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The Maintainer of the Nvidia Open-Source “Nouveau” Linux Kernel Driver Resigns

118 points by pabs3 3y ago

rasz 3y ago
Ben Skeggs is a no brainer instant hire for AMD and Valve. Wonder what his plans are after Red H^^IBM.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  His work at Red Hat was great, both inside and outside the company. Best of luck in the future Ben.
jsiepkes 3y ago
Is Nouveau still important now that Nvidia has opensourced their display drivers sometime ago?
- robert_foss 3y ago
  They have no interest in upstreaming their open sourced kernel driver it would seem.
- fayalalebrun 3y ago
  Of course. First of all they did not open source any existing driver. They released an open source kernel driver, which is separate from their existing closed source kernel driver. They still have not released an open source userspace driver.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I think that only works on new hardware, not old models? (Because new cards do more in proprietary firmware instead of a proprietary driver)
Roark66 3y ago
I wanted to use noveau a couple of times, but I always backed out due to no cuda support. I wish there was a way to use noveau for the display side of things and nVidia's cuda for ML acceleration.
cwillu 3y ago
The non-blogspam version: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2023-September/043241.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2023-Septembe...
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  Phoronix is hardly blogspam. I do appreciate the mailing list link, but there is plenty of value in surfacing this info into a news article.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cwillu 3y ago
    Reasonable people can differ, I guess. I myself have never seen a phoronix post that wasn't better summed up by the mailing list post they got it from though. “Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.”
    - yunohn 3y ago
      I don’t think you’re being reasonable. The mailing list email does not describe the developers background nor provide context - whereas the Phoronix article does.
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      It's an interesting point, maybe it feels like that to you because you're already deep in the community. For myself (as I am not), Phoronix articles often provide a good bit of accessibility through context and explanation.
  - mkl 3y ago
    The Phoronix article has the mailing list link. It also provides important context, so seems much better to me.
Galanwe 3y ago
I attended a presentation of the nouveau drivers at FOSDEM circa 2010. Until then I was quite supportive of the initiative. Then the presentation started, headed by two young guys, still students from what I understood. They basically explained how they reversed the drivers and did a lot of trial and error, how they recently fixed a bug where the fan of the card was on 100% of the time, etc. I left the presentation feeling very unsure on whether I should actually let that driver use my graphics card, and ended up reinstalling binary blobs. Never tried noubeau again since then. Is it actually 100% non destructive for your card nowadays?
- a_t48 3y ago
  This is kind of FUD and dismissive. nouveau isn't...the most performant, but a lot can change in 13 years.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Running the fan all the time is a safe failure mode; is there any reason to think the driver was ever "destructive"?
imiric 3y ago
Unsurprising. [1] comes to mind. Unfortunately, Nouveau has always been unstable for me, on every combination of hardware and software I tried it on. I'm glad it exists, and it seems to work for some people, but it always seemed infeasible that a single person could realistically maintain a project that reverse engineers one of the most complex drivers in existence from one of the most OSS-hostile companies in the world, and makes it work reliably for dozens of graphics cards, supporting hundreds of features. Kudos to the maintainer for their tireless dedication over the years. Hopefully a larger team can pick up the maintenance effort. [1]: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- wavesquid 3y ago
  I've had precisely the opposite happen: the NVIDIA driver had always been janky, either preventing standby,or not playing nice with my kernel, or some other weird incompatibility, while nouveau has been rock solid. This is across multiple desktops and laptops over multiple generations of card. Without nouveau id actively refuse a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU in it.
  - ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
  - silon42 3y ago
    One card, same experience... nouveau was quite reliable... it was a dual graphics laptop, so I later switched to Intel to get more battery life. On another laptop (with nVidia Optimus, I believe), it was not usable (at least not for external screen).
jlbooker 3y ago
I was never impressed with Nouveau, mostly because I pretty quickly ran into this system-crashing bug that I've had open for six years. It's "high critical" importance, plenty of reproductions, log submissions, etc... no developer ever looked at it. Nouveau was unusable. I gave it another try recently, and found it still crashing far too frequently to be acceptable. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100567 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100567

