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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

by 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.
      - mrweasel 3y ago
        Still not sure what you're getting at. I don't disagree that the drivers could benefit from a few extra people looking at them... though I doubt that many outside AMD is looking at the Radeon drivers. There's no harm in NVIDIA opening their drivers, but they won't do it, nor do they like that the kernel developers are saying that users are on their own if they do load their proprietary drivers. Now what I originally tried to address was people defending NVIDIA, because their work depends heavily on things working as they currently do and what they are looking at now is an ever so slightly more uncertain future. Edit: Oh I see, you're confused about "if the thing that powers their products suddenly taken from them", is that what you're thinking in terms of authorship? I'm referring to having the drivers taken away, feature, performance, whatever the negative outcome could be in the mind of those defending NVIDIA.
beanjuiceII 3y ago
what are you talking about, if this is a violation you'd see it in courts but it's not because there's no case
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TheDong 3y ago
  Most crimes don't end up in courts. Doubly so when one side is a corporation with an ungodly amount of money, and the other side is a group of difficult to organize nerds who would struggle to show real damages. Things not showing up in courts proves basically nothing, and if you think it does, well, I'd be happy to sell you a lawyer who will charge you $200k to win a case over the course of 3 years netting you a judgement of $25k at the end. Regardless of the legal aspect though, nvidia's clearly in the moral wrong. The kernel ships with a license that tries to protect user's freedom to modify its source code, and the source code for derived works. nvidia is acting counter to that license, and counter to its user's freedom.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Given that at least some other OSs see drivers as 3rd party programs and not derived works of the kernel, I don't see why we should consider Nvidia morally in the wrong. I find it much more likely that they are legally in the wrong, though.
    - vilunov 3y ago
      Linux being a monolithic kernel and drivers being a derivative work is an important design choice, which arguably is an important reason Linux became so popular now, as it forces everyone to contribute to the common pool, if they wish to use others' work. One group deciding that they are an exception is morally wrong in my eyes, because it undermines that idea.
  - justin66 3y ago
    > Most crimes don't end up in courts. It would lend credibility to your arguments if you understood the difference between criminal and civil actions.
adrian_b 3y ago
I do not see on what grounds you can classify in this case Linux as a victim and NVIDIA as an attacker. There are many people who want to use on their computers both the Linux kernel and NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA maintains their Linux drivers only for the benefit of the NVIDIA GPU owners who desire this, they do not get any direct revenue from this activity. So at most you might say that Linux is a victim of the GPU owners that want to use Linux, despite the fact that some kernel developers hate the owners of NVIDIA GPUs and try to discourage them to use Linux. The problem is that Linux does not have a clear license that would enumerate what Linux users are allowed to do, and even if it would have such a list, that would be somewhat ridiculous, because one of the main claimed objectives of the Linux development has always been that its purpose is to remove the restrictions imposed by the commercial operating systems. If Linux would have a license forbidding the Linux users to use it in weapons of mass destruction, that could be justifiable on moral grounds. On the other hand, a license that would forbid the Linux users to buy NVIDIA GPUs or any other piece of hardware cannot have any justification. While some kernel developers did not attempt to do something so pathetic, they still do not find anything better to do than to find new ways to make the life harder for those Linux users that have good reasons for using something like NVIDIA GPUs or the ZFS file system. It is normal for the kernel developers to not do anything to contribute to proprietary device drivers, but it is ugly and mean to try to sabotage them by actively preventing them to link to the symbols that must necessarily be used by a device driver in order to accomplish its function.
- TheDong 3y ago
  > I do not see on what grounds you can classify in this case Linux as a victim and NVIDIA as an attacker. The linux kernel is respecting it's user's rights to know what code they run, and to be able to modify it. nvidia is not extending that courtesy to their users, even though the linux kernel's possibly-legally-enforceable copyright insists that nvidia has to extend such a right. nvidia can release their source code as GPL if they want to use the GPL parts of the kernel. Are you just as mad at nvidia for having a proprietary driver but not letting users apply patches to the driver? I assure you, the license nvidia distributes its drivers under is much more restrictive than linux's GPL license. Like, if you're mad that the linux developers are making it harder for nvidia to violate linux's license and make a derivative work of the linux kernel, surely you're even madder that nvidia's developers have made it even harder for anyone to make a derivative work of nvidia's proprietary driver blobs, right?
deeviant 3y ago
Nvidia will not be open sourcing their driver, so a result of this type of open source witch hunt is make the proprietary drivers worse. You'll have to forgive me for not wanted the only functional driver of hardware in I very much rely on in a daily basis for both work and personal use, to lose functionality.
- TimeBearingDown 3y ago
  NVIDIA already ostensibly open-sourced their driver for GeForce RTX 20-series and newer. Yes, they shoved all the important bits in the firmware, but this still could make for a much more stable Linux module, if NVIDIA actually respects license/code boundaries.
  - rany_ 3y ago
    It is worth mentioning that their open-sourced driver is not the same codebase as their proprietary driver, it is inferior in performance for desktop/gaming users. So it is not really a complete alternative yet. Either way as you mention, the fact it's only GeForce RTX 20-series and newer is a dealbreaker for people with older cards as well.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > open source witch hunt Enforcing licences and neutering illegal violation of license is not a witch hunt.
GuB-42 3y ago
For GPL, open source supporters, and people who don't like or care about Nvidia support, Linux devs are doing the right thing. For people who depend on their Nvidia hardware to work under Linux, I understand they are pissed off, since it break their support for a non-technical reason. It is not unlike DRM when you think about it. In the "Digital Rights Management", it is a technical measure to protect the Linux kernel copyright ("copyleft" in this case). In the "Digital Restrictions Management" sense, it is a feature that is design to break something that works. And it is also about the "Direct Rendering Manager", but at least, no one complains about that DRM. I just with that Nvidia had more competition. For not, they can do whatever they want because they have the best GPUs, both with regard to open source and price. AMD GPUs are meh right now. Maybe Intel will be competitive one day, from my experience, their Linux / open source support is rather good, but maybe because when it comes to GPUs, they are the underdog.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  > or people who depend on their Nvidia hardware to work under Linux, I understand they are pissed off, since it break their support for a non-technical reason. They need to redirect their anger at the correct culprit -- Nvidia. The non-technical breakage is a result of Nvidia continuing to try to sneak around restrictions that they should have been abiding by. Nvidia could have spent the resources to get their drivers to compliance, but instead they chose to use them to try to circumvent the restrictions.
nialv7 3y ago
I thought the nvidia kernel driver is open sourced? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules It says it's dual licensed MIT/GPL2
- rany_ 3y ago
  That's only for a small subset of their more recent GPUs, as you can see here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#compatible-gpus https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#compatible... Also it's not the same codebase as their proprietary driver, it is inferior in performance for desktop/gaming users. So it is not really a complete alternative yet.
  - COGlory 3y ago
    It is absolutely an alternative. We are running it on an HPC cluster with dozens of A40s and A100s and getting comparable benchmarks.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      tbh if the open-nvidia driver works for compute (which runtimes, opencl too/etc?) that pretty much neuters NVIDIA's driver licensing "this isn't allowed on gaming cards in datacenters (except mining)" shenanigans doesn't it? it's MIT/GPL2 licensed, do what the fuck you want with it? also gives them a way to relieve pressure on the AI market. "install the open drivers bro", assuming it works.
    - rany_ 3y ago
      I'll add "for desktop users" as that's my only experience with it. I haven't used it for compute.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by rany_ 3y ago

