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The real shame is that Nvidia is still doing binary blob drivers 15 years after I started caring about Linux. Are they really that afraid of someone taking thei

The real shame is that Nvidia is still doing binary blob drivers 15 years after I started caring about Linux. Are they really that afraid of someone taking their Lucky Charms?

banachtarski 6y ago
Well, in their defense, I generally haven't run into any issues with their driver and it's also pretty easy to package/install as an enduser.
- sushisource 6y ago
  I agree, if it weren't for the fact that they give zero shits about Wayland support. I'd be totally fine with them staying closed source as long as they kept up with the standards.
  - izacus 6y ago
    What are you talking about? Wayland is supported on DEs that wanted to support nVidia chips. Meanwhile projects like Sway have a direct "Go to hell if you use nVidia, we won't let you run this code." It's bizarre that you blame nVidia for this.
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      It’s “””supported”””. It’s apparently very buggy and very difficult to debug. Sway lets you run it after you set a flag making it very clear that if something is broken you may not report a bug since the developers are unable to reasonably fix it. Most Linux distro will also prevent you submitting a bug report for a kernel issue if you have a tainted kernel.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      It's possible to create a Wayland compositor that works with the proprietary nVidia drivers, but it requires using nVidia-specific interfaces because nVidia refuses to support the same interfaces for non-GLX, non-X11 hardware acceleration provided by every other Linux graphics driver. It's hardly surprising that a lot of Wayland compositor developers would rather not put in a ton of extra effort to add a special case for one particular set of proprietary drivers, which they would then need to maintain and support separately from the common code path.
      - 1_player 6y ago
        To tell the whole story, the NVIDIA argument is that they want cross platform standard interfaces (EGLStream), which would use the same code the Windows driver uses, but the Linux world is pushing for Linux-only interfaces (EGL)
        1_player 6y ago
        Typo, by Linux-only interface I meant GBM.
        nybble41 6y ago
        That may be, but the fact remains that nVidia is pushing an interface that no other Linux drivers currently support, for reasons that really only benefit them. The Linux kernel team has never been particularly supportive of middleware layers designed to promote common drivers between Linux and other operating systems, and for good reason—it impedes the development of optimized, native Linux drivers. The only way I see nVidia succeeding here is if they clearly demonstrate that EGLStreams is a technically superior alternative to GBM, not just for their own hardware but in general, and also contribute the changes needed to support EGLStreams for all the other graphics drivers currently using GBM so that applications don't need to deal with both systems. As long as the EGLStreams code path can only be exercised in combination with the proprietary nVidia drivers it will remain a second-class citizen and projects would be well-advised to avoid it. (Drew DeVault goes into more detail[1] in his objection to the inclusion of EGLStreams support in KWin, which I agree with 100%.) Or they could just acknowledge that this is a Linux driver, not a Windows driver, and implement the standard Linux GBM interfaces like everyone else even if that means less shared code. [1] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3C20190220154143.GA31283%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3C20190220154143...
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Is it? This is the same driver that makes me shut down X and fucks up xorg.conf every time I need to update?
  - mistaken 6y ago
    Not to mention that nvidia uses proprietary configuration options even in Xorg.conf. A multi-monitor configuration which works fine in nouveau (or really any other driver) refuses to work with nvidia, because if you use the binary driver you have to set bizarre metamode options to make it work.
- mcguire 6y ago
  I have. Like keeping a copy of the last page you viewed in Chrome and overlaying it on the screen after exiting the browser. That one is fun.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    I encountered a real fun bug where a game on linux crashed and a ghost of the game remained on the monitor even after it was connected to a different computer and power cycled, it remained for days. Some really interesting cascading bugs there.
    - cesarb 6y ago
      That reminds me of the spookiest bug I've ever encountered: once, when resuming a Dell laptop from suspend at work, it showed a Windows desktop. Said laptop had been running Linux exclusively for several months (but it had previously been used with Windows). Interacting with the laptop made the expected xscreensaver unlock screen appear, and everything worked normally afterwards. The only explanation I could come up with was that, somehow, a snapshot of the Windows screen had survived intact in a corner of the framebuffer which the Linux driver didn't touch, even after months of power off/on and suspend/resume cycles, and a bizarre driver glitch made it visible in that particular resume cycle.
      - ateng 6y ago
        The said windows desktop ghost screen didn’t have date time on start menu, did it?
        cesarb 6y ago
        If I recall correctly, the Windows XP default was to show only the time, so the date probably wasn't visible.
    - marcan_42 6y ago
      That's not a software bug, that's an image retention issue with your monitor. If it was that severe then it probably got into a state where it was sending severely invalid timings to the TFT LCD array, DC biasing it, which causes long-term retention and may even cause permanent damage if done for too long. Software isn't supposed to be able to cause that. That's on your monitor.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  I still haven't been able to get my laptop's 1660Ti to display anything else than glitch art, proprietary or nouveau.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  I have. I needed a prerelease kernel for a new driver but nvidia had not released a binary for the new kernel yet so I was unable to use anything but the open source nvidia driver.
  - wang_li 6y ago
    You could just as easily blame the author of the driver that only works on a prerelease kernel.