118 points by pabs3 3y ago

rasz 3y ago

Ben Skeggs is a no brainer instant hire for AMD and Valve. Wonder what his plans are after Red H^^IBM.

worthless-trash 3y ago
His work at Red Hat was great, both inside and outside the company. Best of luck in the future Ben.

jsiepkes 3y ago

Is Nouveau still important now that Nvidia has opensourced their display drivers sometime ago?

robert_foss 3y ago
They have no interest in upstreaming their open sourced kernel driver it would seem.
fayalalebrun 3y ago
Of course. First of all they did not open source any existing driver. They released an open source kernel driver, which is separate from their existing closed source kernel driver. They still have not released an open source userspace driver.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I think that only works on new hardware, not old models? (Because new cards do more in proprietary firmware instead of a proprietary driver)

Roark66 3y ago

I wanted to use noveau a couple of times, but I always backed out due to no cuda support. I wish there was a way to use noveau for the display side of things and nVidia's cuda for ML acceleration.

cwillu 3y ago

The non-blogspam version: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2023-September/043241.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2023-Septembe...

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
Phoronix is hardly blogspam. I do appreciate the mailing list link, but there is plenty of value in surfacing this info into a news article.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cwillu 3y ago
  Reasonable people can differ, I guess. I myself have never seen a phoronix post that wasn't better summed up by the mailing list post they got it from though. “Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.”
  - yunohn 3y ago
    I don’t think you’re being reasonable. The mailing list email does not describe the developers background nor provide context - whereas the Phoronix article does.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    It's an interesting point, maybe it feels like that to you because you're already deep in the community. For myself (as I am not), Phoronix articles often provide a good bit of accessibility through context and explanation.
- mkl 3y ago
  The Phoronix article has the mailing list link. It also provides important context, so seems much better to me.

Galanwe 3y ago

I attended a presentation of the nouveau drivers at FOSDEM circa 2010. Until then I was quite supportive of the initiative. Then the presentation started, headed by two young guys, still students from what I understood. They basically explained how they reversed the drivers and did a lot of trial and error, how they recently fixed a bug where the fan of the card was on 100% of the time, etc. I left the presentation feeling very unsure on whether I should actually let that driver use my graphics card, and ended up reinstalling binary blobs. Never tried noubeau again since then. Is it actually 100% non destructive for your card nowadays?

a_t48 3y ago
This is kind of FUD and dismissive. nouveau isn't...the most performant, but a lot can change in 13 years.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Running the fan all the time is a safe failure mode; is there any reason to think the driver was ever "destructive"?

imiric 3y ago

Unsurprising. [1] comes to mind. Unfortunately, Nouveau has always been unstable for me, on every combination of hardware and software I tried it on. I'm glad it exists, and it seems to work for some people, but it always seemed infeasible that a single person could realistically maintain a project that reverse engineers one of the most complex drivers in existence from one of the most OSS-hostile companies in the world, and makes it work reliably for dozens of graphics cards, supporting hundreds of features. Kudos to the maintainer for their tireless dedication over the years. Hopefully a larger team can pick up the maintenance effort. [1]: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

wavesquid 3y ago
I've had precisely the opposite happen: the NVIDIA driver had always been janky, either preventing standby,or not playing nice with my kernel, or some other weird incompatibility, while nouveau has been rock solid. This is across multiple desktops and laptops over multiple generations of card. Without nouveau id actively refuse a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU in it.
- ChoHag 3y ago
  [dead]
- silon42 3y ago
  One card, same experience... nouveau was quite reliable... it was a dual graphics laptop, so I later switched to Intel to get more battery life. On another laptop (with nVidia Optimus, I believe), it was not usable (at least not for external screen).

jlbooker 3y ago

I was never impressed with Nouveau, mostly because I pretty quickly ran into this system-crashing bug that I've had open for six years. It's "high critical" importance, plenty of reproductions, log submissions, etc... no developer ever looked at it. Nouveau was unusable. I gave it another try recently, and found it still crashing far too frequently to be acceptable. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100567 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100567