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.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      Still not sure what you're getting at. I don't disagree that the drivers could benefit from a few extra people looking at them... though I doubt that many outside AMD is looking at the Radeon drivers. There's no harm in NVIDIA opening their drivers, but they won't do it, nor do they like that the kernel developers are saying that users are on their own if they do load their proprietary drivers. Now what I originally tried to address was people defending NVIDIA, because their work depends heavily on things working as they currently do and what they are looking at now is an ever so slightly more uncertain future. Edit: Oh I see, you're confused about "if the thing that powers their products suddenly taken from them", is that what you're thinking in terms of authorship? I'm referring to having the drivers taken away, feature, performance, whatever the negative outcome could be in the mind of those defending NVIDIA.

beanjuiceII 3y ago

what are you talking about, if this is a violation you'd see it in courts but it's not because there's no case

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TheDong 3y ago
Most crimes don't end up in courts. Doubly so when one side is a corporation with an ungodly amount of money, and the other side is a group of difficult to organize nerds who would struggle to show real damages. Things not showing up in courts proves basically nothing, and if you think it does, well, I'd be happy to sell you a lawyer who will charge you $200k to win a case over the course of 3 years netting you a judgement of $25k at the end. Regardless of the legal aspect though, nvidia's clearly in the moral wrong. The kernel ships with a license that tries to protect user's freedom to modify its source code, and the source code for derived works. nvidia is acting counter to that license, and counter to its user's freedom.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Given that at least some other OSs see drivers as 3rd party programs and not derived works of the kernel, I don't see why we should consider Nvidia morally in the wrong. I find it much more likely that they are legally in the wrong, though.
  - vilunov 3y ago
    Linux being a monolithic kernel and drivers being a derivative work is an important design choice, which arguably is an important reason Linux became so popular now, as it forces everyone to contribute to the common pool, if they wish to use others' work. One group deciding that they are an exception is morally wrong in my eyes, because it undermines that idea.
- justin66 3y ago
  > Most crimes don't end up in courts. It would lend credibility to your arguments if you understood the difference between criminal and civil actions.