- asddubs 6y ago
  wayland doesn't work at all so if you have a 4k monitor and a non-4k monitor and an nvidia card, you're basically just fucked, because you can't selectively scale things
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
My new theory is the Nvidia driver can't be GPL and in the Linux kernel, because then they couldn't ban datacenter usage of their GeForce cards by not licensing the driver for datacenter use. The upcharge on the Tesla series of cards is huge compared to GeForce for mostly the same chips. (For those not aware, see if you can find and GTX 2080 or 3080 from a cloud provider. It's not a thing. This is actually a huge deal for the machine learning industry, massively increasing costs. I doubt Google would have made the TPU if not for this.) Also, their driver is very complex, and they are constantly improving their hardware. They don't want to be dependent on getting new features and performance improvements upstreamed.
- amelius 6y ago
  > not licensing the driver for datacenter use. Why are these kind of licenses even allowed. If I buy a product, surely I can do with it as I please? Also, why doesn't TSMC slap a license on every IC that leaves their fab, taking (say) a 30% profit from every application in which their ICs are being used?
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    lol. When was the last time anyone actually bought a copy of software? You own nothing. You are a party to a contract written by nvidia and signed by you when you installed their driver. You can do only what they allow and they can yank thier permission whenever they see fit. Not happy? That is what makes FOSS so appealing.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      > When was the last time anyone actually bought a copy of software? Satya Nadella bought Skyrim recently. All of it.
      - jackvalentine 6y ago
        Skyrim includes licensed code such as Bink Video.
chrisseaton 6y ago
Maybe they can't open-source it because they don't own all the IP? That's very likely the case for Windows as well, for example, Microsoft just didn't licence all the code they used for releasing the source, and now you can't go back to 1000 different IP owners and negotiate anything reasonable.
- bonzini 6y ago
  Didn't they have to manually prepare a binary patch for a security issue in the Word Equation Editor, because they either lost or could not compile the source code anymore?
  - skissane 6y ago
    The original Equation Editor was licensed from a third party (Design Science), and it is possible that Microsoft never had the source code. Maybe the third party vendor lost the source code, but I think it is more likely that getting the third party vendor to fix the bug would have required negotiation with that vendor, and maybe Microsoft and that vendor were having trouble agreeing. (This is speculation on my part, I have no inside info.)
    - jamiek88 6y ago
      Or equally likely, that vendor no longer exists.
      - easton 6y ago
        Likely, perhaps, but not true, since they still exist: https://www.dessci.com/en/ https://www.dessci.com/en/ Microsoft probably started wondering internally why they don't just write their own equation editor, but didn't have time, so decided to do a crazy patch to this one and then start on a rewrite.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Well, at the very least, they could allow loading unsigned firmware, or allow their firmware to be redistributed, then. This is the number one usability issue with nouveau: no firmware means no re-clocking, which means bad perf.
paulmd 6y ago
second-hand information but apparently the reason they can't is that the driver contains code licensed from other companies and they can't open-source that. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j217oo/gamers_nexus_the_real_problem_with_rtx_3080/g734l93/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j217oo/gamers_nex... while obviously not an official source, that isn't particularly surprising either. as an additional relatively-well-known-but-possibly-incorrect bit of internet lore, right now their Linux driver is basically a wrapper around their Windows driver, so that explanation makes a lot of sense. They would have to go through and disentangle what parts they own and what needs to be stripped out / replaced for the linux version at an absolute minimum.
CamperBob2 6y ago
Are they really that afraid of someone taking their Lucky Charms? They're afraid of patent trolls.
severino 6y ago
Why is it a shame? They had been providing quality Linux drivers for years, when nobody else cared about high-end graphics for Linux. Remember fglrx? Now AMD is opensource? Great! However, it's still very far from perfect. You only have to take a look at the list of AMDGPU issues at freedesktop[1]... because being opensource is easy, but working fine in a stable manner is another. [1]https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Providing support for a marginal platform is also much harder when you’re <0.1 times the size.
- shmerl 6y ago
  It's shame, because they hinder the progress of Linux desktop and prevent Nouveau from reclocking properly. And what about AMD bug tracker? It's open, so you can see the bugs. That's a plus, not a minus. Nvidia blob has all the bugs hidden somewhere, so you don't see them. It doesn't mean the blob doesn't have them.
  - severino 6y ago
    > It's shame, because they hinder the progress of Linux desktop and prevent Nouveau from reclocking properly. I think it's the opposite. Some years ago, Nvidia was your only chance to have accelerated graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD didn't care about it at all, and Intel cards were not for gaming. So Nvidia made it possible to do things in Linux when nobody else allowed you to... how's that hindering the progress of anything? Specially when nobody forces you to get an Nvidia card. > And what about AMD bug tracker? It's open, so you can see the bugs. That's a plus, not a minus. Nvidia blob has all the bugs hidden somewhere, so you don't see them. It doesn't mean the blob doesn't have them. Yes, I didn't say Nvidia was bug free. I just said AMD drivers for Linux are, at the moment, far from perfect, despite being opensource. I'd say, for newer cards, they're worse than Nvidia's. I value opensource, but if I have to choose between having an opensource desktop crashing twice a day, vs. the Nvidia blob, of course I'd go for the latter, as much as I'd love to have a fully opensource OS.
javchz 6y ago
That's my dream... or in a short time frame at least wayland support.

