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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

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.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > ... but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux, they'll cave. Why wouldn't they? It would only be a few million dollars a year to do so, at most.
    - seanw444 3y ago
      Yeah, they totally would.
    - COGlory 3y ago
      Their customers are not going to run an Nvidia fork, because the vast majority of applications only compile on very specific Linux configurations to begin with. This would effectively cede the market to CPUs or AMD.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        No, it would be a lot easier to modify their applications then wait for AMD to create CUDA 2.0.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/introduction.html#dgx-os-6-features https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/introduction...
    - tw04 3y ago
      That isn't a permanent fork away from the Linux kernel. It's basically them repackaging Ubuntu LTS, customized with some of the binaries packaged in. Permanently forking the Linux kernel us a VERY different beast then taking Ubuntu, pre-installing Nvidia drivers, and then re-baselining everytime Ubuntu releases a new LTS.
      - 3y ago
- elromulous 3y ago
  +1 Nvidia would win this fight. Linus and co taking a hard stance would result in the industry bifurcating on Linux. AI just has so much momentum and money being poured into it.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  webgpu will eventually fill this role right?
PaulHoule 3y ago
Whatever. From a pragmatic perspective it's a reason to stick with Windows.
pedrocr 3y ago
Isn't that exactly what has already happened? Nvidia has released a fully open-source kernel side driver for their current hardware, probably because of pressure from the hyperscalers that don't want to run closed-source code in their kernels. The new driver still needs to be integrated into the upstream kernel so this news is still about the current legally dubious one.
seanw444 3y ago
Unfortunately there's not really any competition in the GPU space for AI use. AMD hasn't stepped up, and Intel is barely getting its footing for basic gaming functionality. Nvidia has an established monopoly on the GPGPU space, and forcing their hand, and them withdrawing from Linux compatibility, would result in everyone that needs Nvidia to ditch Linux. At least until an alternative becomes available, and then those customers would ditch Nvidia for screwing them over once already.
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  This is where WSL pulls its mask off. Windows will become (even more so) the platform of choice by being a "more compatible" version of Linux than Linux. And AI developers don't seem to have much affinity for open-source. Why would they care about being stuck on Microsoft and Nvidia's proprietary platforms when they're building their own proprietary models?
  - seanw444 3y ago
    Great point. WSL has always been a wolf in sheeps clothing, in my eyes. I'm not saying it's not useful. It certainly fills a role people clearly wanted filled. But you'd be naive to think Microsoft isn't taking on an "embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality. Again.
    - whoopdedo 3y ago
      Also, I'm sure AI devs would be all for making it more difficult to run models on the desktop so you'd be forced to use a cloud service. They could even keep using a non-GPL patched Linux on their servers because it's not like they're distributing anything.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  One word: Apple. With Apple's significant work from hardware on up with AI there's a very near future where many AI applications will train models on a Mac[0] directly in XCode[1], bundle it with the iOS/Mac OS application (and browsers), and run inference directly on the device. Apple will also be deploying more and more of their own foundational models shipped in the hardware/OS. Most user AI applications will be as simple as "call this coreml API". With the links provided it could be said we're already there and they've been laying the groundwork for years. This hits Nvidia and big GPU cloud providers two fold: 1) Training. We already see with the unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon that Apple can provide accelerated training with RAM capable of training/finetuning very large models[2]. 800GB/s bandwidth memory (192 GB!!!) is very close to the RTX 4090 (1TB/s). Also note how many PCIe X16 slots the Mac Pro has... You can be certain that follow up Apple Silicon will eat closer and closer to Nvidia datacenter GPU performance/capability and with Apple's resources potentially even surpass it for all but things like training massive LLM models from scratch a la Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. 2) Inference. Why pay AWS or whoever to run your inference when users have already spent their money on hardware that does it faster (because network latency) and more privately on the devices they already have? iOS 17 already does some AI tuning (FINALLY) on device with auto-correct - expect to see this show up everywhere in iOS and iOS applications. I don't make many predictions but this one is obvious. I'm convinced the next generations of Apple Silicon and the Apple software ecosystem, developer experience, etc will be the first very real threat to Nvidia. When this really gets going Intel and AMD will be permanently left at the starting line (where they are now) for all but very bespoke use cases and deployments like Frontier[3]. For people who take issue with MacOS look at the progress of Asahi... Then, once Google/Android catches up things will get REALLY interesting. This is the future and the current grab for Nvidia GPUs and clouds will eventually look like crypto mining - a few great years to be capitalized on when the getting was good. [0] - https://coremltools.readme.io/docs https://coremltools.readme.io/docs [1] - https://coremltools.readme.io/docs/xcode-model-preview-types https://coremltools.readme.io/docs/xcode-model-preview-types [2] - https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ [3] - https://www.amd.com/en/products/frontier https://www.amd.com/en/products/frontier
whalesalad 3y ago
Have you seen Nvidia's valuation lately? They are printing money because everyone wants it. I hear you but that is a utopian pipe dream that will never see the light of day. This is the gold rush.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  > Have you seen Nvidia's valuation lately That's exactly why it's time to strike. They don't want to cause any waves that would stop that momentum. This is the perfect time to intimidate them into falling into line just to avoid a public stink.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    Intimidate them? My brother, they are valued in the trillions of dollars. Also how will you orchestrate this coup and get everyone onboard? Impossible. This is quite honestly the Richard Stallman take. How has that gone? As admirable as it might seem - it has no legs.
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      I personally convinced Microsoft to rename GVFS a few years ago (because same name as a GNU project) using similar tactics, just because I thought it would be funny. All it took was front page of HN, a few reddit re-posts, and Slashdot, all driving traffic to a github issue. They went from outright refusing to ever doing anything about it to completely bending over in a matter of days. Major corporations with their toes in the open source space are _terrified_ of dev communities turning on them.
      - justin66 3y ago
        Microsoft politely changed the name of an Azure thingy that no one in the world cares about because its name conflicted with the name of a GNOME thingy that no one in the world cares about. The analogy with Nvidia's product line is imperfect.
    - 3y ago
jacquesm 3y ago
I'm pretty happy that things are the way they are. Linux distros (and the kernel maintainers) can't afford to pick fights with one of their major engines behind Linux adoption in academia and industry. NVidia comes first, then the OS decision in many contexts. You pick your fights with care, whatever your personal belief in the outcome of your bets, I would not be so sure about that one myself.
ohgodplsno 3y ago
>Force them to release an open source driver - they will comply, otherwise their AI conquest dreams will be over. Hahahaha. Absolutely nobody in the AI space gives a single shit about the GPL. Half of the big players and half of the research institutes have tried one way or another to bastardize what "open source" means. If they have to install Nvidia-linux which is a fork of Ubuntu with very minor patches in the kernel, they will.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

