10 ms·

A Case for Open-Source GPU Drivers

82 points by ssp 15y ago

wmf 15y ago
An example problem of proprietary drivers: Nvidia doesn't support the latest KMS/GEM APIs which are needed for smooth-looking boot and (I guess) for future stuff like Wayland. If the driver was open, the community would have ported it.
- marshray 15y ago
  Hmmm. I'm not shedding any tears over the lack of graphical boot. I like to watch the messages. What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    Hmmm. I'm not shedding any tears over the lack of graphical boot. I like to watch the messages. It's not just about having or not having boot messages, which are still there in framebuffer mode if you want them. In fact, with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen, with large fonts if you like. A major part of the issue is video mode switches causing ugly flickers, with many LCD monitors taking ages to resync and turn the backlight on after a mode change. You can miss a lot of boot messages in those precious seconds. Sometimes my monitor takes so long to sync that I don't even get to see the BIOS screen or GRUB menu. Meta rant: why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do? What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook. Putting all drivers in the hands of the kernel subsystem maintainers would go a long way toward solving that.
    - marshray 15y ago
      with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen That would be nice. why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do? In this case, I'll admit I'm not a fan of splash screens in general. I've been a teeny-tiny bit annoyed over the years at the level of effort I've seen kernel and distro developers put into graphical boot schemes when it seemed to comes at the expense of more basic stuff, like you know, working drivers for things after the boot was complete. But it's their time and energy. If they want to put it into showing a penguin holding a beer that's their business. To me it's usually a sign of form-over-function, or functions-I-don't-want-over-functions-I-do.
      - nitrogen 15y ago
        I started working with the Linux framebuffer a long time ago. The penguin boot logo was cool, but the biggest benefit was being able to code in a 128x43 (or bigger) terminal without running X. I see KMS as the long-overdue fulfillment of the dream I had then of decoupling high-end video support from X.org.
        marshray 15y ago
        Yeah, that would be cool. I used to work that way too. These days my coding usually requires a pdf reader and web browser at some point. It would be cool to be able to launch an OpenGL app without X though.
        nitrogen 15y ago
        Back then I was using links2 in graphical mode, fbi for viewing images, and fbgs for reading PDFs. Since I'm working with web apps and WebGL now, I'm obviously running X.
      - jiggy2011 15y ago
        Entirely agree, I remember my first Linux install (Suse 6.x) seeing all of those messages fly onto the screen , first from the bios and then from Linux. It would go straight to a text login then I would type "startx" to get the GUI up. Also made it much easier to tell WTF was going on with your system and displayed all those warning messages that I am guessing are just hidden away now unless you happen to look at dmesg.
- binarycrusader 15y ago
  I disagree with "needed". It's entirely possible to have a modern, "smooth-looking boot" now even with the nVidia drivers as they are. Wayland support is a valid point though. Regardless, nVidia remains at the top of the pile in terms of performance and support on Linux. Especially for high-end 3D applications like Maya, CUDA, etc. nVidia also has fundamental disagreements about the right graphics architecture for the system with many of the Linux folk. I personally think nVidia's concerns about that are valid. It's unclear whether GEM, etc. are the right long-term approach.
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    Providing documentation sufficient to write an open source driver would not prevent nvidia from also providing a binary driver that does things the "right" way.
    - slug 15y ago
      Unfortunately I don't think this will ever happen, since from what I know, most of the nvidia binary driver is basically a firmware to run the 'dumb' multi-core gpu hardware. Giving this away would provide valuable knowledge to their competition.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Saying that the nVidia drivers are "at the top of the pile" doesn't say much for the competition. Just a few of the problems that I have had: 1) In a 2 Monitor setup there is no way to rotate one of the monitors into portrait mode without the other unless you create them as 2 seperate X sessions. 2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird. 3) A very odd issue where on my second monitor the fonts will randomly screw up or parts of a window randomly become transparent and I can see the window behind (seems to happen mostly with flash) through it. Only way to fix it is to disable and then re-enable monitor. Yes, I used to have an ATI card and I can confirm that it had just as many if not more issues.
    - thristian 15y ago
rhizome 15y ago
First we need an open-documentation GPU.
- wmf 15y ago
  AMD/ATI Radeon. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4OA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4O... Even with documentation, the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    I have heard good things about ATI on Linux, but perhaps the problems are only a personnel issue? Suffice it to say that if I'm going to be keeping Linux on my desktop that my next video card will be ATI, which means that my current frustrations are due to Nvidia ownershp.
    - ImprovedSilence 15y ago
      I couldn't complain enough about Linux with Nvidia cards... The worst part is, my card is something like 8 years old now (The old Dell is still going strong as ever now) so it's a legacy card they won't even open source, it's not like they are ever going to make money from the drivers for Gforce4 ever again...
      - marshray 15y ago
        I have a 2 year old laptop with Nvidia. The driver installer is surprisingly smart (and not in a bad way). I have working accelerated OpenGL 3.3. It doesn't suck, as far as tained kernel modules go. I wouldn't expect miracles with an 8 year old card though.
        exDM69 15y ago
        Nvidia does a decent job with new GPU's when it comes to 3d and basic graphics. It did a good job with the old GPU's too, but I guess the old drivers aren't maintained a lot. However, the Nvidia binary driver still lacks some features when it comes to multiple displays, etc. HDMI connect/disconnect does not work on a laptop. There's no Xrandr support yet, so hotplugging displays and screen rotation, etc is not quite there. X has to be restarted more often than I want. I've heard they're working on Xrandr and other stuff. I still think that they should be open sourced, though.
moomin 15y ago
I believe a lot of the problem is that the major vendors believe they'll expose themselves to patent lawsuits by making it easier for aggressors to make a case.