The real shame is that Nvidia is still doing binary blob drivers 15 years after I started caring about Linux. Are they really that afraid of someone taking their Lucky Charms?

banachtarski 6y ago

Well, in their defense, I generally haven't run into any issues with their driver and it's also pretty easy to package/install as an enduser.

sushisource 6y ago
I agree, if it weren't for the fact that they give zero shits about Wayland support. I'd be totally fine with them staying closed source as long as they kept up with the standards.
- izacus 6y ago
  What are you talking about? Wayland is supported on DEs that wanted to support nVidia chips. Meanwhile projects like Sway have a direct "Go to hell if you use nVidia, we won't let you run this code." It's bizarre that you blame nVidia for this.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    It’s “””supported”””. It’s apparently very buggy and very difficult to debug. Sway lets you run it after you set a flag making it very clear that if something is broken you may not report a bug since the developers are unable to reasonably fix it. Most Linux distro will also prevent you submitting a bug report for a kernel issue if you have a tainted kernel.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    It's possible to create a Wayland compositor that works with the proprietary nVidia drivers, but it requires using nVidia-specific interfaces because nVidia refuses to support the same interfaces for non-GLX, non-X11 hardware acceleration provided by every other Linux graphics driver. It's hardly surprising that a lot of Wayland compositor developers would rather not put in a ton of extra effort to add a special case for one particular set of proprietary drivers, which they would then need to maintain and support separately from the common code path.
    - 1_player 6y ago
      To tell the whole story, the NVIDIA argument is that they want cross platform standard interfaces (EGLStream), which would use the same code the Windows driver uses, but the Linux world is pushing for Linux-only interfaces (EGL)
      - 1_player 6y ago
        Typo, by Linux-only interface I meant GBM.
      - nybble41 6y ago
        That may be, but the fact remains that nVidia is pushing an interface that no other Linux drivers currently support, for reasons that really only benefit them. The Linux kernel team has never been particularly supportive of middleware layers designed to promote common drivers between Linux and other operating systems, and for good reason—it impedes the development of optimized, native Linux drivers. The only way I see nVidia succeeding here is if they clearly demonstrate that EGLStreams is a technically superior alternative to GBM, not just for their own hardware but in general, and also contribute the changes needed to support EGLStreams for all the other graphics drivers currently using GBM so that applications don't need to deal with both systems. As long as the EGLStreams code path can only be exercised in combination with the proprietary nVidia drivers it will remain a second-class citizen and projects would be well-advised to avoid it. (Drew DeVault goes into more detail[1] in his objection to the inclusion of EGLStreams support in KWin, which I agree with 100%.) Or they could just acknowledge that this is a Linux driver, not a Windows driver, and implement the standard Linux GBM interfaces like everyone else even if that means less shared code. [1] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3C20190220154143.GA31283%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3C20190220154143...
tomc1985 6y ago
Is it? This is the same driver that makes me shut down X and fucks up xorg.conf every time I need to update?
- mistaken 6y ago
  Not to mention that nvidia uses proprietary configuration options even in Xorg.conf. A multi-monitor configuration which works fine in nouveau (or really any other driver) refuses to work with nvidia, because if you use the binary driver you have to set bizarre metamode options to make it work.
mcguire 6y ago