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.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > ... but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux, they'll cave. Why wouldn't they? It would only be a few million dollars a year to do so, at most.
  - seanw444 3y ago
    Yeah, they totally would.
  - COGlory 3y ago
    Their customers are not going to run an Nvidia fork, because the vast majority of applications only compile on very specific Linux configurations to begin with. This would effectively cede the market to CPUs or AMD.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      No, it would be a lot easier to modify their applications then wait for AMD to create CUDA 2.0.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > but unless Nvidia is planning on forking the kernel and fully maintaining their own version of Linux https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/introduction.html#dgx-os-6-features https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx-os-6-user-guide/introduction...
  - tw04 3y ago
    That isn't a permanent fork away from the Linux kernel. It's basically them repackaging Ubuntu LTS, customized with some of the binaries packaged in. Permanently forking the Linux kernel us a VERY different beast then taking Ubuntu, pre-installing Nvidia drivers, and then re-baselining everytime Ubuntu releases a new LTS.
    - 3y ago
elromulous 3y ago
+1 Nvidia would win this fight. Linus and co taking a hard stance would result in the industry bifurcating on Linux. AI just has so much momentum and money being poured into it.
sam0x17 3y ago
webgpu will eventually fill this role right?

PaulHoule 3y ago

Whatever. From a pragmatic perspective it's a reason to stick with Windows.

pedrocr 3y ago

Isn't that exactly what has already happened? Nvidia has released a fully open-source kernel side driver for their current hardware, probably because of pressure from the hyperscalers that don't want to run closed-source code in their kernels. The new driver still needs to be integrated into the upstream kernel so this news is still about the current legally dubious one.

seanw444 3y ago

Unfortunately there's not really any competition in the GPU space for AI use. AMD hasn't stepped up, and Intel is barely getting its footing for basic gaming functionality. Nvidia has an established monopoly on the GPGPU space, and forcing their hand, and them withdrawing from Linux compatibility, would result in everyone that needs Nvidia to ditch Linux. At least until an alternative becomes available, and then those customers would ditch Nvidia for screwing them over once already.

