23 ms·

Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules

377 points by segfaultbuserr 3y ago

duped 3y ago
I have a dumb question - after so many years of bad reputation and so on, why doesn't NVidia just open source their drivers? What is the value of them staying proprietary?
- xxs 3y ago
  CUDA, and pretty much all optimization(hacks) done to run games better
- rany_ 3y ago
  > CUDA, and pretty much all optimization(hacks) done to run games better And arbitrary limitations implemented at the driver level to force you to purchase their enterprise GPUs, see https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch#nvenc-and-nvfbc-patches-for-nvidia-drivers https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch#nvenc-and-nvfbc-patc... I wouldn't be surprised if there are more as of yet undiscovered limitations that they've added in that are just pure money grabs with no technical merit.
  - duped 3y ago
    They could bake this into the firmware as an opaque blob, no?
    - rany_ 3y ago
      Maybe but given that this is implemented in the driver tells me that there might be some kind of issue with it being implemented on the GPU. I doubt they chose this less than optimal way of implementing such a limitation because they were simply being silly.
HeckFeck 3y ago
"Fuck you Nvidia" - L. Torvalds. We should take this mantra to the Nvidia offices and chant it until we go hoarse, may the proprietary blob crumble like the walls of Jericho.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  What good would that do if people keep buying their product as-is?
  - c4mpute 3y ago
    People would no longer buy their product if it wouldn't work on Linux. The Bazillions that Nvidia earns buying shovels in the AI gold rush? All dependent on working Linux drivers because most to all of the big AI shops run Linux clusters.
    - dns_snek 3y ago
      Don't you think that AI shops would sooner drop Linux than drop Nvidia? One is printing money with no viable replacement, the other is a general-purpose operating system.
      - legacynl 3y ago
        I don't think that's right. switching a gpu is as easy as opening the case, replacing the gpu and installing drivers. if you switch OS you will have to find replacements and alternatives for all the software you're using to manage and run those machines, probably retrain people with that new software, migrate stuff, redo all the config in your new software etc. On top of that I don't think there's a lot of overhead associated with using different gpus models simultaneously, allowing you to incrementally migrate your servers to a new gpu.
        grotorea 3y ago
        Aren't you forgetting the "buy a GPU" step? And aren't most OSes either free or significantly cheaper than the sort of GPU AI uses?
r1ch 3y ago
I hope this doesn't break ZFS again.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  As far as I know the ZFS vs GPL issues still haven't been resolved yet. Random incompatibility with the kernel is kind of a thing you need to take for granted if you choose to use ZFS on Linux, because the two code bases just aren't compatible with each other. Linus Torvalds himself has recommended people not to use it in combination with Linux. Oracle and other ZFS copyright holders could fix this situation by dual licensing ZFS, but they don't care, so you should expect ZFS to break with every major Linux update as not much special care is taken to keep it (and other out-of-tree drivers) compatible.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    There aren’t any viable alternatives to ZFS, however. It would be easier to swap out the rest of the OS.
    - mnd999 3y ago
      If you’re building a ZFS based storage server, FreeBSD is a great choice for this reason.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      If you can't replace ZFS for your use case, consider replacing Linux instead. There are a few BSDs out there that will run ZFS without the common Linux problem, for instance.
      - Filligree 3y ago
        My use case it "Retaining my data long-term", and the options in that realm are more or less tape (hugely expensive), ZFS, or less-reliable systems like unraid. Unfortunately I do also need to run Linux, to a degree, so I'm using a distribution that removes the DRM.
netsharc 3y ago
What colour are your bits[1], but on the kernel level... Yay? [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- btdmaster 3y ago
  Except in this case NVIDIA can decide to colour those bits GPL by licensing their drivers.
rmbyrro 3y ago
For a minute, I thought the title was about Linux helping Nvidia block users from illicit usage of their hardware (like using consumer GPUs on data centers). And was like: "WTF? No way, that must have been a Court order". And then relief...
- Karellen 3y ago
  Who is the "they" in "their hardware"? And what does illicit use of things you yourself own even look like?
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    Come'on, there's only one hardware maker there, no need to specify. I did provide an example of illicit usage, could you please just read it again?
    - Karellen 3y ago
      There's also the users who bought the hardware. The "their" in "helping Nvidia block users from illicit usage of their hardware" could easily refer to either "Nvidia" or "users". There is this weird opinion that once you buy an object, it becomes yours, and is no longer the property of whoever made it.
      - rmbyrro 3y ago
        How does it change the interpretation of the sentence if you consider "their" to be user's hardware or Nvidia's hardware?
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
What is the consequence of this? Will the drivers work worse or outright break? Why would the average Linux user who doesn't give a shit about licensing want this?
- pantalaimon 3y ago
  This is not about what the users what, it's about the intention of the developers as expressed in the license.
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    Precisely. As a user who didn't write the code you don't get to say how people, including you, can use it.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  If Nvidia doesn't break the kernel license terms, this shouldn't be a problem. Their open source drivers should also work just fine as far as I'm aware. This whole issue is the result of Nvidia shoveling closed source code into a copyleft ecosystem. Of course they're going to be met with resistance. They could open-source their drivers and use the GPL symbols, of course, but unlike AMD or Intel I doubt they're going to do that. As for why Linux users would give a shit: if you don't, Nvidia hardware works a lot better on Windows and WSL2 will let you do anything Linux distros will let you do. You're also free to stick to Linux 6.5.
  - kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
    > They could open-source their drivers and use the GPL symbols, of course, but unlike AMD or Intel I doubt they're going to do that. They already have, but their open modules only work on newer cards. https://github.com/nvidia/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/nvidia/open-gpu-kernel-modules.
    - fsflover 3y ago
      Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981
jesprenj 3y ago
Why shouldn't a proprietary driver be able to interact with a free kernel? Linux is literally implementing kernel level DRM, the thing free software swore to destroy. Or at least the requirement that proprietary drivers do not interact with GPL-only code would in my opinion be considered an EULA.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  > Why shouldn't a proprietary driver be able to interact with a free kernel? Because the kernel is licensed under GPL, that's kind of the whole point of Linux. The intention of the license is that anything linked and loaded into the kernel is released under a compatible copyleft license.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Technically that's wrong. Anything you distribute to another person needs to be GPL. You can link and load anything you want into the kernel for your own purposes. Personally, I'm not persuaded that a loadable proprietary kernel module would constitute a derivative work, I don't see how the GPL could be enforced on a 3rd party like that. I think the courts and juries would be very sympathetic to Nvidia.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      If the GPL status wasn't a problem, Nvidia wouldn't be so nice to Linux. They could just as easily patch out the GPL symbol routines in a malware like fashion, yet the billion dollar company decides to play nice. All Linux would need is for one court in one relevant jurisdiction to interpret GPL like they do. If a French court forces Nvidia to stop making selling data centre products in France, that'd be enough to seriously hurt Nvidias's bottom line. Maybe the Texas it Hamburg courts will side with Nvidia, but Nvidia needs to win everywhere and Linux only needs to win once.
    - grotorea 3y ago
      IANAL, but I suspect you're right. The GPL restricts redistribution, but does it impose any restriction on someone who downloads and compile their own kernel and downloads and links the NVIDIA driver against it, then never redistributes it? However the Linux devs are still allowed to do whatever they want to make it harder on NVIDIA. Also I assume the distros count as redistributors so they probably can't combine NVIDIA and GPL parts of the kernel.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Since the Linux kernel linker code is designed to enforce Linus Torvalds's opinion of how the GPL plus a syscall exception should work, he likely has a legal claim against Nvidia for circumvention of copyright protection (DMCA 1201). This is obviously something Linus would never do, and it would be patently awful for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole if he did... but I kinda want to see him do it anyway just because of Nvidia's shenaniganery over the years.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  It's not a bad claim to have in case Nvidia ever decides to take legal action against the Linux foundation. Launching a viable counter suit with a serious impact on Nvidia's business opportunities should work as a nice deterrent against future problems.
