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> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...] Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn'

by vngzs 6y ago

> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...] Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn't bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source. Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: > I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you. Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1]. Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: > Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and they were real pricks for making some announcement like they actually did. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-nouveau-2019&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-n... [2]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

verroq 6y ago
Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.
- boogies 6y ago
  [citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?
  - verroq 6y ago
    No I am thinking of the situation where the open source driver doesn’t have opencl support and the AMD drivers (fglrx) doesn’t compile or requires dependencies so old that it was dropped by the packagers for Arch Linux, all this for a few years until they come out with something that actually works when I’ve never ever had an issue with Nvidia. Also AMD never ever figured out how to fix screen tearing, or do so in a sane that doesn’t involve trial and error editing xorg.conf. Even on Windows AMD drivers are the most unstable, bugged software that’s even been shipped. It’s been a long standing joke that AMD “has no drivers”.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Yeah, fglrx driver with the issues you mention, offered OpenGL 4.1 support on a graphic card I have. The open source driver replacement only does OpenGL 3.3. I guess I should be happy it does any OpenGL at all.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Here, my card on the travel netbook that I use, https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html The open source driver is kind of ok if the only thing we expect from it is getting a working X session. Now if one wants to do some complex OpenGL stuff, then it might work, or not.
    - pezezin 6y ago
      That card is super old, before GCN. Have you tried with something a little bit more recent? I used to have a HD 7950 and it always worked perfectly, same with my current Vega 56.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Sure, how do I replace the card on an otherwise perfectly working laptop? The usual linux answer to hardware problems, keeps being to buy new hardware.
- Legogris 6y ago
  Sadly I have to agree. Ryzen 3400G here, getting hardware transcoding on the iGPU is something I still haven't sorted out. There have been several recent issues in kernel, AGESA firmware (I suspect there might be newer versions with potential fixes that my mobo manufacturer hasn't released yet; this is 1.0.0.4 Patch B) and drivers. I've had several rounds of hunting down and compiling various versions of driver packages, modules and kernels from source, trying third-party PPAs, to no avail. The amdgpu/amdgpupro mess adds another layer of confusion. I am not sure if I am missing some update, need to set some undocumented kernel flag and/or BIOS setting, if it's a software issue or Í just made a mistake somewhere. Debian 10/11. Meanwhile, as much as I wanted to get away from Intel, their drivers have never posed any issue at all.
  - esgwpl 6y ago
    I believe AGESA 1.0.0.4 Patch B broke something for the APUs, you should try either upgrading or downgrading your BIOS but what worked for me was downgrading to AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB, both Windows and Linux has stopped crashing now, although I still get the occasional lockup when browsing with Firefox on Linux. I found out the culprit after stumbling into this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc_build_ryzen_3_3200gasrock_b450m_hdv_r4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc...
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  It's anecdotal of course, but my RX560 has been absolutely flawless on both Ubuntu and openSUSE, literally out of the box support on a standard install.
- esistgut 6y ago
  Ryzen 3700X and Radeon 5700 XT here. Not a single problem.
- tankenmate 6y ago
  I have recently used Radeon 550, 560, 570, 5500 on AMD 5050e (yes, that old!), Ryzen 1600 (non af), 3100, 3600 and all have worked fine, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04. In fact on average I have found the various hardware configurations to be about 5% faster on Linux than Windows.
gcb0 6y ago
You don't even have to go to open source. You can see this hostile behaviour from their top-paying clients! Microsoft own previous gen Xbox emulator on the next gen xbox (i think it was original xbox emulated in the 360, but i might be wrong) was impacted by the team having to reverse-engineer the GPU because nvidia refused to let the emulator people to have access to the documentation provided to the original team.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Stumbling around Google didn't find me much more info on this, do you have any citations or keywords I could follow up on?
  - gcb0 6y ago
    try a better search engine :) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=falcon+emulator+xbox+team+reverse+engineer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=falcon+emulator+xbox+team+reverse+... some interesting results from the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175998 (lol, 4th result send us back here) https://www.onmsft.com/news/xbox-one-uses-virtual-xbox-360-and-emulation-achieve-backward-compatibility https://www.onmsft.com/news/xbox-one-uses-virtual-xbox-360-a...
xvilka 6y ago
Yes, they only can do only one good thing - go bankrupt. That would be the best news for open-source.
- amelius 6y ago
