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Some added context: Many may be reading this the first time and wondering, What gives with the NVIDIA drivers (Nouveau)? To put it simply, NVIDIA screwed third

Some added context: Many may be reading this the first time and wondering, What gives with the NVIDIA drivers (Nouveau)? To put it simply, NVIDIA screwed third-party drivers by requiring a ever-changing encrypted and signed blob, hidden deep within the proprietary driver package, to be sent to the GPU every time it boots. Otherwise, you can't change the clock speed of your NVIDIA GPU from the boot clock speed, which is almost unusably slow. The message from that is screw NVIDIA - not that third party GPUs necessarily are that horrible to implement.

zozbot234 4y ago
nVidia only requires signed firmware starting from 2nd-gen Maxwell cards (released late 2014). There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported.
- kelnos 4y ago
  8 years is pretty old in GPU years. Certainly that old hardware is still useful, but not if you're doing anything where modern GPU performance is helpful, or even necessary.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported. But almost no users to justify the huge development effort. Many laptops from that era, for example, are completely unusable by now - only high end models had 16GB of RAM, most were limited to 4 or 8GB - and desktop builds of that age simply consume far too much electricity for the performance they offer. In contrast, investing work into current NVIDIA/AMD drivers or the Apple Mx architecture makes more sense - the crypto boom and bust led to a lot of cheap but current cards which means many will simply stick it out with a used RTX 3090 for a couple years once NVIDIA releases their new generation, and Apple usually keeps their own hardware stacks very similar in design which means work done now will still be a foundation for Apple's chipsets five or ten years in the future.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    Not everyone can afford to buy hardware. I'm stuck on a 2012 desktop with Intel graphics I found on the side of the road, plus some spare RAM an open source dev mailed to me. I expect there are a lot of folks with dumpstered computers (like those who go to FreeGeek) that could benefit from nouveau support for older GPUs.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Indeed, and lots of them are supported by nouveau: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dotnet00 4y ago
Hasn't NVIDIA been making pretty big steps towards a compromise on that front with the open source linux drivers they released a few months ago?
- izacus 4y ago
  Yes, but let's not have real world infringe of this completely offtopic rant about nVidia in Apple themed post :P
- MaKey 4y ago
  They didn't release open-source Linux drivers, just GPU kernel modules (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981).
adastra22 4y ago
Why is this relevant?
pabs3 4y ago
The signed blob (39 MB of RISC-V code) for newer cards is now publicly released and redistributable, so nouveau will be able to use it too. https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so... https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/

zozbot234 4y ago

nVidia only requires signed firmware starting from 2nd-gen Maxwell cards (released late 2014). There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported.

kelnos 4y ago
8 years is pretty old in GPU years. Certainly that old hardware is still useful, but not if you're doing anything where modern GPU performance is helpful, or even necessary.
mschuster91 4y ago
> There's a lot of existing nVidia hardware that could be fully supported. But almost no users to justify the huge development effort. Many laptops from that era, for example, are completely unusable by now - only high end models had 16GB of RAM, most were limited to 4 or 8GB - and desktop builds of that age simply consume far too much electricity for the performance they offer. In contrast, investing work into current NVIDIA/AMD drivers or the Apple Mx architecture makes more sense - the crypto boom and bust led to a lot of cheap but current cards which means many will simply stick it out with a used RTX 3090 for a couple years once NVIDIA releases their new generation, and Apple usually keeps their own hardware stacks very similar in design which means work done now will still be a foundation for Apple's chipsets five or ten years in the future.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Not everyone can afford to buy hardware. I'm stuck on a 2012 desktop with Intel graphics I found on the side of the road, plus some spare RAM an open source dev mailed to me. I expect there are a lot of folks with dumpstered computers (like those who go to FreeGeek) that could benefit from nouveau support for older GPUs.
pabs3 4y ago
Indeed, and lots of them are supported by nouveau: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dotnet00 4y ago

Hasn't NVIDIA been making pretty big steps towards a compromise on that front with the open source linux drivers they released a few months ago?

izacus 4y ago
Yes, but let's not have real world infringe of this completely offtopic rant about nVidia in Apple themed post :P
MaKey 4y ago
They didn't release open-source Linux drivers, just GPU kernel modules (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981).

adastra22 4y ago

Why is this relevant?

pabs3 4y ago

The signed blob (39 MB of RISC-V code) for newer cards is now publicly released and redistributable, so nouveau will be able to use it too. https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so... https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/