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There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux c

There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible. The Linux ecosystem relies on the Mesa stack (Mesa, DRI, DRM, GBM, KMS, etc), and DRM is part of the upstream kernel itself... Nvidia has openly not used any of these APIs. This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? The Linux community reached out to Nvidia and help them along with Nouveau, and at one point even threatened to sue them. Linus Torvalds has told them that he doesn't care about them if they won't actually participate in Linux, and will continue to break their drivers because they just don't listen.

dooglius 8y ago
> There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. No, you are taking a with-us-or-against-us mentality. Users and application developers want things to work as broadly as possible, regardless of the graphics card or driver being used. Whether that helps or hurts various parties regarding Nvidia's closed-source stance is irrelevant. > Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. >This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? Microsoft can get away with this precisely because it sells Windows; it lowers the price to vendors (such as Dell) on the condition that they only use certified drivers. It is entirely possible to run Windows with uncertified drivers. In any case, it is my understanding that this is a licensing issue, and Nvidia would support more APIs if it could do so while keeping the driver proprietary.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  >Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. It's not so much that they are incompatible. It's that they weren't written for linux. They use the same driver for windows which has been adapted for linux. That also allows them to avoid any sort of derivate work clause that would kick in due to the GPL.
  - stingraycharles 8y ago
    And why would this not be acceptable? Shouldn’t we be happy that nvidia is adapting this driver?
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      No if it goes against Linux standards. That's just accepting the lowest common denominator quality driver. If AMD an do a better job with AMDGPU, so can their much larger competitor.
      - janoc 8y ago
        That's the sort of talk companies with market share of Microsoft or ecosystem of Apple can afford. I am a Linux desktop user myself but: a) The AMD drivers were unusable crap for a very long time, things have improved only thanks to the open source driver (that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs). Basically 3D and OpenGL in Linux was for years synonymous with "buy Nvidia, it works". b) I don't understand this "holier than thou" attitudes when Linux desktop isn't even a blip on the radar and pretty much contributes zero to the bottom line of these companies. However, it tends to have the most vocal, noisy and abusive users ... Instead of being glad that Nvidia actually supports Linux (and FreeBSD and few other free OSes) for ~20 years now (before ATI even had a Linux driver at all!), we heap abuse on them because their drivers aren't to our taste? Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? And no, Intel integrated graphics really isn't an option for high performance graphics and ATI's open source drivers are quite a bit slower. Of course, if all you need is requiring accelerated desktop so that you can have nice transparency/compositing and accelerated video playing, then you won't see this. I don't get where did you get the idea about the "lowest common denominator quality driver" from Nvidia. Sure there are bugs and issues (e.g. with suspend) but in my experience the Nvidia graphic drivers were the least troublesome when it came to application support, OpenGL spec + extension support and various bugs. And I have been using 3D drivers in Linux essentially from the very beginning, when the top end hardware meant a 3DFX card or later a Riva TNT. My diploma thesis ran on a 3DFX back in the day ... That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't complain when something doesn't work but let's not forget the size of the market. A dose of reality helps - jumping up and down and yelling really really loud to look important doesn't make one so.
whatshisface 8y ago
>Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible. Nvidia's linux drivers work fine for me, although granted they are hard to install (hard compared to apt install).
- deleted 8y ago
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- ben-schaaf 8y ago
  At least on Ubuntu if you have 3rd party driver sources enabled it's literally an apt install away. Definitely not as good as being already installed like AMDGPU, but it's been pretty trivial installing NVIDIA drivers for me over the past years.
shmerl 8y ago
Numbers speak better though. Usage stats show, that with AMD open driver stack becoming very competitive, Linux users are gradually preferring AMD to Nvidia for gaming GPUs. The only thing that's holding AMD back now is sketchy availability of high end cards. And for low end and integrated cards, using Intel or AMD APU is an obvious choice, especially in laptops. Optimus is such a horrible mess, that no Linux users should come anywhere close to it.
- nineteen999 8y ago
  The question in my mind is, I suppose, are Linux desktop users ever going to be a enough of a critical mass for Nvidia to care if they lose a few sales to AMD here and there. My gut feeling says no.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Linux desktop alone probably won't be enough to force them to open up their drivers or to stop being a thorn in the side of Nouveau development. But further advancement in the datacenter from AMD already might push their concerns over the edge. Intel joining the high end GPU market with open drivers might also help speeding things up, including dislodging of CUDA lock-in.
est31 8y ago
Their position is a bit more complicated than that. Nvidia does provide drivers for Linux at all, and this is thanks to Nvidia customers that use Linux, like the VFX industry. Nowadays there is also lots of deep learning and crypto mining that's happening on Nvidia GPUs with Linux running on the CPU. Having a hard stance on Nvidia, which I support, makes no sense if they have no interest in Linux support at all.
deleted 8y ago
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doctorpangloss 8y ago
NVIDIA GPUs on Linux are used by GPGPU data center customers, rendering data center customers, weird cryptocurrency miners, and then a tiny number of everyone else. The everyone else is predominantly certified RedHat / CentOS or Ubuntu animation and engineering Linux applications users. Then finally people who install Linux on their NVIDIA equipped laptops and desktops. The last group is so vanishingly small. They’re neither a meaningful number of users nor a meaning number of payers. Linux should do its best to support word of mouth evangelists with the best user experience possible, because even though free software evangelism is definitely viral, retention favors convenience over all other factors when the price is zero. But this has always been about ego. Jensen Huang thinks he’s the biggest hot shot in the world, and that culture pervades his company. But Linux is going to be around a lot longer than somebody’s game rendering coprocessors. I’d appeal to humility, not some meaningless details about APIs. Definitely not a business case.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  What about Nvidia-equipped laptops that come with Ubuntu pre-installed?
deleted 8y ago
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yongjik 8y ago
Oh I'm not so sure about Microsoft doing that. Probably everybody has heard about this story now [1], but in case anyone hasn't: > I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. Well, maybe Microsoft of 2019 might behave differently, after spending decades in desktop OS market domination, but what's more relevant is how they got there in the first place. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  I had not heard of it yet, so thanks. And well, makes sense, different priorities ... https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/
eschaton 8y ago
Nvidia’s position seems to be that Linux needs to grow up and provide a stable driver API and ABI, and stop claiming anyone is a “bad actor” just because they don’t want to put their drivers under the GPL, make them part of the Linux kernel source tree, and essentially give up control of them. I’m honestly surprised the major distros haven’t gotten together to do this, in a shared fork if necessary. It’s outright embarrassing that this attitude still infects the Linux project.
- shmerl 8y ago
  What's embarrassing, is Nvidia's inability to provide upstream driver themselves, or to allow nouveau which already exists, use all their hardware features[1]. Linux kernel has quality rules, and if Nvidia can't follow them, it's their problem. It should not be in the interest of Linux maintainers to accept any junk upstream. 1. 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...
  - eschaton 8y ago
    And Nvidia has rules around access to its intellectual property. If Linux can’t follow them, Linux doesn’t get Nvidia’s code.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Nvidia can sit on their property all they want, and lose market share in result, while other GPU makers have no problem making open upstream drivers. That actually benefits everyone but Nvidia ;) In practice though, that's likely the least of their reasons not to open their driver. More probably, they just don't want to expose some embarrassing code mess or non compliant cheating in their graphics stack, as well as don't want to allow anyone decide how to use their GPUs without Nvidia dictating them. If they control accelerated driver - they can dictate and demand more money in some use cases from those who want a more permissive driver. All of that has very little to do with intellectual property and more with market manipulation.