  Should open-source perhaps drop NVidia, instead of the other way around?
  - posguy 6y ago
    This divestiture happened long ago, if your running Linux not on a server, then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box. Even there though, only Intel has a buttery smooth experience. Ryzen for laptops is half baked (terrible USB C docking performance, occasional crashing on Windows and Linux with the 2xxxU series CPU/GPU chips) and AMD GPUs still require manual intervention to load proprietary firmware. AMD does make some performant mobile GPUs though, they work well in Debian!
    - lmm 6y ago
      Funny, I stick with NVidia because they still offer more reliable, performant drivers for Linux (or these days FreeBSD), open source or no.
      - posguy 6y ago
        How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers? I switched to Wayland a few years back as vsync is quite nice to have, but whenever I go back to Xorg for AnyDesk or TeamViewer on AMD or Intel there is a fair bit of tearing. Nvidia could have a competitive open source driver tomorrow if they released redistributable firmware that allowed reclocking the GPU.
        lmm 6y ago
        > How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers? As a FreeBSD user I'm still "trapped" on Xorg anyway, and in any case I'd rather stick with what works than learn some whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits.
est31 6y ago
In recent years, Linux computers have evolved to a major revenue source for Nvidia thanks to deep learning. However, not desktop users are behind this but servers, due to Nvidia's proprietary CUDA API. If they open sourced it or rebuilt it on top of mesa, it'd make it easier for AMD to implement CUDA, getting access to the deep learning ecosystem that's currently locked into CUDA. Nvidia's sales would take a huge drop. So I think it's even more likely that their drivers remain proprietary.
- llukas 6y ago
  Reality check? https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipDNN https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipDNN CUDA just works.
  - est31 6y ago
    ROCm exists but many frameworks don't support it. https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/16541 https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/16541
    - t-vi 6y ago
      PyTorch supports ROCm quite well if you can follow three step build instructions instructions (https://lernapparat.de/pytorch-rocm/ https://lernapparat.de/pytorch-rocm/). TVM.ai also supports ROCm well. TF I didn't check. FP32 performance for the VII is comparable to GTX20280Ti e.g. on Resnet training. Tensor Cores are cool, but 90% of people don't use FP16 that much. I'm not sure that is the best reply that stackoverflow has ever seen.
      - fluffything 6y ago
        The problem is that ROCm does not support many AMD compute cards, like their top of the line Navi-based one-year-old 5700 family. Most frameworks do support ROCm though, so the ball is on AMDs court.
fluffything 6y ago
> Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: Is this an Ad Hominem ? Linus does not mention there a single thing that they are actually doing wrong. > Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME. Drew just does not want to support the nvidia-wy in wl-roots, which is a super super niche WM toolkit whose "major" user is sway, another super super niche WM. Drew is angry for two reasons. First, sway users complain to them that sway does not work with nvidia hardware, which as a user of a WM is a rightful thing to complain about. Second, Drew does not want to support the nvidia-way, and it is angry and nvidia because they do not support the way that wl-roots has chosen. It is 100% ok for Drew to say that they don't want to maintain 2 code-paths, and wl-roots and sway do not support nvidia. It is also 100% ok for nvidia to consider wl-roots to niche to be worth the effort. What's IMO not ok is for Drew to feel entitled about getting nvidia to support wl-roots. Nvidia does not owe wl-roots anything. --- IMO when it comes to drivers and open-source, a lot of the anger and conflict seems to steem from a sentiment of entitlement. I read online comments _every day_ of people that have bought some hardware that's advertised as "does not support Linux" (or Macos, or whatever) being angry at the hardware manufacturer (why doesn't your hardware support the platform that says it does not support? I'm entitled to support!!!), the dozens of volunteers that reverse engineer and develop open source drivers for free (why doesn't the open source driver that you develop in your free time work correctly? I'm entitled to you working for free for me so that I can watch netflix!), etc. etc. etc. The truth of the matter is, that for people using nvidia hardware on linux for Machine Learning, CAD, rendering, visualization, games, etc. their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support. The only complaints I hear is people buying nvidia to do something that they know is not supported and then lashing out at everybody else due to entitlement.
- DCKing 6y ago
  What exactly are you invested in in this discussion? We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices. But you seem to just want to take on people's personal views on Nvidia now. You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices. I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market. But even if you don't agree with some/most of the complaints surely you must agree that Nvidia's track record of pissing of both other companies (and people) is problematic for when they take control of a company with an ecosystem driven business model like ARM's?
hanselot 6y ago
I remember waiting years to purchase my first "decent" GPU. The GTX580, specifically because it was confirmed by NVIDIA on their blogs that FERMI cards would fully support Vulkan. I spent so much money on that card, expecting full CUDA and Vulkan support soon after. Then Nvidia canned Fermi vulkan support silently. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you.