- derleth 15y ago
  Since when is it hard for a patent troll to make a case?
  - marshray 15y ago
    It's not just "patent trolls". Patent thickets and minefields are common in the hardware world. Perhaps you remember the lawsuits and "cross-licensing agreements" between Intel and AMD years past? Plus, it doesn't have to mean that it's hard to do in the first place. Being able to grep someone's source code tends to make it a bit easier to find that obvious usage of the 'if' statement (or whatever) that you have a patent on.
- adestefan 15y ago
  Besides any patents there are issues were Nvidia/AMD do not write every piece of their drivers. They can't unilaterally open source pieces of code that they don't even own the copyright on.
  - marshray 15y ago
    That's always an issue with open-sourcing any large code base. It's always been worked around before.
sedachv 15y ago
IMO all drivers need to be Free Software. The problem is that as soon as you introduce loadable modules into a kernel, there's really no way to prevent them because of the precedent set by Linux. One of the reasons the LGPL was developed was the linking issue, but Linux developers seem to be ok with letting binary blob modules as a "gray area": http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 If Linux developers had from the start demanded Free Software drivers, they'd have had them (please spare me the arguments about "Linux wouldn't have grown if they didn't allow binary drivers"). Letting that precedent pass means that hardware developers don't have many incentives to provide sources for their drivers. This affects not just Linux, but all Free Software operating systems.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I would guess that it's roughly in the same ballpark as non GPL software being able to run on Linux. Just happens to be ring0 rather than ring3. I don't think it is realistic to expect all drivers to be Free Software especially specifically distributed under GPL. A huge number of Linux drivers are GPL anyway. What makes you so confident that Linux hackers would have managed to reverse engineer all nVidia's stuff to the point of having a good stable performant driver? Especially considering nVidia release new cards with new capabilities (thus requiring driver modifications) very frequently. If nVidia had decided that they would release no free driver and therefor no driver at all, I don't see the business case for somebody being paid to develop a free software driver for nVidia cards and it's certainly not a weekend project.
  - sedachv 15y ago
    The problem is that all the ARM-system chipsets are shipping binary-only drivers for Android and OMAP devices, even though Linux is used almost exclusively on those devices. That's the business case. nVidia may not care about Linux because it's a tiny portion of their market, but chip manufacturers (like PowerVR, for example) would have had to release Free Software drivers if Linux hadn't set the binary precedent. This would also be true for a lot of other hardware now. But unless there's a radical change in policy, it's too late. What's the point of having a Free Software OS if you can't run it on your hardware because the closed-source drivers won't work?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ggchappell 15y ago
The reasons for not open-sourcing the drivers don't make sense to me. Sure, the community might not have the knowledge necessary to improve your drivers, but then no harm done. Drivers might be taken in directions you don't want them to go? These companies release new chips multiple times per year. With them come new drivers. Who cares what directions the old drivers take? And furthermore, chip companies might just get free driver debugging. That makes their chips look better. It makes them look better. More sales. Is there any possibility that the real reason for the lack of open-source drivers, is that in many cases "different" graphics chips are essentially the same, and what you're really paying for with the more expensive ones, is a driver that enables high-end functionality? Open-sourcing would wreck that.
- wmf 15y ago
  These companies release new chips multiple times per year. With them come new drivers. Not really. Because different GPU generations tend to be similar, they tend to have "unified" drivers that support multiple GPU models. This leads to problems if the community has diverged from your last code drop and now merging is really expensive and you'll get blamed if you don't do it (see Android). Then there are additional problems because the vendors want to use the same driver core on Windows and Linux, but they definitely don't want to GPL the Windows version so they can't accept any GPL patches from Linux people, etc. (see Broadcom)
  - Zak 15y ago
    they definitely don't want to GPL the Windows version Why not? Do the drivers provide them with a competitive advantage over anybody else? In the case of a GPU, I imagine they might. In the case of a wireless card, modem or something of that sort it seems pretty unlikely.
- exDM69 15y ago
  I agree with you that GPU drivers should be open sourced. In fact, all driver source code should be released for all operating systems. They also should ship with instruction manuals and data sheets with circuit diagrams. I write GPU driver software (in userspace) for living. I'd be much more happier if I could push my code to GitHub for everyone to see. However, I do understand that keeping the drivers secret can be a competitive advantage. GPU's are devices unlike any other, they're all different from vendor to vendor and model to model. The driver source code will reveal crucial parts of the hardware design. Knowing what your adversaries have in their chip is a disadvantage to them. I guess some reverse engineering probably takes place, but that is at a whole different level than actually seeing the source code. OpenGL is also an issue. It's a nasty legacy API from Silicon Graphics, dating back to 1992 or so. It's not only a very crappy API for the programmer, it's also hell to implement. If you don't believe me, try to look for texture completeness rules in the GL spec (the problem doesn't exist in Direct3D, because they don't have backward compatibility or legacy API's to deal with). So, having a working OpenGL implementation that passes the 30,000+ conformance test cases is also a competitive advantage you don't want to give away. It's worth several years of programmer effort. However, I still think that we and everyone else should open source their GPU drivers and OpenGL implementations and compete in who makes the baddass-est silicon chips.
wtracy 15y ago
A missed bullet point: Ability for FOSS developers to port drivers to obscure platforms. Right now the Haiku OS folks are having a heck of a time trying to get hardware acceleration to work with nVidia hardware.
tintin 15y ago
Maybe it should start with open hardware. The Open Graphics Project seems dead, but maybe there are other alternatives. There are a lot of open hardware projects lately. Synthesizers, computers, 3D printers. All great examples. But video cards might be too complex to be open.