- aseipp 3y ago
  There's a pretty good argument to be made that Linux, the most high-profile GPL project in existence, not trying to enforce its license/copyright terms on reasonable grounds, is far, far worse for the FOSS ecosystem than the alternative of being sort-of-mean to corporation XYZ (where XYZ = Nvidia, VMWare, RandomHardwareCorp Inc, whatever). If the biggest 800lb Gorilla in the room isn't willing to go to court over it, that doesn't paint a very rosy picture for the rest of us. If Linux is going to just use "soft" mechanisms to force the hands of MegaCorps when they do blatant license/copyright violations, then they might as well put a fork in the GPL, call it done, and switch to BSD3 or MIT+Apache or something. And before people yell at me, this is precisely how LLVM operates; the project does not use strong copyleft licensing, but purely technical means, to "force" upstream cooperation, due to factors like APIs churn and extremely high development velocity. And it seems to work pretty well, actually, without watering down their respective chosen license.
  - deleted 3y ago
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Aardwolf 3y ago
I hope this won't result in some kind of battle ending up in no or worse nvidia drivers for linux, without them my favorite OS would suddenly be less useful due to less games and AI.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Losing their dominant position in Linux would be catastrophic for Nvidia; they’ll do anything to avoid that happening.
  - gnu8 3y ago
    Almost anything; they won’t GPL their driver like they ought to, because they made unwise decisions surrounding the use of material covered by software patents and non-Free licenses, and thus are unable to do so.
    - yrro 3y ago
      Aren't they re-architecting & creating a new, free software driver that's only responsible for memory management & conveying requests from the user through to to the _real_ computer running on the GPU?
      - jujube3 3y ago
        Don't clutter up this thread with actual facts and information.
  - wang_li 3y ago
    Unlikely. AI projects are tied to Nvidia not to Linux. They just port their driver to FreeBSD or Solaris or whatever. The AI crowd will follow. But they can also just release drivers that as part of the driver install patches the end user's kernel to remove this janky stuff.
    - trasz4 3y ago
vuavu 3y ago
Linux kernel working against their users? Why?
- Moomoomoo309 3y ago
  I don't think you get what this change is. You can disable nonfree drivers on the kernel level, and it will make sure they aren't loaded. You can also allow them, as many distros do. Nvidia took their driver and had it lie to the Linux kernel and pretend it was a free driver when it isn't. Linux is making sure they can't do that again, because if you don't want nonfree drivers, you don't want nonfree drivers. Nvidia is working against their users, not Linux.
  - throwaway23e8 3y ago
    Unfortunately this is a troll who only meant to stir the pot. They were recently known as veave and veavo. They are constantly churning through accounts and have been for a long time.
the8472 3y ago
Nvidia did open source their drivers (or some form thereof) and now provides redistributable firmware blobs. Plus firmware authentication has been broken on some older cards. So hopefully the proprietary drivers will lose importance over time.
devit 3y ago
Seems easily avoidable by having the modules rendezvous in one of the myriad ways that are possible given that both run in kernel mode with full privileges. For example, you can walk the kernel-only page tables, find all executable pages, and scan them for a magic string that the other module puts in their text section.
- drewg123 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, then I realized they don't even need this. They could simply grab the addresses via /proc/kallsysms and poke them into the driver using a custom helper to load the kernel module.
nly 3y ago
Not sure what's to gain here really. NVIDIA are free to remove this check and just ship their own Linux distro to their profitable customers. It's desktop users with NVIDIA GPUs who will end up shafted.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  Exactly. Nvidia's position is so incredibly strong in AI and these customers clearly do not care whatsoever about spats like this and/or whether or not the driver is closed source/binary/whatever. If they did AMD/ROCm would have more than low single digit market share in AI. Nvidia obviously has the resources and ability to make a Debian/Ubuntu derivative (or whatever) that can offer increased usability, performance, etc with their hardware. Nvidia may even save effort and cost internally by primarily focusing AI/CUDA driver development on their own distro as opposed to what I'm sure is currently a significant amount of patchwork, workarounds, etc for the bewildering array of variability currently present in the Linux ecosystem. These users/customers aren't using a given Linux distro out of idealistic passion/preference for the distro like many users here - they just want to do AI. They're going to use the best tools available to achieve that goal. Needless to say these massive thousands of Nvidia GPU deployments are highly orchestrated and if an Nvidia distro can offer even 1% improvement on the usability, performance, etc with their hardware these customers are going to deploy an Nvidia distro immediately. These customers are also likely effectively supporting a distro variant already and they would absolutely rather let Nvidia take on as much of this effort as possible. I'd venture to guess many Nvidia customers have actually been asking Nvidia for it - Nvidia may already effectively be doing it for them. Lambda Labs (for example) already does this - shipping and supporting an Ubuntu derivative that does whatever you want with AI within seconds of booting their hardware. Even Oracle already does this and the recent issues with RHEL/Cent are yet another reason this makes sense to Nvidia. Nvidia also already does this with their Jetson line of hardware. You're absolutely correct that it is the desktop users who will get shafted by this. I've been a Linux desktop user since 1997. I love Linux. However, for something like this not even the might and influence of Linux/Linus/etc will "win" going up against Nvidia on this.
- tedivm 3y ago
  They already ship their own repackaged Ubuntu, called DGX OS. It's basically Ubuntu with extra software, drivers, and configuration. Switching the kernel around wouldn't be hard for them (they may already be rolling their own kernel). That said, part of the reason nvidia is so popular is that it's easy to buy their cards, spin up a system, and let a researcher play with it. If people had to buy the dgx workstations for this it would limit them to only the high level cards. There are a lot of benefits to giving every researcher in a company their own hardware for experimenting and debugging before they send their models off to the big clusters for training. https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/index.html
gavinray 3y ago
Why do this? Impeding Nvidia's productivity on Linux only harms the Linux community. Yeah yeah, there's some moral argument over licensing and FOSS, but in the spirit of pragmatism sometimes you ought to look the other way.
- version_five 3y ago
  Yeah, yeah This doesn't sound like good faith, but in case it is, it would by pennywise and pound foolish to let them have an exception. In the immediate term better linux drivers would be good, but the precedent that companies don't have to respect GPL would open the doors to linux getting torn apart by big players that want to use it exclusively for their own gain. It would be horrible for the FOSS movement, and we would have traded it for some better drivers.
Aissen 3y ago
LWN covered this in a now-freely available article: https://lwn.net/Articles/939842/ https://lwn.net/Articles/939842/ ; it has a bit more details and context.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  Thank you. This is a much better article.
- Erlangen 3y ago
  @dang, could you use this link instead?
  - dcow 3y ago
    Just curious, why would you swap out a live link unless it is malicious or disingenuously reposting content from another source? Isn’t there value in a diversity of information sources and/or narrative dialog etc., even if sometimes some other source has a more detailed or better written article? Wouldn’t the better response be to post the other article and let that one win on merit?
    - abtinf 3y ago
      Answering those questions first requires a standard of value to evaluate the options. HN is a rare site that sets an explicit standard for posts: they should “[gratify] one's intellectual curiosity”. It’s not a great standard, partly because “gratify” implies a whole set of metaphysical value judgements. But it is better than none at all and can be reasonably inferred to place value on attributes like objectivity, expertise, comprehensiveness, and conciseness. Should links be swapped even if there isn’t anything technically wrong with the original? Yes, if the replacement is better at gratifying intellectual curiosity. Is there value if diversity of sources? Yes, but not sources that exhibit obvious bias, are poorly written, or woefully incomplete. Wouldn’t it be better to post another article instead? Maybe, if both articles are good.