adrian_b 3y ago

I do not see on what grounds you can classify in this case Linux as a victim and NVIDIA as an attacker. There are many people who want to use on their computers both the Linux kernel and NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA maintains their Linux drivers only for the benefit of the NVIDIA GPU owners who desire this, they do not get any direct revenue from this activity. So at most you might say that Linux is a victim of the GPU owners that want to use Linux, despite the fact that some kernel developers hate the owners of NVIDIA GPUs and try to discourage them to use Linux. The problem is that Linux does not have a clear license that would enumerate what Linux users are allowed to do, and even if it would have such a list, that would be somewhat ridiculous, because one of the main claimed objectives of the Linux development has always been that its purpose is to remove the restrictions imposed by the commercial operating systems. If Linux would have a license forbidding the Linux users to use it in weapons of mass destruction, that could be justifiable on moral grounds. On the other hand, a license that would forbid the Linux users to buy NVIDIA GPUs or any other piece of hardware cannot have any justification. While some kernel developers did not attempt to do something so pathetic, they still do not find anything better to do than to find new ways to make the life harder for those Linux users that have good reasons for using something like NVIDIA GPUs or the ZFS file system. It is normal for the kernel developers to not do anything to contribute to proprietary device drivers, but it is ugly and mean to try to sabotage them by actively preventing them to link to the symbols that must necessarily be used by a device driver in order to accomplish its function.

TheDong 3y ago
> I do not see on what grounds you can classify in this case Linux as a victim and NVIDIA as an attacker. The linux kernel is respecting it's user's rights to know what code they run, and to be able to modify it. nvidia is not extending that courtesy to their users, even though the linux kernel's possibly-legally-enforceable copyright insists that nvidia has to extend such a right. nvidia can release their source code as GPL if they want to use the GPL parts of the kernel. Are you just as mad at nvidia for having a proprietary driver but not letting users apply patches to the driver? I assure you, the license nvidia distributes its drivers under is much more restrictive than linux's GPL license. Like, if you're mad that the linux developers are making it harder for nvidia to violate linux's license and make a derivative work of the linux kernel, surely you're even madder that nvidia's developers have made it even harder for anyone to make a derivative work of nvidia's proprietary driver blobs, right?

deeviant 3y ago

Nvidia will not be open sourcing their driver, so a result of this type of open source witch hunt is make the proprietary drivers worse. You'll have to forgive me for not wanted the only functional driver of hardware in I very much rely on in a daily basis for both work and personal use, to lose functionality.

TimeBearingDown 3y ago
NVIDIA already ostensibly open-sourced their driver for GeForce RTX 20-series and newer. Yes, they shoved all the important bits in the firmware, but this still could make for a much more stable Linux module, if NVIDIA actually respects license/code boundaries.
- rany_ 3y ago
  It is worth mentioning that their open-sourced driver is not the same codebase as their proprietary driver, it is inferior in performance for desktop/gaming users. So it is not really a complete alternative yet. Either way as you mention, the fact it's only GeForce RTX 20-series and newer is a dealbreaker for people with older cards as well.
matkoniecz 3y ago
> open source witch hunt Enforcing licences and neutering illegal violation of license is not a witch hunt.

GuB-42 3y ago

For GPL, open source supporters, and people who don't like or care about Nvidia support, Linux devs are doing the right thing. For people who depend on their Nvidia hardware to work under Linux, I understand they are pissed off, since it break their support for a non-technical reason. It is not unlike DRM when you think about it. In the "Digital Rights Management", it is a technical measure to protect the Linux kernel copyright ("copyleft" in this case). In the "Digital Restrictions Management" sense, it is a feature that is design to break something that works. And it is also about the "Direct Rendering Manager", but at least, no one complains about that DRM. I just with that Nvidia had more competition. For not, they can do whatever they want because they have the best GPUs, both with regard to open source and price. AMD GPUs are meh right now. Maybe Intel will be competitive one day, from my experience, their Linux / open source support is rather good, but maybe because when it comes to GPUs, they are the underdog.

genocidicbunny 3y ago
> or people who depend on their Nvidia hardware to work under Linux, I understand they are pissed off, since it break their support for a non-technical reason. They need to redirect their anger at the correct culprit -- Nvidia. The non-technical breakage is a result of Nvidia continuing to try to sneak around restrictions that they should have been abiding by. Nvidia could have spent the resources to get their drivers to compliance, but instead they chose to use them to try to circumvent the restrictions.

nialv7 3y ago

I thought the nvidia kernel driver is open sourced? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules It says it's dual licensed MIT/GPL2

rany_ 3y ago
That's only for a small subset of their more recent GPUs, as you can see here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#compatible-gpus https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules#compatible... Also it's not the same codebase as their proprietary driver, it is inferior in performance for desktop/gaming users. So it is not really a complete alternative yet.
- COGlory 3y ago
  It is absolutely an alternative. We are running it on an HPC cluster with dozens of A40s and A100s and getting comparable benchmarks.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    tbh if the open-nvidia driver works for compute (which runtimes, opencl too/etc?) that pretty much neuters NVIDIA's driver licensing "this isn't allowed on gaming cards in datacenters (except mining)" shenanigans doesn't it? it's MIT/GPL2 licensed, do what the fuck you want with it? also gives them a way to relieve pressure on the AI market. "install the open drivers bro", assuming it works.
  - rany_ 3y ago
    I'll add "for desktop users" as that's my only experience with it. I haven't used it for compute.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]