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This is actually a reasonable position in my opinion, but there are two problems (neither of them is Google or Chromium's fault): 1) Nouveau is buggy and probl

This is actually a reasonable position in my opinion, but there are two problems (neither of them is Google or Chromium's fault): 1) Nouveau is buggy and problematic (related more to performance and a lack of support for many features) 2) The Nvidia drivers are buggy and problematic (related more to setup and compatibility with the rest of the system) Both of these problems can be traced back to the same root cause, which is simply that Nvidia refuses to do a good job of supporting Linux in any way. They could give Nouveau some funding and information about their hardware, but they don't do that. They could develop proper Linux drivers, but they don't do that either. Every way you look at it Nvidia is at the root of the problem. The solution on the consumer side is to not buy Nvidia products, and to encourage other people to not buy Nvidia products. The solution on the producer side is to contribute to Nouveau (easier said than done unfortunately, your average web dev can't just jump in and reverse engineer graphics drivers on a weekend).

BurningCycles 8y ago
>which is simply that Nvidia refuses to do a good job of supporting Linux in any way. I really dislike the way Nvidia makes it difficult for projects like Nouveau to reverse engineer an open driver, however I don't understand what you mean by poor support for their Linux driver, it's probably the one thing I can't fault them for as it is performing very well and stable. I'm with you on not buying NVidia products though, that is the best way to send a message.
- apatters 8y ago
  YMMV I suppose. Some people seem to have good experiences with their driver but mine have been terrible. I've used Ubuntu as my daily driver for 7 years now and Nvidia's driver has been the #1 source of crashes and configuration problems (half of the time I can't even get 3d accel working with it turned on, spend hours trying different versions that are reported on some forum to have fixed some problem but they don't, can't figure out why things aren't working, upon upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04 it borked the whole system and I had to switch to Nouveau, this list of Nvidia driver pain goes on forever, this is across multiple installs of Ubuntu). All my experience has been on laptops and there are lots of reports of Optimus related problems on Linux so there's that. I gave up on the hope of having Optimus actually work years ago. I would like to just be able to enable the latest version of Nvidia's driver and see my laptop start using the discrete gpu. That would be a big step forward from the past 7 years. FWIW there's Linus' famous Nvidia F-bomb :) "Nvidia has been the single worst company we ever dealt with" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw
  - rincebrain 8y ago
    FWIW it's quite possible that's not Linux-specific, a bunch of people have problems with NVIDIA driver crashes on, say, Windows too. There's a reason Microsoft shimmed the ability for the display driver to crash and restart without taking out the rest of Windows...
  - Doxin 8y ago
    You should give the SGFXI[1] script a try. it's a bit of a hassle to use video drivers from outside the apt-repos but that script basically always manages to set up a working driver for me. [1] https://smxi.org/docs/sgfxi-manual.htm https://smxi.org/docs/sgfxi-manual.htm
antpls 8y ago
> 2) The Nvidia drivers are buggy and problematic (related more to setup and compatibility with the rest of the system) Aren't scientific farm servers running on Linux kernel with Nvidia cards ? It would not be used if it was that buggy, so I think that claim needs precision
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  The cards are not the issue. Drivers can be problematic with certain workloads (like rendering UIs) and not others (like loading and running non-graphics programs). It's also a lot easier to debug and deploy a fix to a farm of identical servers with identical drivers than it is to be compatible across a huge breadth of configurations.
- frabbit 8y ago
  Is that science? A bunch of computing units running secret code?! Reproducibility in computational science is recognized as a huge problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383002/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383002/ A lab or institution claiming a publishable result based on discounted hardware from the manufacturer running code that does who knows what for their TensorFlow/whatever calculations is engaged in something other than science. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that they're just engaged in advertising demonstrations, but it's coming close.
  - dekhn 8y ago
    let's step back from the brink. Plenty of good science is done on proprietary foundations. It would be unrealistic to do otherwise. Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean every component of the system is completely open and inspectable.
    - frabbit 8y ago
      Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean every component of the system is completely open and inspectable. If it's not "open and inspectable" then it cannot be reproduced by another group/researcher. It's just unsupported claims building on a wonky methodology. I wonder what percentage of "Machine Learning" results are based on such shaky foundations and when they'll receive the same amount of skepticism and scorn we see heaped(deservedly) on the field of psychology.
radarsat1 8y ago
One other factor: On 18.04, I have found it nearly impossible to use the NVidia driver. After installing, whatever I do, nouveau takes over. This was not the case on previous Ubuntu versions. Even putting nouveau on the blacklist does not solve the problem -- somehow even if I put it on modprobe's blacklist, also in the kernel arguments, it somehow manages to start up. No idea how or why. I solved it before, eventually, I can't quite remember, but since re-installing my operating system I haven't figured it out again. I think I eventually had to actually move/delete the nouveau ko files, which is a very destructive way to deal with a problem and interferes with apt, and even then they got re-built and re-installed by dkms and took over the display again! I did find a permanent solution which escapes me at the moment. Anyways, it would be good if NVidia and Ubuntu got together and at least made it easier to make use of the official driver.