    - loeg 3y ago
      > reposting content from another source Are you familiar with Phoronix? > Wouldn’t the better response be to post the other article and let that one win on merit? Whether things bubble up to the front page has a little to do with merit and a lot to do with luck or timing. It is not uncommon to replace a poor source that has nevertheless made it to the front page with a higher quality article.
ribit 3y ago
[flagged]
- two_handfuls 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    The problem is that even if most of the GPL is very good and rational, the theory that linking another program to a program covered by some license means that the license of the latter becomes applicable to the former is logically inconsistent (because all the methods by which a program can be used are logically equivalent to linking, including the execution of a CLI program from a shell) and in any case even if such a theory could find some legal base, it is certainly abusive and there is no ethical reason that can justify it. By the same theory, if I would write a program to run on MS Windows, my program should become the property of Microsoft. In my opinion, the only variants of GPL that are correct and the only ones that I would use for my own work, are the former Library GPL and Lesser GPL, which are exactly like the standard GPL, except that they abandon this theory that program linking can unilaterally extend the coverage of one of the licenses of the two programs that are linked.
rany_ 3y ago
I find it disgusting that most people here are defending NVIDIA. This is literally victim blaming; Linux devs are victims of license/contract violation. NVIDIA has no right to be doing this and are acting above the law. The kernel devs wouldn't have to put these defenses if NVIDIA played fair and just open-sourced their driver like every other major GPU vendor.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  There's a lot of people depending on a functional NVIDIA driver to do a lot of computation. It's understandable that they'd be defensive if the thing that powers their products suddenly taken from them, regardless of who's at fault.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    Those are exactly the type of people who have the power to pressure Nvidia to do the right thing.
  - crabbone 3y ago
    Open-sourcing code doesn't take it away from the author... what are you talking about?
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      What are you talking about? The fear could be that NVIDIAs "hacks" helps with performance and playing by the rules of the kernel developers will cost... say 10% in performance, that would be a pretty big hit for many. I don't think there's a fear that NVIDIA will stop developing Linux drivers, that doesn't seem realistic, but I also doubt that they are going to open any more than they absolutely have to. NVIDIA isn't a open source friendly company and no Linux kernel hacks are going to change that. They'll change when it's financially beneficial to do so.
      - crabbone 3y ago
        So... in what way does opening the source of the driver makes the authorship go away? You made a bunch of claims based on having no information about the subject that have nothing to do with the post you replied to... Like... what am I supposed to do with what you wrote? --- As an aside, from my personal experience, NVidia is a very bureaucratic company with very few people having much of an authority over software it writes. It also has a culture of restricting many freedoms to their employees (as in, mandating OS for their laptops, taking away root privileges on work laptops, requiring a lot of unnecessary reporting when dealing with programming issues etc.) I would expect that the decision to not open-source the driver was based on some policy established ages ago. Nobody can remember who and for what reason made the decision, but nobody is bold enough to challenge it. Mostly because the organization grew too big and the decision must've been probably made by some title which no longer exists and whoever is in "position of power" now doesn't have any real power. As for performance... well, I wouldn't expect it to tank. Here's one anecdote that I know about since I'm personally affected by it. On laptops with two graphic adapters (typically Intel and NVidia) where one is used for power-saving mode and another one for better 3D rendering, when such a laptop is connected via HDMI to a big monitor, NVidia's adapter starts overheating and using a lot of unnecessary resources. Turns out someone left out some kernel logging in the very hot loop of the piece of the driver related to HDMI probing. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if NVidia's driver would overall benefit from few extra pairs of eyes looking at it. It's hard to imagine that they somehow found a way to utilize system resources so much better than a legitimate driver would. And even if they did, there's a good chance they'd be able to convince Linux kernel developers to let them have it.
lucasyvas 3y ago
I'm going to get raked across the coals for this but I think it's time for the Linux developers to finally put a stop to NVIDIA's antics. Force them to release an open source driver - they will comply, otherwise their AI conquest dreams will be over. Start playing hardball with these vendors and either put an end to proprietary blobs or make it a living hell to achieve it with no compatibility guarantees. You're playing in the GPL sandbox so do things their way or get lost. NVIDIA should stick to Windows or another Unix if they don't want to play nice. I'm betting people would rather not take on the operational burden of a different OS in their stack long term and would prefer a vendor that works with Linux well.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  There's quite a lot of questionable telemetry in the driver, I am not sure how it would work if exposed to GDPR scrutiny like that.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    This is one of the reasons people want an open source driver: so Nvidia can be called out for that undeniably (even a source-available licence would achieve that) or so OSS devs could release a forked version without if Nvidia can't be shamed into doing so.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  There is still no replacement for CUDA. ROCm is a compatibility joke, Vulkan is too insanely low-level, OpenCL runs way too slow. Compute shaders are technically fine but bring flashbacks to 2006. Metal is a good alternative but only offered on systems without discrete GPUs! so we’re running CUDA for the next five years. In a conflict between Linux and Nvidia, in the HPC or AI spaces, Nvidia wins.
  - tw04 3y ago
    >In a conflict between Linux and Nvidia, in the HPC or AI spaces, Nvidia wins. I HIGHLY doubt this. Nvidia has decades of investment in Linux internally. They aren't going to convert their DGX to Windows, or their dozens of internally utilized supercomputers. Sure, in a small window end-users are going to make a LOT of noise about Linux "breaking" - but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux, they'll cave.
userbinator 3y ago
As their code is running in ring0, from experience I know that Nvidia has a lot more fun tricks they can use, but are probably holding back for now. Ditto for the Linux developers. This stupid DRM crap helps no one and only fuels more cat-and-mouse games that waste everyone's time. "Get along, kids."
tigrezno 3y ago
Just when I bought my first Amd Radeon card :)
- orangetuba 3y ago
  I just switched to AMD Radeon as well to get away from the nVidia hellscape that is nVidia and Linux.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Just a reminder that it's only "illicit" in theory, until that has been proven in court. What they're talking about is essentially a DRM within the kernel code that tries to prevent a loadable kernel module from guessing where the kernel data structures are in memory. They know that people are likely to push the envelope, and they're trying to make it as hard as possible as a deterrent. However you could argue that ALL closed-source loadable kernel modules are violating the GPL equally, with or without a "shim", and people have argued that, but we've mostly forgotten about it and use this DRM fiction as a stand-in for legal fiction. Or perhaps the GPL-tagged functions within the kernel count as an "API" in the Google vs Oracle sense and none of this matters.
- Longlius 3y ago
  >However you could argue that ALL loadable kernel modules are violating the GPL equally Except most loadable kernel modules are in the kernel source tree and available under the GPL.
CodesInChaos 3y ago
How much machine learning/neural networks happens on Linux compared to Windows? Assuming that's the majority, it should put Linux is a much better negotiating position compared to the time when the driver only benefited the small number of Linux gamers. So it's probably the right time to push Nvidia into a better architecture where the kernel driver is GPL and the closed source stuff is in a userspace component.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  BSD exists and Nvidia maintains some support for it.
  - drewg123 3y ago
    I'm typing this using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on FreeBSD right now.. They are SO much easier to deal with than the "native" AMD and Intel drivers that require tens of thousands of lines of linux shim code.
datenwolf 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here.
lacoolj 3y ago
Guess I'll have to prevent upgrading to this kernel until NV gets their end straightened out