by vngzs 6y ago

verroq 6y ago

Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.

boogies 6y ago
[citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?
- verroq 6y ago
  No I am thinking of the situation where the open source driver doesn’t have opencl support and the AMD drivers (fglrx) doesn’t compile or requires dependencies so old that it was dropped by the packagers for Arch Linux, all this for a few years until they come out with something that actually works when I’ve never ever had an issue with Nvidia. Also AMD never ever figured out how to fix screen tearing, or do so in a sane that doesn’t involve trial and error editing xorg.conf. Even on Windows AMD drivers are the most unstable, bugged software that’s even been shipped. It’s been a long standing joke that AMD “has no drivers”.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yeah, fglrx driver with the issues you mention, offered OpenGL 4.1 support on a graphic card I have. The open source driver replacement only does OpenGL 3.3. I guess I should be happy it does any OpenGL at all.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Here, my card on the travel netbook that I use, https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html The open source driver is kind of ok if the only thing we expect from it is getting a working X session. Now if one wants to do some complex OpenGL stuff, then it might work, or not.
  - pezezin 6y ago
    That card is super old, before GCN. Have you tried with something a little bit more recent? I used to have a HD 7950 and it always worked perfectly, same with my current Vega 56.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Sure, how do I replace the card on an otherwise perfectly working laptop? The usual linux answer to hardware problems, keeps being to buy new hardware.
Legogris 6y ago
Sadly I have to agree. Ryzen 3400G here, getting hardware transcoding on the iGPU is something I still haven't sorted out. There have been several recent issues in kernel, AGESA firmware (I suspect there might be newer versions with potential fixes that my mobo manufacturer hasn't released yet; this is 1.0.0.4 Patch B) and drivers. I've had several rounds of hunting down and compiling various versions of driver packages, modules and kernels from source, trying third-party PPAs, to no avail. The amdgpu/amdgpupro mess adds another layer of confusion. I am not sure if I am missing some update, need to set some undocumented kernel flag and/or BIOS setting, if it's a software issue or Í just made a mistake somewhere. Debian 10/11. Meanwhile, as much as I wanted to get away from Intel, their drivers have never posed any issue at all.
- esgwpl 6y ago
  I believe AGESA 1.0.0.4 Patch B broke something for the APUs, you should try either upgrading or downgrading your BIOS but what worked for me was downgrading to AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB, both Windows and Linux has stopped crashing now, although I still get the occasional lockup when browsing with Firefox on Linux. I found out the culprit after stumbling into this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc_build_ryzen_3_3200gasrock_b450m_hdv_r4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc...
KozmoNau7 6y ago
It's anecdotal of course, but my RX560 has been absolutely flawless on both Ubuntu and openSUSE, literally out of the box support on a standard install.
esistgut 6y ago
Ryzen 3700X and Radeon 5700 XT here. Not a single problem.
tankenmate 6y ago
I have recently used Radeon 550, 560, 570, 5500 on AMD 5050e (yes, that old!), Ryzen 1600 (non af), 3100, 3600 and all have worked fine, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04. In fact on average I have found the various hardware configurations to be about 5% faster on Linux than Windows.

gcb0 6y ago

You don't even have to go to open source. You can see this hostile behaviour from their top-paying clients! Microsoft own previous gen Xbox emulator on the next gen xbox (i think it was original xbox emulated in the 360, but i might be wrong) was impacted by the team having to reverse-engineer the GPU because nvidia refused to let the emulator people to have access to the documentation provided to the original team.

exikyut 6y ago
Stumbling around Google didn't find me much more info on this, do you have any citations or keywords I could follow up on?
- gcb0 6y ago
  try a better search engine :) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=falcon+emulator+xbox+team+reverse+engineer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=falcon+emulator+xbox+team+reverse+... some interesting results from the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175998 (lol, 4th result send us back here) https://www.onmsft.com/news/xbox-one-uses-virtual-xbox-360-and-emulation-achieve-backward-compatibility https://www.onmsft.com/news/xbox-one-uses-virtual-xbox-360-a...

xvilka 6y ago

Yes, they only can do only one good thing - go bankrupt. That would be the best news for open-source.