I have. Like keeping a copy of the last page you viewed in Chrome and overlaying it on the screen after exiting the browser. That one is fun.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  I encountered a real fun bug where a game on linux crashed and a ghost of the game remained on the monitor even after it was connected to a different computer and power cycled, it remained for days. Some really interesting cascading bugs there.
  - cesarb 6y ago
    That reminds me of the spookiest bug I've ever encountered: once, when resuming a Dell laptop from suspend at work, it showed a Windows desktop. Said laptop had been running Linux exclusively for several months (but it had previously been used with Windows). Interacting with the laptop made the expected xscreensaver unlock screen appear, and everything worked normally afterwards. The only explanation I could come up with was that, somehow, a snapshot of the Windows screen had survived intact in a corner of the framebuffer which the Linux driver didn't touch, even after months of power off/on and suspend/resume cycles, and a bizarre driver glitch made it visible in that particular resume cycle.
    - ateng 6y ago
      The said windows desktop ghost screen didn’t have date time on start menu, did it?
      - cesarb 6y ago
        If I recall correctly, the Windows XP default was to show only the time, so the date probably wasn't visible.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    That's not a software bug, that's an image retention issue with your monitor. If it was that severe then it probably got into a state where it was sending severely invalid timings to the TFT LCD array, DC biasing it, which causes long-term retention and may even cause permanent damage if done for too long. Software isn't supposed to be able to cause that. That's on your monitor.
Nullabillity 6y ago
I still haven't been able to get my laptop's 1660Ti to display anything else than glitch art, proprietary or nouveau.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
I have. I needed a prerelease kernel for a new driver but nvidia had not released a binary for the new kernel yet so I was unable to use anything but the open source nvidia driver.
- wang_li 6y ago
  You could just as easily blame the author of the driver that only works on a prerelease kernel.
asddubs 6y ago
wayland doesn't work at all so if you have a 4k monitor and a non-4k monitor and an nvidia card, you're basically just fucked, because you can't selectively scale things

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

My new theory is the Nvidia driver can't be GPL and in the Linux kernel, because then they couldn't ban datacenter usage of their GeForce cards by not licensing the driver for datacenter use. The upcharge on the Tesla series of cards is huge compared to GeForce for mostly the same chips. (For those not aware, see if you can find and GTX 2080 or 3080 from a cloud provider. It's not a thing. This is actually a huge deal for the machine learning industry, massively increasing costs. I doubt Google would have made the TPU if not for this.) Also, their driver is very complex, and they are constantly improving their hardware. They don't want to be dependent on getting new features and performance improvements upstreamed.

amelius 6y ago
> not licensing the driver for datacenter use. Why are these kind of licenses even allowed. If I buy a product, surely I can do with it as I please? Also, why doesn't TSMC slap a license on every IC that leaves their fab, taking (say) a 30% profit from every application in which their ICs are being used?
- sandworm101 6y ago
  lol. When was the last time anyone actually bought a copy of software? You own nothing. You are a party to a contract written by nvidia and signed by you when you installed their driver. You can do only what they allow and they can yank thier permission whenever they see fit. Not happy? That is what makes FOSS so appealing.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    > When was the last time anyone actually bought a copy of software? Satya Nadella bought Skyrim recently. All of it.
    - jackvalentine 6y ago
      Skyrim includes licensed code such as Bink Video.