pxeger1 3y ago
If Nvidia are breaking the GPL, or DMCA copy-protection-circumvention law, the Linux Foundation (or the FSF or someone) should sue them and get them to stop. If they are not breaking it, they should be allowed to use the symbols.
gentleman11 3y ago
I assumed this was related to the official drivers spying on you, but was mistaken. This is only about integrating with gpl code
hlandau 3y ago
There is a comment here by the author of this patch which is absolutely extraordinary: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230731083806.453036-6-hch@lst.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230731083806.453036-6-hch@lst... "Given that symbol_get was only ever inteded for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls law suites." This is literally an attempt to claim the protection of the DMCA's anticircumvention law (which makes it illegal to "circumvent" DRM) for the Linux kernel, an open source project. It's also a tacit admission that EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is blatantly a DRM scheme (which it is). Personally I loathe NVIDIA and have no particular interest in defending their behaviour; however, I find it extraordinary here that the Linux project is trying to claim the DRM anti-circumvention law applies to an open source project. It's pretty bizarre given there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.
- trustmebro 3y ago
  The values of the FOSS community are pro Good. If you do something shady, and they help you save face with a gentle touch like this, you're lucky.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    It's a shady workaround to the kernel itself being shady with which symbols get marked GPL.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Marking symbols as GPL is not shady.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        For the symbols where use of them does not imply that the code is derivative of the kernel, it is shady. See also kernel_fpu_begin
mnd999 3y ago
If you break everyone’s computers you’re going to get then blame, whether it’s your fault or not.
rascul 3y ago
Are there other companies that distribute closed source kernel modules that this could have implications for? Or is it just Nvidia?
juancn 3y ago
All this lawyer-ese detracts from making Linux useful. It's a pity that so much effort is spent on some fundamentalist view of open source.
- barryrandall 3y ago
  Agreed. NVIDIA is wasting kernel developers' time and humanity would be better off if they just open sourced their driver.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    They have open sourced part of their driver. They stuffed all of the proprietary crap into a firmware image and open sourced a loader for it so GPL isn't a problem on their recent cards. Their proprietary drivers will keep working on Windows for years to come, so it's not like Nvidia customers don't have any alternatives.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
juancn 3y ago
Next step, we make an open source loadable module with a small virtual machine that loads blobs from user mode. It will only run blobs signed by a private key owned by NVIDIA, the public key is part of the open source module. Or we create a hypervisor that virtualizes linux, and bypasses most of the kernel or... There's always a way... this is just annoying and makes it more expensive to get decent drivers for Linux, so less effort will be spent there.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > this is just annoying and makes it more expensive to get decent drivers for Linux, so less effort will be spent there No, it makes it more expensive to get proprietary drivers for Linux; it is not clear that this is a great loss.
  - juancn 3y ago
    Most people don't give a damn wether the driver is open source or not. First of all they care if it works well enough. The biggest draw of open source is the "free as in beer" part (gratis), relatively few people care about the "free as in freedom" (libre).
londons_explore 3y ago
Im worried that one day kernel developers might try to force all of userspace to be GPL or otherwise oper source. Just because your project is open source is no reason to try to force everyone else to be open source.
- mort96 3y ago
  Why would you be worried about that? What has the kernel community ever said to even indicate that they'd want to move in that direction?
crop_rotation 3y ago
There is no chance of Linux winning this over Nvidia. The thing is there is no alternative to Nvidia, while there are many to Linux. The demand is seemingly infinite. Every big corp is rushing to secure as many as they can. For people talking about it being hard to keep their own forked or patched kernel, Nvidia is so big at this point that it can buy RedHat(from IBM), Suse, and almost every Linux vendor on the market and the cost would be mostly not relevant to them. There is zero chance of anyone avoiding Nvidia now due to Linux issues. Sure, 5 years ago this might have worked, but that ship has sailed.
- Matl 3y ago
  > The thing is there is no alternative to Nvidia, while there are many to Linux. Huh? I am a backebd dev and a gamer who would never give up Linux for a proprietary OS, but has no NVidia hardware. That being said, I know you're talking about industry. My question is, so are we supposed to just take it? NVidia has to be pushed to do the right thing here, as AMD and Intel have done or are we just slaves to 'too big to fail' and somehow this is a triumph of capitalism?
  - crop_rotation 3y ago
    I am talking about industry solely, and the time for pushing was 5 years ago and before. I am not saying what would be the ideal outcome, but that at this point anyone running AI workloads will abandon Linux over Nvidia if there is a need to do so.
    - Matl 3y ago
      I suspect we're going to see more and more specialized hardware in this area before that happens, but what benefit exactly is there to having them on Linux anyway? Most of that industry is highly opposed to being open in any sensible definition of that word, so what do they bring exactly?
  - incrudible 3y ago
    NVDAs foothold here is not about gaming, but machine learning. Few people play on Linux anyway, but machine learning is basically not happening without Nvidia. Not that this is favorable, but it is true. And yes, I am taking it, I simply do not care that much.
exabrial 3y ago
Are we saying that _ALL_ Linux kernel modules by their very nature _HAVE TO_ be GPL? Couldn't NVidia just compile against a compatible, but ASL header? Just trying to understand whats happening!
- mook 3y ago
  Not all kernel modules need to be GPL; that's why there's a license field for modules at all (if everything needs to be GPL, then the license would be implied). The issue here is that nVidia wants at least part of their module to not be open source, but _also_ wants access to functionality that's been marked as only allowed to be access by GPL modules (the typical assumption is that, in order to use those, your code already needs to be tied deeply enough that you're a derived work). Note: based off things I've gleaned from LWN and places.
  - exabrial 3y ago
    In that case, should they compile against an ASL header, or is there something with linking and kernel modules I’m not grasping?
TechBro8615 3y ago
I don't understand why Nvidia puts so much effort into keeping their drivers as proprietary blobs. It's not like their software is part of their defensibility; they're a hardware company. Not only will opening their kernel modules have zero impact on their hardware sales, but it will actually improve their stability and also earn goodwill from developers who might otherwise go out of their way to purchase a GPU from AMD.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  They want to be more than a hardware company, because commodification is antithetical to fat profit margins. They have ~80% of the GPU market, their only way to increase profit margins is to start gouging (which is easier if they control the stack higher up, e.g. if the main GPGPU language is built around their GPU architecture) or to branch into a different field entirely (which is why Nvidia has been going so hard into AI - they could leverage their GPU dominance to gain an early lead in the field).
- charonn0 3y ago
  My guess is that it would enable unlocking higher performance regimes in lower-end cards. But I have nothing to back that up with.
- sceadu 3y ago
  Their software is a huge part of their defensibility
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    How?
    - totoglazer 3y ago
      CUDA is the basis for the entire “AI revolution.” Their entire stock price now is from the extreme demand for A100/H100 to power AI and other supercomputing needs. That’s possible because the software stack (CUDA drivers, etc) are incredibly powerful at turning the silicon into value. AMD also has ok hardware, but almost no adoption due to software. If they give up the software the huge advantage they have will erode.
quickthrower2 3y ago
For the uninitiated, if NVidia refuse to make their modules GPL, and also cannot find a workaround, does this mean you cannot use their cards on (at least unmodified) future versions of Linux? Maybe NVidia could persuade end users to patch their kernel to get around this?
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  No this would simply require Nvidia to push more of their actual implementation into their shim code (which is required to be open sourced). So at worst it will force more complicated workaround solutions for Nvidia driver devs which could in turn cause more bugs for users.
michaelmrose 3y ago
At what point does it make sense to just maintain a fork of the kernel that is pragmatically interested in making things that work rather than sabotage.