82 points by ssp 15y ago

wmf 15y ago

An example problem of proprietary drivers: Nvidia doesn't support the latest KMS/GEM APIs which are needed for smooth-looking boot and (I guess) for future stuff like Wayland. If the driver was open, the community would have ported it.

marshray 15y ago
Hmmm. I'm not shedding any tears over the lack of graphical boot. I like to watch the messages. What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  Hmmm. I'm not shedding any tears over the lack of graphical boot. I like to watch the messages. It's not just about having or not having boot messages, which are still there in framebuffer mode if you want them. In fact, with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen, with large fonts if you like. A major part of the issue is video mode switches causing ugly flickers, with many LCD monitors taking ages to resync and turn the backlight on after a mode change. You can miss a lot of boot messages in those precious seconds. Sometimes my monitor takes so long to sync that I don't even get to see the BIOS screen or GRUB menu. Meta rant: why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do? What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook. Putting all drivers in the hands of the kernel subsystem maintainers would go a long way toward solving that.
  - marshray 15y ago
    with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen That would be nice. why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do? In this case, I'll admit I'm not a fan of splash screens in general. I've been a teeny-tiny bit annoyed over the years at the level of effort I've seen kernel and distro developers put into graphical boot schemes when it seemed to comes at the expense of more basic stuff, like you know, working drivers for things after the boot was complete. But it's their time and energy. If they want to put it into showing a penguin holding a beer that's their business. To me it's usually a sign of form-over-function, or functions-I-don't-want-over-functions-I-do.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      I started working with the Linux framebuffer a long time ago. The penguin boot logo was cool, but the biggest benefit was being able to code in a 128x43 (or bigger) terminal without running X. I see KMS as the long-overdue fulfillment of the dream I had then of decoupling high-end video support from X.org.
      - marshray 15y ago
        Yeah, that would be cool. I used to work that way too. These days my coding usually requires a pdf reader and web browser at some point. It would be cool to be able to launch an OpenGL app without X though.
        nitrogen 15y ago
        Back then I was using links2 in graphical mode, fbi for viewing images, and fbgs for reading PDFs. Since I'm working with web apps and WebGL now, I'm obviously running X.
    - jiggy2011 15y ago
      Entirely agree, I remember my first Linux install (Suse 6.x) seeing all of those messages fly onto the screen , first from the bios and then from Linux. It would go straight to a text login then I would type "startx" to get the GUI up. Also made it much easier to tell WTF was going on with your system and displayed all those warning messages that I am guessing are just hidden away now unless you happen to look at dmesg.
binarycrusader 15y ago
I disagree with "needed". It's entirely possible to have a modern, "smooth-looking boot" now even with the nVidia drivers as they are. Wayland support is a valid point though. Regardless, nVidia remains at the top of the pile in terms of performance and support on Linux. Especially for high-end 3D applications like Maya, CUDA, etc. nVidia also has fundamental disagreements about the right graphics architecture for the system with many of the Linux folk. I personally think nVidia's concerns about that are valid. It's unclear whether GEM, etc. are the right long-term approach.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  Providing documentation sufficient to write an open source driver would not prevent nvidia from also providing a binary driver that does things the "right" way.
  - slug 15y ago
    Unfortunately I don't think this will ever happen, since from what I know, most of the nvidia binary driver is basically a firmware to run the 'dumb' multi-core gpu hardware. Giving this away would provide valuable knowledge to their competition.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Saying that the nVidia drivers are "at the top of the pile" doesn't say much for the competition. Just a few of the problems that I have had: 1) In a 2 Monitor setup there is no way to rotate one of the monitors into portrait mode without the other unless you create them as 2 seperate X sessions. 2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird. 3) A very odd issue where on my second monitor the fonts will randomly screw up or parts of a window randomly become transparent and I can see the window behind (seems to happen mostly with flash) through it. Only way to fix it is to disable and then re-enable monitor. Yes, I used to have an ATI card and I can confirm that it had just as many if not more issues.
  - thristian 15y ago