amelius 6y ago
Should open-source perhaps drop NVidia, instead of the other way around?
- posguy 6y ago
  This divestiture happened long ago, if your running Linux not on a server, then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box. Even there though, only Intel has a buttery smooth experience. Ryzen for laptops is half baked (terrible USB C docking performance, occasional crashing on Windows and Linux with the 2xxxU series CPU/GPU chips) and AMD GPUs still require manual intervention to load proprietary firmware. AMD does make some performant mobile GPUs though, they work well in Debian!
  - lmm 6y ago
    Funny, I stick with NVidia because they still offer more reliable, performant drivers for Linux (or these days FreeBSD), open source or no.
    - posguy 6y ago
      How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers? I switched to Wayland a few years back as vsync is quite nice to have, but whenever I go back to Xorg for AnyDesk or TeamViewer on AMD or Intel there is a fair bit of tearing. Nvidia could have a competitive open source driver tomorrow if they released redistributable firmware that allowed reclocking the GPU.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers? As a FreeBSD user I'm still "trapped" on Xorg anyway, and in any case I'd rather stick with what works than learn some whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits.

est31 6y ago

In recent years, Linux computers have evolved to a major revenue source for Nvidia thanks to deep learning. However, not desktop users are behind this but servers, due to Nvidia's proprietary CUDA API. If they open sourced it or rebuilt it on top of mesa, it'd make it easier for AMD to implement CUDA, getting access to the deep learning ecosystem that's currently locked into CUDA. Nvidia's sales would take a huge drop. So I think it's even more likely that their drivers remain proprietary.

llukas 6y ago
Reality check? https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipDNN https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipDNN CUDA just works.
- est31 6y ago
  ROCm exists but many frameworks don't support it. https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/16541 https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/16541
  - t-vi 6y ago
    PyTorch supports ROCm quite well if you can follow three step build instructions instructions (https://lernapparat.de/pytorch-rocm/ https://lernapparat.de/pytorch-rocm/). TVM.ai also supports ROCm well. TF I didn't check. FP32 performance for the VII is comparable to GTX20280Ti e.g. on Resnet training. Tensor Cores are cool, but 90% of people don't use FP16 that much. I'm not sure that is the best reply that stackoverflow has ever seen.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      The problem is that ROCm does not support many AMD compute cards, like their top of the line Navi-based one-year-old 5700 family. Most frameworks do support ROCm though, so the ball is on AMDs court.

fluffything 6y ago

> Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: Is this an Ad Hominem ? Linus does not mention there a single thing that they are actually doing wrong. > Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME. Drew just does not want to support the nvidia-wy in wl-roots, which is a super super niche WM toolkit whose "major" user is sway, another super super niche WM. Drew is angry for two reasons. First, sway users complain to them that sway does not work with nvidia hardware, which as a user of a WM is a rightful thing to complain about. Second, Drew does not want to support the nvidia-way, and it is angry and nvidia because they do not support the way that wl-roots has chosen. It is 100% ok for Drew to say that they don't want to maintain 2 code-paths, and wl-roots and sway do not support nvidia. It is also 100% ok for nvidia to consider wl-roots to niche to be worth the effort. What's IMO not ok is for Drew to feel entitled about getting nvidia to support wl-roots. Nvidia does not owe wl-roots anything. --- IMO when it comes to drivers and open-source, a lot of the anger and conflict seems to steem from a sentiment of entitlement. I read online comments _every day_ of people that have bought some hardware that's advertised as "does not support Linux" (or Macos, or whatever) being angry at the hardware manufacturer (why doesn't your hardware support the platform that says it does not support? I'm entitled to support!!!), the dozens of volunteers that reverse engineer and develop open source drivers for free (why doesn't the open source driver that you develop in your free time work correctly? I'm entitled to you working for free for me so that I can watch netflix!), etc. etc. etc. The truth of the matter is, that for people using nvidia hardware on linux for Machine Learning, CAD, rendering, visualization, games, etc. their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support. The only complaints I hear is people buying nvidia to do something that they know is not supported and then lashing out at everybody else due to entitlement.

DCKing 6y ago
What exactly are you invested in in this discussion? We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices. But you seem to just want to take on people's personal views on Nvidia now. You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices. I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market. But even if you don't agree with some/most of the complaints surely you must agree that Nvidia's track record of pissing of both other companies (and people) is problematic for when they take control of a company with an ecosystem driven business model like ARM's?

hanselot 6y ago

I remember waiting years to purchase my first "decent" GPU. The GTX580, specifically because it was confirmed by NVIDIA on their blogs that FERMI cards would fully support Vulkan. I spent so much money on that card, expecting full CUDA and Vulkan support soon after. Then Nvidia canned Fermi vulkan support silently. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you.