I have a dumb question - after so many years of bad reputation and so on, why doesn't NVidia just open source their drivers? What is the value of them staying proprietary?

xxs 3y ago
CUDA, and pretty much all optimization(hacks) done to run games better
rany_ 3y ago
> CUDA, and pretty much all optimization(hacks) done to run games better And arbitrary limitations implemented at the driver level to force you to purchase their enterprise GPUs, see https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch#nvenc-and-nvfbc-patches-for-nvidia-drivers https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch#nvenc-and-nvfbc-patc... I wouldn't be surprised if there are more as of yet undiscovered limitations that they've added in that are just pure money grabs with no technical merit.
- duped 3y ago
  They could bake this into the firmware as an opaque blob, no?
  - rany_ 3y ago
    Maybe but given that this is implemented in the driver tells me that there might be some kind of issue with it being implemented on the GPU. I doubt they chose this less than optimal way of implementing such a limitation because they were simply being silly.

HeckFeck 3y ago

"Fuck you Nvidia" - L. Torvalds. We should take this mantra to the Nvidia offices and chant it until we go hoarse, may the proprietary blob crumble like the walls of Jericho.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
What good would that do if people keep buying their product as-is?
- c4mpute 3y ago
  People would no longer buy their product if it wouldn't work on Linux. The Bazillions that Nvidia earns buying shovels in the AI gold rush? All dependent on working Linux drivers because most to all of the big AI shops run Linux clusters.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    Don't you think that AI shops would sooner drop Linux than drop Nvidia? One is printing money with no viable replacement, the other is a general-purpose operating system.
    - legacynl 3y ago
      I don't think that's right. switching a gpu is as easy as opening the case, replacing the gpu and installing drivers. if you switch OS you will have to find replacements and alternatives for all the software you're using to manage and run those machines, probably retrain people with that new software, migrate stuff, redo all the config in your new software etc. On top of that I don't think there's a lot of overhead associated with using different gpus models simultaneously, allowing you to incrementally migrate your servers to a new gpu.
      - grotorea 3y ago
        Aren't you forgetting the "buy a GPU" step? And aren't most OSes either free or significantly cheaper than the sort of GPU AI uses?

r1ch 3y ago

I hope this doesn't break ZFS again.

jeroenhd 3y ago
As far as I know the ZFS vs GPL issues still haven't been resolved yet. Random incompatibility with the kernel is kind of a thing you need to take for granted if you choose to use ZFS on Linux, because the two code bases just aren't compatible with each other. Linus Torvalds himself has recommended people not to use it in combination with Linux. Oracle and other ZFS copyright holders could fix this situation by dual licensing ZFS, but they don't care, so you should expect ZFS to break with every major Linux update as not much special care is taken to keep it (and other out-of-tree drivers) compatible.
- Filligree 3y ago
  There aren’t any viable alternatives to ZFS, however. It would be easier to swap out the rest of the OS.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    If you’re building a ZFS based storage server, FreeBSD is a great choice for this reason.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    If you can't replace ZFS for your use case, consider replacing Linux instead. There are a few BSDs out there that will run ZFS without the common Linux problem, for instance.
    - Filligree 3y ago
      My use case it "Retaining my data long-term", and the options in that realm are more or less tape (hugely expensive), ZFS, or less-reliable systems like unraid. Unfortunately I do also need to run Linux, to a degree, so I'm using a distribution that removes the DRM.

netsharc 3y ago

What colour are your bits[1], but on the kernel level... Yay? [1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

btdmaster 3y ago
Except in this case NVIDIA can decide to colour those bits GPL by licensing their drivers.

rmbyrro 3y ago

For a minute, I thought the title was about Linux helping Nvidia block users from illicit usage of their hardware (like using consumer GPUs on data centers). And was like: "WTF? No way, that must have been a Court order". And then relief...

Karellen 3y ago
Who is the "they" in "their hardware"? And what does illicit use of things you yourself own even look like?
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Come'on, there's only one hardware maker there, no need to specify. I did provide an example of illicit usage, could you please just read it again?
  - Karellen 3y ago
    There's also the users who bought the hardware. The "their" in "helping Nvidia block users from illicit usage of their hardware" could easily refer to either "Nvidia" or "users". There is this weird opinion that once you buy an object, it becomes yours, and is no longer the property of whoever made it.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      How does it change the interpretation of the sentence if you consider "their" to be user's hardware or Nvidia's hardware?

Traubenfuchs 3y ago

What is the consequence of this? Will the drivers work worse or outright break? Why would the average Linux user who doesn't give a shit about licensing want this?

pantalaimon 3y ago
This is not about what the users what, it's about the intention of the developers as expressed in the license.
- H8crilA 3y ago
  Precisely. As a user who didn't write the code you don't get to say how people, including you, can use it.
jeroenhd 3y ago
If Nvidia doesn't break the kernel license terms, this shouldn't be a problem. Their open source drivers should also work just fine as far as I'm aware. This whole issue is the result of Nvidia shoveling closed source code into a copyleft ecosystem. Of course they're going to be met with resistance. They could open-source their drivers and use the GPL symbols, of course, but unlike AMD or Intel I doubt they're going to do that. As for why Linux users would give a shit: if you don't, Nvidia hardware works a lot better on Windows and WSL2 will let you do anything Linux distros will let you do. You're also free to stick to Linux 6.5.
- kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
  > They could open-source their drivers and use the GPL symbols, of course, but unlike AMD or Intel I doubt they're going to do that. They already have, but their open modules only work on newer cards. https://github.com/nvidia/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/nvidia/open-gpu-kernel-modules.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981

jesprenj 3y ago

Why shouldn't a proprietary driver be able to interact with a free kernel? Linux is literally implementing kernel level DRM, the thing free software swore to destroy. Or at least the requirement that proprietary drivers do not interact with GPL-only code would in my opinion be considered an EULA.

jeroenhd 3y ago
> Why shouldn't a proprietary driver be able to interact with a free kernel? Because the kernel is licensed under GPL, that's kind of the whole point of Linux. The intention of the license is that anything linked and loaded into the kernel is released under a compatible copyleft license.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Technically that's wrong. Anything you distribute to another person needs to be GPL. You can link and load anything you want into the kernel for your own purposes. Personally, I'm not persuaded that a loadable proprietary kernel module would constitute a derivative work, I don't see how the GPL could be enforced on a 3rd party like that. I think the courts and juries would be very sympathetic to Nvidia.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    If the GPL status wasn't a problem, Nvidia wouldn't be so nice to Linux. They could just as easily patch out the GPL symbol routines in a malware like fashion, yet the billion dollar company decides to play nice. All Linux would need is for one court in one relevant jurisdiction to interpret GPL like they do. If a French court forces Nvidia to stop making selling data centre products in France, that'd be enough to seriously hurt Nvidias's bottom line. Maybe the Texas it Hamburg courts will side with Nvidia, but Nvidia needs to win everywhere and Linux only needs to win once.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    IANAL, but I suspect you're right. The GPL restricts redistribution, but does it impose any restriction on someone who downloads and compile their own kernel and downloads and links the NVIDIA driver against it, then never redistributes it? However the Linux devs are still allowed to do whatever they want to make it harder on NVIDIA. Also I assume the distros count as redistributors so they probably can't combine NVIDIA and GPL parts of the kernel.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Since the Linux kernel linker code is designed to enforce Linus Torvalds's opinion of how the GPL plus a syscall exception should work, he likely has a legal claim against Nvidia for circumvention of copyright protection (DMCA 1201). This is obviously something Linus would never do, and it would be patently awful for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole if he did... but I kinda want to see him do it anyway just because of Nvidia's shenaniganery over the years.