rhizome 15y ago

First we need an open-documentation GPU.

wmf 15y ago
AMD/ATI Radeon. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4OA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4O... Even with documentation, the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers.
- rhizome 15y ago
  I have heard good things about ATI on Linux, but perhaps the problems are only a personnel issue? Suffice it to say that if I'm going to be keeping Linux on my desktop that my next video card will be ATI, which means that my current frustrations are due to Nvidia ownershp.
  - ImprovedSilence 15y ago
    I couldn't complain enough about Linux with Nvidia cards... The worst part is, my card is something like 8 years old now (The old Dell is still going strong as ever now) so it's a legacy card they won't even open source, it's not like they are ever going to make money from the drivers for Gforce4 ever again...
    - marshray 15y ago
      I have a 2 year old laptop with Nvidia. The driver installer is surprisingly smart (and not in a bad way). I have working accelerated OpenGL 3.3. It doesn't suck, as far as tained kernel modules go. I wouldn't expect miracles with an 8 year old card though.
      - exDM69 15y ago
        Nvidia does a decent job with new GPU's when it comes to 3d and basic graphics. It did a good job with the old GPU's too, but I guess the old drivers aren't maintained a lot. However, the Nvidia binary driver still lacks some features when it comes to multiple displays, etc. HDMI connect/disconnect does not work on a laptop. There's no Xrandr support yet, so hotplugging displays and screen rotation, etc is not quite there. X has to be restarted more often than I want. I've heard they're working on Xrandr and other stuff. I still think that they should be open sourced, though.

moomin 15y ago

I believe a lot of the problem is that the major vendors believe they'll expose themselves to patent lawsuits by making it easier for aggressors to make a case.

derleth 15y ago
Since when is it hard for a patent troll to make a case?
- marshray 15y ago
  It's not just "patent trolls". Patent thickets and minefields are common in the hardware world. Perhaps you remember the lawsuits and "cross-licensing agreements" between Intel and AMD years past? Plus, it doesn't have to mean that it's hard to do in the first place. Being able to grep someone's source code tends to make it a bit easier to find that obvious usage of the 'if' statement (or whatever) that you have a patent on.
adestefan 15y ago
Besides any patents there are issues were Nvidia/AMD do not write every piece of their drivers. They can't unilaterally open source pieces of code that they don't even own the copyright on.
- marshray 15y ago
  That's always an issue with open-sourcing any large code base. It's always been worked around before.

sedachv 15y ago

IMO all drivers need to be Free Software. The problem is that as soon as you introduce loadable modules into a kernel, there's really no way to prevent them because of the precedent set by Linux. One of the reasons the LGPL was developed was the linking issue, but Linux developers seem to be ok with letting binary blob modules as a "gray area": http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 If Linux developers had from the start demanded Free Software drivers, they'd have had them (please spare me the arguments about "Linux wouldn't have grown if they didn't allow binary drivers"). Letting that precedent pass means that hardware developers don't have many incentives to provide sources for their drivers. This affects not just Linux, but all Free Software operating systems.

