4 ms·

Very nice they are doing that, but you know what would be a real altruism move ? Open up the source for Nvidia Chips so projects like OpenBSD and the other BSDs

by jmclnx 4y ago

Very nice they are doing that, but you know what would be a real altruism move ? Open up the source for Nvidia Chips so projects like OpenBSD and the other BSDs can run on hardware from Nvidia.

freedomben 4y ago
It seem self-defeating that they don't. If nvidia fully opened up their driver, they would de-facto own the GPU market (at least for ML, but probably gaming as well). Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up.
- DigiDigiorno 4y ago
  They already own the data center gpu market, what are you taking about? Last I checked they already had monopoly evoking shares of that market. Like 80+ or 90+ percent
- smoldesu 4y ago
  There's a better chance of hell freezing over, but it would certainly benefit users. From a economic standpoint though, it's entirely unsurprising why they do this. CUDA owns, and in the AI age it's hard to beat the parallelism Nvidia offers. If Nvidia cedes their acceleration advantage, they're leaving themselves open for attack. DirectX is a funny example of this, still being closed-source despite a reverse-engineered version existing with often better performance. It would be nice if everyone writing UNIX-like drivers gave away their source code, but then the books wouldn't balance. It's a tale that's half a century old now.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up. This is happening, albeit slowly, fwiw. Pytorch has ROCm support, but not great. AMD did win the exascale machine contracts and have custom hardware in the machines that are built. It does look like they've been using those contracts to invest more into computational sciences/ML. I can only hope that they continue at the pace they have in the consumer market. Competition between AMD and Nvidia (and hopefully Intel -- a pipe dream) can only be beneficial to us in the ML community.
deusum 4y ago
NVIDIA on FreeBSD is better than ever, but Wayland is broken, still, if my failed attempts are a fair measure.
dotnet00 4y ago
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... Coming up on a year since they've had source code available.
- junon 4y ago
  For closed source blob adapters, which I suppose is something. It will allow kernel developers to integrate their drivers, without a really having the sources to the driver itself. You still get a closed source blob.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Even AMD has closed source blobs as firmware though?
    - junon 4y ago
      Not sure they have open source adapters though. Maybe they do. But the big release from Nvidia last year was that you can see and use the code that calls into their blobs.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  >NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 Seems only for a specific chip rev, does nothing for older revs. Also since it is a module, I presume just for Linux, does nothing for OpenBSD (especially) and probably do nothing for NetBSD. FYI, OpenBSD does not support kernel modules like Linux does.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    It's open source, which was the point being referenced by the post I replied to. The BSDs can use the code to guide their own implementations, as they have done for various other drivers. Also, it supports everything Turing onwards, which, while not ideal, does cover all the hardware they've made in the past 4.5 years.

by jmclnx 4y ago

Very nice they are doing that, but you know what would be a real altruism move ? Open up the source for Nvidia Chips so projects like OpenBSD and the other BSDs can run on hardware from Nvidia.

freedomben 4y ago

It seem self-defeating that they don't. If nvidia fully opened up their driver, they would de-facto own the GPU market (at least for ML, but probably gaming as well). Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up.

DigiDigiorno 4y ago
They already own the data center gpu market, what are you taking about? Last I checked they already had monopoly evoking shares of that market. Like 80+ or 90+ percent
smoldesu 4y ago
There's a better chance of hell freezing over, but it would certainly benefit users. From a economic standpoint though, it's entirely unsurprising why they do this. CUDA owns, and in the AI age it's hard to beat the parallelism Nvidia offers. If Nvidia cedes their acceleration advantage, they're leaving themselves open for attack. DirectX is a funny example of this, still being closed-source despite a reverse-engineered version existing with often better performance. It would be nice if everyone writing UNIX-like drivers gave away their source code, but then the books wouldn't balance. It's a tale that's half a century old now.
godelski 4y ago
> Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up. This is happening, albeit slowly, fwiw. Pytorch has ROCm support, but not great. AMD did win the exascale machine contracts and have custom hardware in the machines that are built. It does look like they've been using those contracts to invest more into computational sciences/ML. I can only hope that they continue at the pace they have in the consumer market. Competition between AMD and Nvidia (and hopefully Intel -- a pipe dream) can only be beneficial to us in the ML community.

deusum 4y ago

NVIDIA on FreeBSD is better than ever, but Wayland is broken, still, if my failed attempts are a fair measure.

dotnet00 4y ago

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... Coming up on a year since they've had source code available.

junon 4y ago
For closed source blob adapters, which I suppose is something. It will allow kernel developers to integrate their drivers, without a really having the sources to the driver itself. You still get a closed source blob.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Even AMD has closed source blobs as firmware though?
  - junon 4y ago
    Not sure they have open source adapters though. Maybe they do. But the big release from Nvidia last year was that you can see and use the code that calls into their blobs.
jmclnx 4y ago
>NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 Seems only for a specific chip rev, does nothing for older revs. Also since it is a module, I presume just for Linux, does nothing for OpenBSD (especially) and probably do nothing for NetBSD. FYI, OpenBSD does not support kernel modules like Linux does.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  It's open source, which was the point being referenced by the post I replied to. The BSDs can use the code to guide their own implementations, as they have done for various other drivers. Also, it supports everything Turing onwards, which, while not ideal, does cover all the hardware they've made in the past 4.5 years.