jeroenhd 3y ago
It's not a bad claim to have in case Nvidia ever decides to take legal action against the Linux foundation. Launching a viable counter suit with a serious impact on Nvidia's business opportunities should work as a nice deterrent against future problems.
aseipp 3y ago
There's a pretty good argument to be made that Linux, the most high-profile GPL project in existence, not trying to enforce its license/copyright terms on reasonable grounds, is far, far worse for the FOSS ecosystem than the alternative of being sort-of-mean to corporation XYZ (where XYZ = Nvidia, VMWare, RandomHardwareCorp Inc, whatever). If the biggest 800lb Gorilla in the room isn't willing to go to court over it, that doesn't paint a very rosy picture for the rest of us. If Linux is going to just use "soft" mechanisms to force the hands of MegaCorps when they do blatant license/copyright violations, then they might as well put a fork in the GPL, call it done, and switch to BSD3 or MIT+Apache or something. And before people yell at me, this is precisely how LLVM operates; the project does not use strong copyleft licensing, but purely technical means, to "force" upstream cooperation, due to factors like APIs churn and extremely high development velocity. And it seems to work pretty well, actually, without watering down their respective chosen license.
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Aardwolf 3y ago

I hope this won't result in some kind of battle ending up in no or worse nvidia drivers for linux, without them my favorite OS would suddenly be less useful due to less games and AI.

School-Cotton 3y ago
Losing their dominant position in Linux would be catastrophic for Nvidia; they’ll do anything to avoid that happening.
- gnu8 3y ago
  Almost anything; they won’t GPL their driver like they ought to, because they made unwise decisions surrounding the use of material covered by software patents and non-Free licenses, and thus are unable to do so.
  - yrro 3y ago
    Aren't they re-architecting & creating a new, free software driver that's only responsible for memory management & conveying requests from the user through to to the _real_ computer running on the GPU?
    - jujube3 3y ago
      Don't clutter up this thread with actual facts and information.
- wang_li 3y ago
  Unlikely. AI projects are tied to Nvidia not to Linux. They just port their driver to FreeBSD or Solaris or whatever. The AI crowd will follow. But they can also just release drivers that as part of the driver install patches the end user's kernel to remove this janky stuff.
  - trasz4 3y ago

vuavu 3y ago

Linux kernel working against their users? Why?

Moomoomoo309 3y ago
I don't think you get what this change is. You can disable nonfree drivers on the kernel level, and it will make sure they aren't loaded. You can also allow them, as many distros do. Nvidia took their driver and had it lie to the Linux kernel and pretend it was a free driver when it isn't. Linux is making sure they can't do that again, because if you don't want nonfree drivers, you don't want nonfree drivers. Nvidia is working against their users, not Linux.
- throwaway23e8 3y ago
  Unfortunately this is a troll who only meant to stir the pot. They were recently known as veave and veavo. They are constantly churning through accounts and have been for a long time.

the8472 3y ago

Nvidia did open source their drivers (or some form thereof) and now provides redistributable firmware blobs. Plus firmware authentication has been broken on some older cards. So hopefully the proprietary drivers will lose importance over time.

devit 3y ago

Seems easily avoidable by having the modules rendezvous in one of the myriad ways that are possible given that both run in kernel mode with full privileges. For example, you can walk the kernel-only page tables, find all executable pages, and scan them for a magic string that the other module puts in their text section.

drewg123 3y ago
I was thinking the same thing, then I realized they don't even need this. They could simply grab the addresses via /proc/kallsysms and poke them into the driver using a custom helper to load the kernel module.

nly 3y ago

Not sure what's to gain here really. NVIDIA are free to remove this check and just ship their own Linux distro to their profitable customers. It's desktop users with NVIDIA GPUs who will end up shafted.

kkielhofner 3y ago
Exactly. Nvidia's position is so incredibly strong in AI and these customers clearly do not care whatsoever about spats like this and/or whether or not the driver is closed source/binary/whatever. If they did AMD/ROCm would have more than low single digit market share in AI. Nvidia obviously has the resources and ability to make a Debian/Ubuntu derivative (or whatever) that can offer increased usability, performance, etc with their hardware. Nvidia may even save effort and cost internally by primarily focusing AI/CUDA driver development on their own distro as opposed to what I'm sure is currently a significant amount of patchwork, workarounds, etc for the bewildering array of variability currently present in the Linux ecosystem. These users/customers aren't using a given Linux distro out of idealistic passion/preference for the distro like many users here - they just want to do AI. They're going to use the best tools available to achieve that goal. Needless to say these massive thousands of Nvidia GPU deployments are highly orchestrated and if an Nvidia distro can offer even 1% improvement on the usability, performance, etc with their hardware these customers are going to deploy an Nvidia distro immediately. These customers are also likely effectively supporting a distro variant already and they would absolutely rather let Nvidia take on as much of this effort as possible. I'd venture to guess many Nvidia customers have actually been asking Nvidia for it - Nvidia may already effectively be doing it for them. Lambda Labs (for example) already does this - shipping and supporting an Ubuntu derivative that does whatever you want with AI within seconds of booting their hardware. Even Oracle already does this and the recent issues with RHEL/Cent are yet another reason this makes sense to Nvidia. Nvidia also already does this with their Jetson line of hardware. You're absolutely correct that it is the desktop users who will get shafted by this. I've been a Linux desktop user since 1997. I love Linux. However, for something like this not even the might and influence of Linux/Linus/etc will "win" going up against Nvidia on this.
tedivm 3y ago
They already ship their own repackaged Ubuntu, called DGX OS. It's basically Ubuntu with extra software, drivers, and configuration. Switching the kernel around wouldn't be hard for them (they may already be rolling their own kernel). That said, part of the reason nvidia is so popular is that it's easy to buy their cards, spin up a system, and let a researcher play with it. If people had to buy the dgx workstations for this it would limit them to only the high level cards. There are a lot of benefits to giving every researcher in a company their own hardware for experimenting and debugging before they send their models off to the big clusters for training. https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/index.html

gavinray 3y ago

Why do this? Impeding Nvidia's productivity on Linux only harms the Linux community. Yeah yeah, there's some moral argument over licensing and FOSS, but in the spirit of pragmatism sometimes you ought to look the other way.

version_five 3y ago
Yeah, yeah This doesn't sound like good faith, but in case it is, it would by pennywise and pound foolish to let them have an exception. In the immediate term better linux drivers would be good, but the precedent that companies don't have to respect GPL would open the doors to linux getting torn apart by big players that want to use it exclusively for their own gain. It would be horrible for the FOSS movement, and we would have traded it for some better drivers.