dooglius 8y ago

> There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. No, you are taking a with-us-or-against-us mentality. Users and application developers want things to work as broadly as possible, regardless of the graphics card or driver being used. Whether that helps or hurts various parties regarding Nvidia's closed-source stance is irrelevant. > Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. >This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? Microsoft can get away with this precisely because it sells Windows; it lowers the price to vendors (such as Dell) on the condition that they only use certified drivers. It is entirely possible to run Windows with uncertified drivers. In any case, it is my understanding that this is a licensing issue, and Nvidia would support more APIs if it could do so while keeping the driver proprietary.

bubblethink 8y ago
>Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. It's not so much that they are incompatible. It's that they weren't written for linux. They use the same driver for windows which has been adapted for linux. That also allows them to avoid any sort of derivate work clause that would kick in due to the GPL.
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  And why would this not be acceptable? Shouldn’t we be happy that nvidia is adapting this driver?
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    No if it goes against Linux standards. That's just accepting the lowest common denominator quality driver. If AMD an do a better job with AMDGPU, so can their much larger competitor.
    - janoc 8y ago
      That's the sort of talk companies with market share of Microsoft or ecosystem of Apple can afford. I am a Linux desktop user myself but: a) The AMD drivers were unusable crap for a very long time, things have improved only thanks to the open source driver (that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs). Basically 3D and OpenGL in Linux was for years synonymous with "buy Nvidia, it works". b) I don't understand this "holier than thou" attitudes when Linux desktop isn't even a blip on the radar and pretty much contributes zero to the bottom line of these companies. However, it tends to have the most vocal, noisy and abusive users ... Instead of being glad that Nvidia actually supports Linux (and FreeBSD and few other free OSes) for ~20 years now (before ATI even had a Linux driver at all!), we heap abuse on them because their drivers aren't to our taste? Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? And no, Intel integrated graphics really isn't an option for high performance graphics and ATI's open source drivers are quite a bit slower. Of course, if all you need is requiring accelerated desktop so that you can have nice transparency/compositing and accelerated video playing, then you won't see this. I don't get where did you get the idea about the "lowest common denominator quality driver" from Nvidia. Sure there are bugs and issues (e.g. with suspend) but in my experience the Nvidia graphic drivers were the least troublesome when it came to application support, OpenGL spec + extension support and various bugs. And I have been using 3D drivers in Linux essentially from the very beginning, when the top end hardware meant a 3DFX card or later a Riva TNT. My diploma thesis ran on a 3DFX back in the day ... That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't complain when something doesn't work but let's not forget the size of the market. A dose of reality helps - jumping up and down and yelling really really loud to look important doesn't make one so.