BurningCycles 8y ago

>which is simply that Nvidia refuses to do a good job of supporting Linux in any way. I really dislike the way Nvidia makes it difficult for projects like Nouveau to reverse engineer an open driver, however I don't understand what you mean by poor support for their Linux driver, it's probably the one thing I can't fault them for as it is performing very well and stable. I'm with you on not buying NVidia products though, that is the best way to send a message.

apatters 8y ago
YMMV I suppose. Some people seem to have good experiences with their driver but mine have been terrible. I've used Ubuntu as my daily driver for 7 years now and Nvidia's driver has been the #1 source of crashes and configuration problems (half of the time I can't even get 3d accel working with it turned on, spend hours trying different versions that are reported on some forum to have fixed some problem but they don't, can't figure out why things aren't working, upon upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04 it borked the whole system and I had to switch to Nouveau, this list of Nvidia driver pain goes on forever, this is across multiple installs of Ubuntu). All my experience has been on laptops and there are lots of reports of Optimus related problems on Linux so there's that. I gave up on the hope of having Optimus actually work years ago. I would like to just be able to enable the latest version of Nvidia's driver and see my laptop start using the discrete gpu. That would be a big step forward from the past 7 years. FWIW there's Linus' famous Nvidia F-bomb :) "Nvidia has been the single worst company we ever dealt with" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw
- rincebrain 8y ago
  FWIW it's quite possible that's not Linux-specific, a bunch of people have problems with NVIDIA driver crashes on, say, Windows too. There's a reason Microsoft shimmed the ability for the display driver to crash and restart without taking out the rest of Windows...
- Doxin 8y ago
  You should give the SGFXI[1] script a try. it's a bit of a hassle to use video drivers from outside the apt-repos but that script basically always manages to set up a working driver for me. [1] https://smxi.org/docs/sgfxi-manual.htm https://smxi.org/docs/sgfxi-manual.htm

antpls 8y ago

> 2) The Nvidia drivers are buggy and problematic (related more to setup and compatibility with the rest of the system) Aren't scientific farm servers running on Linux kernel with Nvidia cards ? It would not be used if it was that buggy, so I think that claim needs precision

bastawhiz 8y ago
The cards are not the issue. Drivers can be problematic with certain workloads (like rendering UIs) and not others (like loading and running non-graphics programs). It's also a lot easier to debug and deploy a fix to a farm of identical servers with identical drivers than it is to be compatible across a huge breadth of configurations.
frabbit 8y ago
Is that science? A bunch of computing units running secret code?! Reproducibility in computational science is recognized as a huge problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383002/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383002/ A lab or institution claiming a publishable result based on discounted hardware from the manufacturer running code that does who knows what for their TensorFlow/whatever calculations is engaged in something other than science. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that they're just engaged in advertising demonstrations, but it's coming close.
- dekhn 8y ago
  let's step back from the brink. Plenty of good science is done on proprietary foundations. It would be unrealistic to do otherwise. Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean every component of the system is completely open and inspectable.
  - frabbit 8y ago
    Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean every component of the system is completely open and inspectable. If it's not "open and inspectable" then it cannot be reproduced by another group/researcher. It's just unsupported claims building on a wonky methodology. I wonder what percentage of "Machine Learning" results are based on such shaky foundations and when they'll receive the same amount of skepticism and scorn we see heaped(deservedly) on the field of psychology.

radarsat1 8y ago

One other factor: On 18.04, I have found it nearly impossible to use the NVidia driver. After installing, whatever I do, nouveau takes over. This was not the case on previous Ubuntu versions. Even putting nouveau on the blacklist does not solve the problem -- somehow even if I put it on modprobe's blacklist, also in the kernel arguments, it somehow manages to start up. No idea how or why. I solved it before, eventually, I can't quite remember, but since re-installing my operating system I haven't figured it out again. I think I eventually had to actually move/delete the nouveau ko files, which is a very destructive way to deal with a problem and interferes with apt, and even then they got re-built and re-installed by dkms and took over the display again! I did find a permanent solution which escapes me at the moment. Anyways, it would be good if NVidia and Ubuntu got together and at least made it easier to make use of the official driver.