Aissen 3y ago

LWN covered this in a now-freely available article: https://lwn.net/Articles/939842/ https://lwn.net/Articles/939842/ ; it has a bit more details and context.

trimethylpurine 3y ago
Thank you. This is a much better article.
Erlangen 3y ago
@dang, could you use this link instead?
- dcow 3y ago
  Just curious, why would you swap out a live link unless it is malicious or disingenuously reposting content from another source? Isn’t there value in a diversity of information sources and/or narrative dialog etc., even if sometimes some other source has a more detailed or better written article? Wouldn’t the better response be to post the other article and let that one win on merit?
  - abtinf 3y ago
    Answering those questions first requires a standard of value to evaluate the options. HN is a rare site that sets an explicit standard for posts: they should “[gratify] one's intellectual curiosity”. It’s not a great standard, partly because “gratify” implies a whole set of metaphysical value judgements. But it is better than none at all and can be reasonably inferred to place value on attributes like objectivity, expertise, comprehensiveness, and conciseness. Should links be swapped even if there isn’t anything technically wrong with the original? Yes, if the replacement is better at gratifying intellectual curiosity. Is there value if diversity of sources? Yes, but not sources that exhibit obvious bias, are poorly written, or woefully incomplete. Wouldn’t it be better to post another article instead? Maybe, if both articles are good.
  - loeg 3y ago
    > reposting content from another source Are you familiar with Phoronix? > Wouldn’t the better response be to post the other article and let that one win on merit? Whether things bubble up to the front page has a little to do with merit and a lot to do with luck or timing. It is not uncommon to replace a poor source that has nevertheless made it to the front page with a higher quality article.

ribit 3y ago

[flagged]

two_handfuls 3y ago
[flagged]
- adrian_b 3y ago
  The problem is that even if most of the GPL is very good and rational, the theory that linking another program to a program covered by some license means that the license of the latter becomes applicable to the former is logically inconsistent (because all the methods by which a program can be used are logically equivalent to linking, including the execution of a CLI program from a shell) and in any case even if such a theory could find some legal base, it is certainly abusive and there is no ethical reason that can justify it. By the same theory, if I would write a program to run on MS Windows, my program should become the property of Microsoft. In my opinion, the only variants of GPL that are correct and the only ones that I would use for my own work, are the former Library GPL and Lesser GPL, which are exactly like the standard GPL, except that they abandon this theory that program linking can unilaterally extend the coverage of one of the licenses of the two programs that are linked.

rany_ 3y ago

I find it disgusting that most people here are defending NVIDIA. This is literally victim blaming; Linux devs are victims of license/contract violation. NVIDIA has no right to be doing this and are acting above the law. The kernel devs wouldn't have to put these defenses if NVIDIA played fair and just open-sourced their driver like every other major GPU vendor.

mrweasel 3y ago
There's a lot of people depending on a functional NVIDIA driver to do a lot of computation. It's understandable that they'd be defensive if the thing that powers their products suddenly taken from them, regardless of who's at fault.
- bogwog 3y ago
  Those are exactly the type of people who have the power to pressure Nvidia to do the right thing.
- crabbone 3y ago
  Open-sourcing code doesn't take it away from the author... what are you talking about?
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    What are you talking about? The fear could be that NVIDIAs "hacks" helps with performance and playing by the rules of the kernel developers will cost... say 10% in performance, that would be a pretty big hit for many. I don't think there's a fear that NVIDIA will stop developing Linux drivers, that doesn't seem realistic, but I also doubt that they are going to open any more than they absolutely have to. NVIDIA isn't a open source friendly company and no Linux kernel hacks are going to change that. They'll change when it's financially beneficial to do so.
    - crabbone 3y ago
      So... in what way does opening the source of the driver makes the authorship go away? You made a bunch of claims based on having no information about the subject that have nothing to do with the post you replied to... Like... what am I supposed to do with what you wrote? --- As an aside, from my personal experience, NVidia is a very bureaucratic company with very few people having much of an authority over software it writes. It also has a culture of restricting many freedoms to their employees (as in, mandating OS for their laptops, taking away root privileges on work laptops, requiring a lot of unnecessary reporting when dealing with programming issues etc.) I would expect that the decision to not open-source the driver was based on some policy established ages ago. Nobody can remember who and for what reason made the decision, but nobody is bold enough to challenge it. Mostly because the organization grew too big and the decision must've been probably made by some title which no longer exists and whoever is in "position of power" now doesn't have any real power. As for performance... well, I wouldn't expect it to tank. Here's one anecdote that I know about since I'm personally affected by it. On laptops with two graphic adapters (typically Intel and NVidia) where one is used for power-saving mode and another one for better 3D rendering, when such a laptop is connected via HDMI to a big monitor, NVidia's adapter starts overheating and using a lot of unnecessary resources. Turns out someone left out some kernel logging in the very hot loop of the piece of the driver related to HDMI probing. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if NVidia's driver would overall benefit from few extra pairs of eyes looking at it. It's hard to imagine that they somehow found a way to utilize system resources so much better than a legitimate driver would. And even if they did, there's a good chance they'd be able to convince Linux kernel developers to let them have it.

lucasyvas 3y ago

I'm going to get raked across the coals for this but I think it's time for the Linux developers to finally put a stop to NVIDIA's antics. Force them to release an open source driver - they will comply, otherwise their AI conquest dreams will be over. Start playing hardball with these vendors and either put an end to proprietary blobs or make it a living hell to achieve it with no compatibility guarantees. You're playing in the GPL sandbox so do things their way or get lost. NVIDIA should stick to Windows or another Unix if they don't want to play nice. I'm betting people would rather not take on the operational burden of a different OS in their stack long term and would prefer a vendor that works with Linux well.

intelVISA 3y ago
There's quite a lot of questionable telemetry in the driver, I am not sure how it would work if exposed to GDPR scrutiny like that.
- dspillett 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons people want an open source driver: so Nvidia can be called out for that undeniably (even a source-available licence would achieve that) or so OSS devs could release a forked version without if Nvidia can't be shamed into doing so.
freeone3000 3y ago
There is still no replacement for CUDA. ROCm is a compatibility joke, Vulkan is too insanely low-level, OpenCL runs way too slow. Compute shaders are technically fine but bring flashbacks to 2006. Metal is a good alternative but only offered on systems without discrete GPUs! so we’re running CUDA for the next five years. In a conflict between Linux and Nvidia, in the HPC or AI spaces, Nvidia wins.
- tw04 3y ago
  >In a conflict between Linux and Nvidia, in the HPC or AI spaces, Nvidia wins. I HIGHLY doubt this. Nvidia has decades of investment in Linux internally. They aren't going to convert their DGX to Windows, or their dozens of internally utilized supercomputers. Sure, in a small window end-users are going to make a LOT of noise about Linux "breaking" - but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux, they'll cave.

userbinator 3y ago

As their code is running in ring0, from experience I know that Nvidia has a lot more fun tricks they can use, but are probably holding back for now. Ditto for the Linux developers. This stupid DRM crap helps no one and only fuels more cat-and-mouse games that waste everyone's time. "Get along, kids."

tigrezno 3y ago

Just when I bought my first Amd Radeon card :)

orangetuba 3y ago
I just switched to AMD Radeon as well to get away from the nVidia hellscape that is nVidia and Linux.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Just a reminder that it's only "illicit" in theory, until that has been proven in court. What they're talking about is essentially a DRM within the kernel code that tries to prevent a loadable kernel module from guessing where the kernel data structures are in memory. They know that people are likely to push the envelope, and they're trying to make it as hard as possible as a deterrent. However you could argue that ALL closed-source loadable kernel modules are violating the GPL equally, with or without a "shim", and people have argued that, but we've mostly forgotten about it and use this DRM fiction as a stand-in for legal fiction. Or perhaps the GPL-tagged functions within the kernel count as an "API" in the Google vs Oracle sense and none of this matters.

Longlius 3y ago
>However you could argue that ALL loadable kernel modules are violating the GPL equally Except most loadable kernel modules are in the kernel source tree and available under the GPL.