jiggy2011 15y ago
I would guess that it's roughly in the same ballpark as non GPL software being able to run on Linux. Just happens to be ring0 rather than ring3. I don't think it is realistic to expect all drivers to be Free Software especially specifically distributed under GPL. A huge number of Linux drivers are GPL anyway. What makes you so confident that Linux hackers would have managed to reverse engineer all nVidia's stuff to the point of having a good stable performant driver? Especially considering nVidia release new cards with new capabilities (thus requiring driver modifications) very frequently. If nVidia had decided that they would release no free driver and therefor no driver at all, I don't see the business case for somebody being paid to develop a free software driver for nVidia cards and it's certainly not a weekend project.
- sedachv 15y ago
  The problem is that all the ARM-system chipsets are shipping binary-only drivers for Android and OMAP devices, even though Linux is used almost exclusively on those devices. That's the business case. nVidia may not care about Linux because it's a tiny portion of their market, but chip manufacturers (like PowerVR, for example) would have had to release Free Software drivers if Linux hadn't set the binary precedent. This would also be true for a lot of other hardware now. But unless there's a radical change in policy, it's too late. What's the point of having a Free Software OS if you can't run it on your hardware because the closed-source drivers won't work?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ggchappell 15y ago

The reasons for not open-sourcing the drivers don't make sense to me. Sure, the community might not have the knowledge necessary to improve your drivers, but then no harm done. Drivers might be taken in directions you don't want them to go? These companies release new chips multiple times per year. With them come new drivers. Who cares what directions the old drivers take? And furthermore, chip companies might just get free driver debugging. That makes their chips look better. It makes them look better. More sales. Is there any possibility that the real reason for the lack of open-source drivers, is that in many cases "different" graphics chips are essentially the same, and what you're really paying for with the more expensive ones, is a driver that enables high-end functionality? Open-sourcing would wreck that.

wmf 15y ago
These companies release new chips multiple times per year. With them come new drivers. Not really. Because different GPU generations tend to be similar, they tend to have "unified" drivers that support multiple GPU models. This leads to problems if the community has diverged from your last code drop and now merging is really expensive and you'll get blamed if you don't do it (see Android). Then there are additional problems because the vendors want to use the same driver core on Windows and Linux, but they definitely don't want to GPL the Windows version so they can't accept any GPL patches from Linux people, etc. (see Broadcom)
- Zak 15y ago
  they definitely don't want to GPL the Windows version Why not? Do the drivers provide them with a competitive advantage over anybody else? In the case of a GPU, I imagine they might. In the case of a wireless card, modem or something of that sort it seems pretty unlikely.
exDM69 15y ago
I agree with you that GPU drivers should be open sourced. In fact, all driver source code should be released for all operating systems. They also should ship with instruction manuals and data sheets with circuit diagrams. I write GPU driver software (in userspace) for living. I'd be much more happier if I could push my code to GitHub for everyone to see. However, I do understand that keeping the drivers secret can be a competitive advantage. GPU's are devices unlike any other, they're all different from vendor to vendor and model to model. The driver source code will reveal crucial parts of the hardware design. Knowing what your adversaries have in their chip is a disadvantage to them. I guess some reverse engineering probably takes place, but that is at a whole different level than actually seeing the source code. OpenGL is also an issue. It's a nasty legacy API from Silicon Graphics, dating back to 1992 or so. It's not only a very crappy API for the programmer, it's also hell to implement. If you don't believe me, try to look for texture completeness rules in the GL spec (the problem doesn't exist in Direct3D, because they don't have backward compatibility or legacy API's to deal with). So, having a working OpenGL implementation that passes the 30,000+ conformance test cases is also a competitive advantage you don't want to give away. It's worth several years of programmer effort. However, I still think that we and everyone else should open source their GPU drivers and OpenGL implementations and compete in who makes the baddass-est silicon chips.

wtracy 15y ago

A missed bullet point: Ability for FOSS developers to port drivers to obscure platforms. Right now the Haiku OS folks are having a heck of a time trying to get hardware acceleration to work with nVidia hardware.

tintin 15y ago

Maybe it should start with open hardware. The Open Graphics Project seems dead, but maybe there are other alternatives. There are a lot of open hardware projects lately. Synthesizers, computers, 3D printers. All great examples. But video cards might be too complex to be open.