whatshisface 8y ago

>Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible. Nvidia's linux drivers work fine for me, although granted they are hard to install (hard compared to apt install).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ben-schaaf 8y ago
At least on Ubuntu if you have 3rd party driver sources enabled it's literally an apt install away. Definitely not as good as being already installed like AMDGPU, but it's been pretty trivial installing NVIDIA drivers for me over the past years.

shmerl 8y ago

Numbers speak better though. Usage stats show, that with AMD open driver stack becoming very competitive, Linux users are gradually preferring AMD to Nvidia for gaming GPUs. The only thing that's holding AMD back now is sketchy availability of high end cards. And for low end and integrated cards, using Intel or AMD APU is an obvious choice, especially in laptops. Optimus is such a horrible mess, that no Linux users should come anywhere close to it.

nineteen999 8y ago
The question in my mind is, I suppose, are Linux desktop users ever going to be a enough of a critical mass for Nvidia to care if they lose a few sales to AMD here and there. My gut feeling says no.
- shmerl 8y ago
  Linux desktop alone probably won't be enough to force them to open up their drivers or to stop being a thorn in the side of Nouveau development. But further advancement in the datacenter from AMD already might push their concerns over the edge. Intel joining the high end GPU market with open drivers might also help speeding things up, including dislodging of CUDA lock-in.

est31 8y ago

Their position is a bit more complicated than that. Nvidia does provide drivers for Linux at all, and this is thanks to Nvidia customers that use Linux, like the VFX industry. Nowadays there is also lots of deep learning and crypto mining that's happening on Nvidia GPUs with Linux running on the CPU. Having a hard stance on Nvidia, which I support, makes no sense if they have no interest in Linux support at all.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss 8y ago

NVIDIA GPUs on Linux are used by GPGPU data center customers, rendering data center customers, weird cryptocurrency miners, and then a tiny number of everyone else. The everyone else is predominantly certified RedHat / CentOS or Ubuntu animation and engineering Linux applications users. Then finally people who install Linux on their NVIDIA equipped laptops and desktops. The last group is so vanishingly small. They’re neither a meaningful number of users nor a meaning number of payers. Linux should do its best to support word of mouth evangelists with the best user experience possible, because even though free software evangelism is definitely viral, retention favors convenience over all other factors when the price is zero. But this has always been about ego. Jensen Huang thinks he’s the biggest hot shot in the world, and that culture pervades his company. But Linux is going to be around a lot longer than somebody’s game rendering coprocessors. I’d appeal to humility, not some meaningless details about APIs. Definitely not a business case.

akvadrako 8y ago
What about Nvidia-equipped laptops that come with Ubuntu pre-installed?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 8y ago

Oh I'm not so sure about Microsoft doing that. Probably everybody has heard about this story now [1], but in case anyone hasn't: > I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. Well, maybe Microsoft of 2019 might behave differently, after spending decades in desktop OS market domination, but what's more relevant is how they got there in the first place. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

hutzlibu 8y ago
I had not heard of it yet, so thanks. And well, makes sense, different priorities ... https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/

eschaton 8y ago

Nvidia’s position seems to be that Linux needs to grow up and provide a stable driver API and ABI, and stop claiming anyone is a “bad actor” just because they don’t want to put their drivers under the GPL, make them part of the Linux kernel source tree, and essentially give up control of them. I’m honestly surprised the major distros haven’t gotten together to do this, in a shared fork if necessary. It’s outright embarrassing that this attitude still infects the Linux project.

shmerl 8y ago
What's embarrassing, is Nvidia's inability to provide upstream driver themselves, or to allow nouveau which already exists, use all their hardware features[1]. Linux kernel has quality rules, and if Nvidia can't follow them, it's their problem. It should not be in the interest of Linux maintainers to accept any junk upstream. 1. 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...
- eschaton 8y ago
  And Nvidia has rules around access to its intellectual property. If Linux can’t follow them, Linux doesn’t get Nvidia’s code.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Nvidia can sit on their property all they want, and lose market share in result, while other GPU makers have no problem making open upstream drivers. That actually benefits everyone but Nvidia ;) In practice though, that's likely the least of their reasons not to open their driver. More probably, they just don't want to expose some embarrassing code mess or non compliant cheating in their graphics stack, as well as don't want to allow anyone decide how to use their GPUs without Nvidia dictating them. If they control accelerated driver - they can dictate and demand more money in some use cases from those who want a more permissive driver. All of that has very little to do with intellectual property and more with market manipulation.