chrisseaton 6y ago

Maybe they can't open-source it because they don't own all the IP? That's very likely the case for Windows as well, for example, Microsoft just didn't licence all the code they used for releasing the source, and now you can't go back to 1000 different IP owners and negotiate anything reasonable.

bonzini 6y ago
Didn't they have to manually prepare a binary patch for a security issue in the Word Equation Editor, because they either lost or could not compile the source code anymore?
- skissane 6y ago
  The original Equation Editor was licensed from a third party (Design Science), and it is possible that Microsoft never had the source code. Maybe the third party vendor lost the source code, but I think it is more likely that getting the third party vendor to fix the bug would have required negotiation with that vendor, and maybe Microsoft and that vendor were having trouble agreeing. (This is speculation on my part, I have no inside info.)
  - jamiek88 6y ago
    Or equally likely, that vendor no longer exists.
    - easton 6y ago
      Likely, perhaps, but not true, since they still exist: https://www.dessci.com/en/ https://www.dessci.com/en/ Microsoft probably started wondering internally why they don't just write their own equation editor, but didn't have time, so decided to do a crazy patch to this one and then start on a rewrite.
MayeulC 6y ago
Well, at the very least, they could allow loading unsigned firmware, or allow their firmware to be redistributed, then. This is the number one usability issue with nouveau: no firmware means no re-clocking, which means bad perf.

paulmd 6y ago

second-hand information but apparently the reason they can't is that the driver contains code licensed from other companies and they can't open-source that. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j217oo/gamers_nexus_the_real_problem_with_rtx_3080/g734l93/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j217oo/gamers_nex... while obviously not an official source, that isn't particularly surprising either. as an additional relatively-well-known-but-possibly-incorrect bit of internet lore, right now their Linux driver is basically a wrapper around their Windows driver, so that explanation makes a lot of sense. They would have to go through and disentangle what parts they own and what needs to be stripped out / replaced for the linux version at an absolute minimum.

CamperBob2 6y ago

Are they really that afraid of someone taking their Lucky Charms? They're afraid of patent trolls.

severino 6y ago

Why is it a shame? They had been providing quality Linux drivers for years, when nobody else cared about high-end graphics for Linux. Remember fglrx? Now AMD is opensource? Great! However, it's still very far from perfect. You only have to take a look at the list of AMDGPU issues at freedesktop[1]... because being opensource is easy, but working fine in a stable manner is another. [1]https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues

Aeolun 6y ago
Providing support for a marginal platform is also much harder when you’re <0.1 times the size.
shmerl 6y ago
It's shame, because they hinder the progress of Linux desktop and prevent Nouveau from reclocking properly. And what about AMD bug tracker? It's open, so you can see the bugs. That's a plus, not a minus. Nvidia blob has all the bugs hidden somewhere, so you don't see them. It doesn't mean the blob doesn't have them.
- severino 6y ago
  > It's shame, because they hinder the progress of Linux desktop and prevent Nouveau from reclocking properly. I think it's the opposite. Some years ago, Nvidia was your only chance to have accelerated graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD didn't care about it at all, and Intel cards were not for gaming. So Nvidia made it possible to do things in Linux when nobody else allowed you to... how's that hindering the progress of anything? Specially when nobody forces you to get an Nvidia card. > And what about AMD bug tracker? It's open, so you can see the bugs. That's a plus, not a minus. Nvidia blob has all the bugs hidden somewhere, so you don't see them. It doesn't mean the blob doesn't have them. Yes, I didn't say Nvidia was bug free. I just said AMD drivers for Linux are, at the moment, far from perfect, despite being opensource. I'd say, for newer cards, they're worse than Nvidia's. I value opensource, but if I have to choose between having an opensource desktop crashing twice a day, vs. the Nvidia blob, of course I'd go for the latter, as much as I'd love to have a fully opensource OS.

javchz 6y ago

That's my dream... or in a short time frame at least wayland support.