CodesInChaos 3y ago

How much machine learning/neural networks happens on Linux compared to Windows? Assuming that's the majority, it should put Linux is a much better negotiating position compared to the time when the driver only benefited the small number of Linux gamers. So it's probably the right time to push Nvidia into a better architecture where the kernel driver is GPL and the closed source stuff is in a userspace component.

andromeduck 3y ago
BSD exists and Nvidia maintains some support for it.
- drewg123 3y ago
  I'm typing this using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on FreeBSD right now.. They are SO much easier to deal with than the "native" AMD and Intel drivers that require tens of thousands of lines of linux shim code.

datenwolf 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't do this here.

lacoolj 3y ago

Guess I'll have to prevent upgrading to this kernel until NV gets their end straightened out

pxeger1 3y ago

If Nvidia are breaking the GPL, or DMCA copy-protection-circumvention law, the Linux Foundation (or the FSF or someone) should sue them and get them to stop. If they are not breaking it, they should be allowed to use the symbols.

gentleman11 3y ago

I assumed this was related to the official drivers spying on you, but was mistaken. This is only about integrating with gpl code

hlandau 3y ago

There is a comment here by the author of this patch which is absolutely extraordinary: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230731083806.453036-6-hch@lst.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230731083806.453036-6-hch@lst... "Given that symbol_get was only ever inteded for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls law suites." This is literally an attempt to claim the protection of the DMCA's anticircumvention law (which makes it illegal to "circumvent" DRM) for the Linux kernel, an open source project. It's also a tacit admission that EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is blatantly a DRM scheme (which it is). Personally I loathe NVIDIA and have no particular interest in defending their behaviour; however, I find it extraordinary here that the Linux project is trying to claim the DRM anti-circumvention law applies to an open source project. It's pretty bizarre given there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.

trustmebro 3y ago
The values of the FOSS community are pro Good. If you do something shady, and they help you save face with a gentle touch like this, you're lucky.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  It's a shady workaround to the kernel itself being shady with which symbols get marked GPL.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Marking symbols as GPL is not shady.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      For the symbols where use of them does not imply that the code is derivative of the kernel, it is shady. See also kernel_fpu_begin

mnd999 3y ago

If you break everyone’s computers you’re going to get then blame, whether it’s your fault or not.

rascul 3y ago

Are there other companies that distribute closed source kernel modules that this could have implications for? Or is it just Nvidia?

juancn 3y ago

All this lawyer-ese detracts from making Linux useful. It's a pity that so much effort is spent on some fundamentalist view of open source.

barryrandall 3y ago
Agreed. NVIDIA is wasting kernel developers' time and humanity would be better off if they just open sourced their driver.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  They have open sourced part of their driver. They stuffed all of the proprietary crap into a firmware image and open sourced a loader for it so GPL isn't a problem on their recent cards. Their proprietary drivers will keep working on Windows for years to come, so it's not like Nvidia customers don't have any alternatives.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

juancn 3y ago

Next step, we make an open source loadable module with a small virtual machine that loads blobs from user mode. It will only run blobs signed by a private key owned by NVIDIA, the public key is part of the open source module. Or we create a hypervisor that virtualizes linux, and bypasses most of the kernel or... There's always a way... this is just annoying and makes it more expensive to get decent drivers for Linux, so less effort will be spent there.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> this is just annoying and makes it more expensive to get decent drivers for Linux, so less effort will be spent there No, it makes it more expensive to get proprietary drivers for Linux; it is not clear that this is a great loss.
- juancn 3y ago
  Most people don't give a damn wether the driver is open source or not. First of all they care if it works well enough. The biggest draw of open source is the "free as in beer" part (gratis), relatively few people care about the "free as in freedom" (libre).

londons_explore 3y ago

Im worried that one day kernel developers might try to force all of userspace to be GPL or otherwise oper source. Just because your project is open source is no reason to try to force everyone else to be open source.

mort96 3y ago
Why would you be worried about that? What has the kernel community ever said to even indicate that they'd want to move in that direction?

crop_rotation 3y ago

There is no chance of Linux winning this over Nvidia. The thing is there is no alternative to Nvidia, while there are many to Linux. The demand is seemingly infinite. Every big corp is rushing to secure as many as they can. For people talking about it being hard to keep their own forked or patched kernel, Nvidia is so big at this point that it can buy RedHat(from IBM), Suse, and almost every Linux vendor on the market and the cost would be mostly not relevant to them. There is zero chance of anyone avoiding Nvidia now due to Linux issues. Sure, 5 years ago this might have worked, but that ship has sailed.

Matl 3y ago
> The thing is there is no alternative to Nvidia, while there are many to Linux. Huh? I am a backebd dev and a gamer who would never give up Linux for a proprietary OS, but has no NVidia hardware. That being said, I know you're talking about industry. My question is, so are we supposed to just take it? NVidia has to be pushed to do the right thing here, as AMD and Intel have done or are we just slaves to 'too big to fail' and somehow this is a triumph of capitalism?
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  I am talking about industry solely, and the time for pushing was 5 years ago and before. I am not saying what would be the ideal outcome, but that at this point anyone running AI workloads will abandon Linux over Nvidia if there is a need to do so.
  - Matl 3y ago
    I suspect we're going to see more and more specialized hardware in this area before that happens, but what benefit exactly is there to having them on Linux anyway? Most of that industry is highly opposed to being open in any sensible definition of that word, so what do they bring exactly?
- incrudible 3y ago
  NVDAs foothold here is not about gaming, but machine learning. Few people play on Linux anyway, but machine learning is basically not happening without Nvidia. Not that this is favorable, but it is true. And yes, I am taking it, I simply do not care that much.

exabrial 3y ago

Are we saying that _ALL_ Linux kernel modules by their very nature _HAVE TO_ be GPL? Couldn't NVidia just compile against a compatible, but ASL header? Just trying to understand whats happening!

mook 3y ago
Not all kernel modules need to be GPL; that's why there's a license field for modules at all (if everything needs to be GPL, then the license would be implied). The issue here is that nVidia wants at least part of their module to not be open source, but _also_ wants access to functionality that's been marked as only allowed to be access by GPL modules (the typical assumption is that, in order to use those, your code already needs to be tied deeply enough that you're a derived work). Note: based off things I've gleaned from LWN and places.
- exabrial 3y ago
  In that case, should they compile against an ASL header, or is there something with linking and kernel modules I’m not grasping?

TechBro8615 3y ago

I don't understand why Nvidia puts so much effort into keeping their drivers as proprietary blobs. It's not like their software is part of their defensibility; they're a hardware company. Not only will opening their kernel modules have zero impact on their hardware sales, but it will actually improve their stability and also earn goodwill from developers who might otherwise go out of their way to purchase a GPU from AMD.

Qwertious 3y ago
They want to be more than a hardware company, because commodification is antithetical to fat profit margins. They have ~80% of the GPU market, their only way to increase profit margins is to start gouging (which is easier if they control the stack higher up, e.g. if the main GPGPU language is built around their GPU architecture) or to branch into a different field entirely (which is why Nvidia has been going so hard into AI - they could leverage their GPU dominance to gain an early lead in the field).
charonn0 3y ago
My guess is that it would enable unlocking higher performance regimes in lower-end cards. But I have nothing to back that up with.
sceadu 3y ago
Their software is a huge part of their defensibility
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  How?
  - totoglazer 3y ago
    CUDA is the basis for the entire “AI revolution.” Their entire stock price now is from the extreme demand for A100/H100 to power AI and other supercomputing needs. That’s possible because the software stack (CUDA drivers, etc) are incredibly powerful at turning the silicon into value. AMD also has ok hardware, but almost no adoption due to software. If they give up the software the huge advantage they have will erode.

quickthrower2 3y ago

For the uninitiated, if NVidia refuse to make their modules GPL, and also cannot find a workaround, does this mean you cannot use their cards on (at least unmodified) future versions of Linux? Maybe NVidia could persuade end users to patch their kernel to get around this?

CuriousCosmic 3y ago
No this would simply require Nvidia to push more of their actual implementation into their shim code (which is required to be open sourced). So at worst it will force more complicated workaround solutions for Nvidia driver devs which could in turn cause more bugs for users.

michaelmrose 3y ago

At what point does it make sense to just maintain a fork of the kernel that is pragmatically interested in making things that work rather than sabotage.