whoopdedo 3y ago
This is where WSL pulls its mask off. Windows will become (even more so) the platform of choice by being a "more compatible" version of Linux than Linux. And AI developers don't seem to have much affinity for open-source. Why would they care about being stuck on Microsoft and Nvidia's proprietary platforms when they're building their own proprietary models?
- seanw444 3y ago
  Great point. WSL has always been a wolf in sheeps clothing, in my eyes. I'm not saying it's not useful. It certainly fills a role people clearly wanted filled. But you'd be naive to think Microsoft isn't taking on an "embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality. Again.
  - whoopdedo 3y ago
    Also, I'm sure AI devs would be all for making it more difficult to run models on the desktop so you'd be forced to use a cloud service. They could even keep using a non-GPL patched Linux on their servers because it's not like they're distributing anything.
kkielhofner 3y ago
One word: Apple. With Apple's significant work from hardware on up with AI there's a very near future where many AI applications will train models on a Mac[0] directly in XCode[1], bundle it with the iOS/Mac OS application (and browsers), and run inference directly on the device. Apple will also be deploying more and more of their own foundational models shipped in the hardware/OS. Most user AI applications will be as simple as "call this coreml API". With the links provided it could be said we're already there and they've been laying the groundwork for years. This hits Nvidia and big GPU cloud providers two fold: 1) Training. We already see with the unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon that Apple can provide accelerated training with RAM capable of training/finetuning very large models[2]. 800GB/s bandwidth memory (192 GB!!!) is very close to the RTX 4090 (1TB/s). Also note how many PCIe X16 slots the Mac Pro has... You can be certain that follow up Apple Silicon will eat closer and closer to Nvidia datacenter GPU performance/capability and with Apple's resources potentially even surpass it for all but things like training massive LLM models from scratch a la Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. 2) Inference. Why pay AWS or whoever to run your inference when users have already spent their money on hardware that does it faster (because network latency) and more privately on the devices they already have? iOS 17 already does some AI tuning (FINALLY) on device with auto-correct - expect to see this show up everywhere in iOS and iOS applications. I don't make many predictions but this one is obvious. I'm convinced the next generations of Apple Silicon and the Apple software ecosystem, developer experience, etc will be the first very real threat to Nvidia. When this really gets going Intel and AMD will be permanently left at the starting line (where they are now) for all but very bespoke use cases and deployments like Frontier[3]. For people who take issue with MacOS look at the progress of Asahi... Then, once Google/Android catches up things will get REALLY interesting. This is the future and the current grab for Nvidia GPUs and clouds will eventually look like crypto mining - a few great years to be capitalized on when the getting was good. [0] - https://coremltools.readme.io/docs https://coremltools.readme.io/docs [1] - https://coremltools.readme.io/docs/xcode-model-preview-types https://coremltools.readme.io/docs/xcode-model-preview-types [2] - https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ [3] - https://www.amd.com/en/products/frontier https://www.amd.com/en/products/frontier

whalesalad 3y ago

Have you seen Nvidia's valuation lately? They are printing money because everyone wants it. I hear you but that is a utopian pipe dream that will never see the light of day. This is the gold rush.

sam0x17 3y ago
> Have you seen Nvidia's valuation lately That's exactly why it's time to strike. They don't want to cause any waves that would stop that momentum. This is the perfect time to intimidate them into falling into line just to avoid a public stink.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Intimidate them? My brother, they are valued in the trillions of dollars. Also how will you orchestrate this coup and get everyone onboard? Impossible. This is quite honestly the Richard Stallman take. How has that gone? As admirable as it might seem - it has no legs.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    I personally convinced Microsoft to rename GVFS a few years ago (because same name as a GNU project) using similar tactics, just because I thought it would be funny. All it took was front page of HN, a few reddit re-posts, and Slashdot, all driving traffic to a github issue. They went from outright refusing to ever doing anything about it to completely bending over in a matter of days. Major corporations with their toes in the open source space are _terrified_ of dev communities turning on them.
    - justin66 3y ago
      Microsoft politely changed the name of an Azure thingy that no one in the world cares about because its name conflicted with the name of a GNOME thingy that no one in the world cares about. The analogy with Nvidia's product line is imperfect.
  - 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

I'm pretty happy that things are the way they are. Linux distros (and the kernel maintainers) can't afford to pick fights with one of their major engines behind Linux adoption in academia and industry. NVidia comes first, then the OS decision in many contexts. You pick your fights with care, whatever your personal belief in the outcome of your bets, I would not be so sure about that one myself.

ohgodplsno 3y ago

>Force them to release an open source driver - they will comply, otherwise their AI conquest dreams will be over. Hahahaha. Absolutely nobody in the AI space gives a single shit about the GPL. Half of the big players and half of the research institutes have tried one way or another to bastardize what "open source" means. If they have to install Nvidia-linux which is a fork of Ubuntu with very minor patches in the kernel, they will.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]