-KWin-EGLStreams-POC https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-K... [4] https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

#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.

bubblethink 8y ago
That is extremely difficult. Lenovo doesn't make any high end laptops without nvidia. You'll be restricted to the X series and the T series. Dell is also quite similar, although at one point they had intel only options for their precision lineup. Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end (i.e., real i7 with 4-6 cores, xeon etc.).
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end Yup. By adding a Nvidia card (or, far less commonly, an ATI/AMD one) they can sell that laptop as a specialty "Gaming" machine - and with margins on commodity hardware being so razor-thin these days, that's exactly what shrewd marketers need!
zlynx 8y ago
I have a Dell XPS with an Nvidia 1050, running Fedora 29. The Nouveau driver was so bad here that I blacklisted all the drivers and just use the Intel GPU. It's the difference between 3 hours or 6 hours of battery. It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  >It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it. Are you sure you didn't install nvidia drivers? That is a common symptom with nvidia binary drivers. Nouveau on the other hand is fine with powering the device off when not used. For nvidia drivers, the bbswitch method is more reliable, but is apparently deprecated by distros these days.

MereInterest 8y ago

As I understand it, the latter, and it is completely justifiable to do so. Requiring users to run binary blobs in order to use their hardware is non-free.

larozin 8y ago

Afaik 10 years ago nvidia drivers were most stable and performant on linux. But yes they are proprietary and implemented in userspace for Xorg. Today Linux graphics stack architecture have been significantly revamped and it requires more kernel code than before for DRM/DRI API and Wayland. nVidia just can't fit into this architecture with its proprietary/nda model without violating GPL for kernel modules.

izacus 8y ago
So it sounds like that the kernel team implemented the APIs in a way that prevent nVidia from integrating with them without opensourcing the driver? Were those changes made as a political statement?
- gdwatson 8y ago
  I'm well out of my depth here and welcome corrections: Managing and multiplexing access to hardware is a core responsibility of the kernel. When video drivers are implemented in user space as X11 has traditionally done there are a bunch of issues: the program that includes them has to be setuid root to have the right access to the hardware, opening up the possibility of security bugs; only one such program can run at a time; and if something goes wrong in user space, it can bring down the system. The newer kernel subsystem responsible for handling video cards is the Direct Rendering Manager, with the unfortunately confusing acronym DRM. [1] nVidia declined to support DRM in its proprietary driver for quite some time but eventually chose to do so. They have some quibbles with GBM, one of the parts of the kernel API, but they didn't raise them until after the API was implemented in the kernel, was implemented in the AMD and Intel drivers, and had become a dependency for the Wayland reference compositor Weston. They refused to implement GBM and instead implemented their own alternative, EGLStreams, which is far more complicated. The open source world believes this is the wrong architecture and has had a lot of discussion about how to (reluctantly) support it. The current KDE and Gnome approach seems to be to accept patches from nVidia for EGLStreams support [2][3], but not everyone feels the same way. [4] nVidia has implemented DRM already. They could implement GBM if they wanted to. I'm sure that having their proprietary driver in kernel space instead of user space makes licensing more complicated, but it hasn't stopped them yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager [2] https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland-and-nvidia-2017-edition/ https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland... [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-KDE-KWin-EGLStreams-POC https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-K... [4] https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html