8 ms·

CUDA is the only reason I have an Nvidia card, but if more projects start migrating to a more agnostic environment, I'll be really grateful. Running Nvidia in

• smoldesu 3y ago
  Those problems might just be GNOME-related at this point. I've been daily-driving two different Nvidia cards for ~3 years now (1050 Ti then 3070 Ti) and Wayland has felt pretty stable for the past 12 months. The worst problem I had experienced in that time was Electron and Java apps drawing incorrectly in xWayland, but both of those are fixed upstream. I'm definitely not against better hardware support for AI, but I think your problems are more GNOME's fault than Nvidia's. KDE's Wayland session is almost flawless on Nvidia nowadays.
  • arsome 3y ago
    If GNOME can tank the kernel, it ain't GNOME's fault.
  • kombine 3y ago
    I really hope that with KDE 6 I can finally switch to Wayland!
    • Zardoz84 3y ago
      I'm using KDE on Debian 12 with AMD GPU with Wayland, and works. it keeps being a bit annoying compared with X11 with a few programs (Eclipse, Dbeaver... I need to launch both with flags to not use Wayland backend). But even I can play AAA games without problems
• wubrr 3y ago
  Yeah, nvidia linux support is meh, but still much better than amd.
  • Zambyte 3y ago
    Is it better than AMD? I have had literally no graphics issues on my 6650 XT with swaywm using the built in kernel drivers.
    • christkv 3y ago
      I think the problems are pro drivers and the issues with ROCm being buggy not the open source graphics drivers.
    • treprinum 3y ago
      I never had an issue with nVidia drivers on Linux in the past 5 years, but recently bought a laptop with a 4090 and AMD CPU. Now I get random freezes, often right after I login into Cinnamon but can't really tell if it's the nVidia driver for 4090, AMDGPU driver for integrated RDNA, kernel 6.2 or Cinnamon issue. The laptop just hangs and stops responding to keyboard so I can't login to console and dmesg it.
      • SoftTalker 3y ago
        The main issue with Nvidia on Linux AIUI is that they don't release the source code for their drivers.
        • treprinum 3y ago
          That might be a philosophical problem that never prevented me from training models on Linux. The half-baked half-crashing AMD solutions just lead to wasting time I can spend on ML research instead.
          • 65a 3y ago
            I literally gave away my last laptop with a discrete nVidia card because it wasted so much of my time.
    • HansHamster 3y ago
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I see these complains from time to time and I never understand them. I've literally been running nvidia on linux since the TNT2 days and have _never_ had this sort of issue. That's across many drivers and many cards over the many many years.
  • ant6n 3y ago
    Well tnt2 should be pretty well supported by now ;-)
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      lmao, touche :)
  • temp0826 3y ago
    I understand it, but I also haven't had any trouble since I figured out the right procedure for me on fedora (which probably took some time, but it's been so long that I can't remember). Whenever I read people having issues it sounds like they are using a package installed via dnf for the driver/etc. I've always had issues with dkms and the like and just install the latest .run from nvidia's website whenever I have a kernel update (I made a one-line script to call it with the silent option and flags for signing for secure boot so I don't really think about it). No issues in a very long time even with the whackiness of prime/optimus offloading on my old laptop.
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      actually, it's a good point because that's how I always install nvidia drivers as well. Never from the local package manager.
    • bootsmann 3y ago
      So you don‘t recommend going the rpm-fusion route?
  • jjoonathan 3y ago
    Same but linux experience is a steep and bumpy function of hardware. My guess: something like laptop GPU switching failed badly in the nvidia binary, earning it a reputation.
• kombine 3y ago
  I use a rolling distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) and have had zero issues with my NVIDIA card despite it pulling the kernel and driver updates as they get released. The driver repo is maintained by NVIDIA itself, which is amazing.
  • filterfiber 3y ago
    Do you use wayland, multiple monitors, and/or play games or is it just for ML/AI?
    • smoldesu 3y ago
      I do all of those things with my 3070 and it works just fine. Most of them will depend on your DE's Wayland implementation. I'm not here to desparage anyone experiencing issues, but my experience on the NixOS rolling-release channel has also been pretty boring. There was a time when my old 1050 Ti struggled, but the modern upstream drivers feel just as smooth as my Intel system does.
• distract8901 3y ago
  My Arch system would occasionally boot to a black screen. When this happened, no amount of tinkering could get it back. I had to reinstall the whole OS. Turns out it was a conflict between nvidia drivers and my (10 year old) Intel integrated GPU. But once I switched to an AMD card, everything works flawlessly. Ubuntu based systems barely worked at all. Incredibly unstable and would occasionally corrupt the output and barf colors and fragments of the desktop all over my screens. AMD on arch has been an absolute delight. It just. Works. It's more stable than nvidia on windows. For a lot of reasons-- but mainly Linux drivers-- I've totally sworn off nvidia cards. AMD just works better for me.
  • aftbit 3y ago
    As a counter-argument, I ran Arch Linux + nvidia GPUs + Intel CPUs between 2012 and 2020, and still run Arch + nvidia (now with AMD CPU) to this day. I won't say it has been bug free at all, but it generally works pretty well. If you find a problem in Arch that you cannot fix without reinstalling, you do not sufficiently understand the problem or Arch itself. "Installing" Arch is refreshingly manual and "simple" compared to the magic that is other Linux distros or the closed source OSes.
    • wildzzz 3y ago
      I ran a laptop with the swappable dedicated Nvidia and integrated Intel GPU for a decade with no issues. Used to use something called Bumblebee to swap between them depending on workload, actually worked surprisingly well given the circumstances. Eventually I just dropped back to integrated only when I stopped doing anything intensive with the machine.
    • iopq 3y ago
      I tried using an Nvidia card with OBS to record my screen and it kind of freezes in Wine. I switched from x11 to Wayland and now Wine shows horizontal lines (!) and performs like crap. Even my 4GB RX 570 from years ago gives a better experience doing this. You just install OBS from flathub, Wayland works, everything works without any setup or tinkering. You click record and you can record your gameplay footage.
• gymbeaux 3y ago
  I often have issues booting to the installer or first boot after install with an NVidia GPU. Pop_OS, Fedora and OpenSUSE work out of the box. Those are all Wayland I believe. Debian/Ubuntu distros are a bad time. I think they’re still X11. It’s ironic because X11 is supposed to be the more stable window manager.
  • Flameancer 3y ago
    I think they moved to Wayland on 23.04 or 23.10. I just recently installed both to try and get a 7800xt working with PyTorch and the default was Wayland.
  • anthk 3y ago
    X11 is not a window manager.
    • gymbeaux 3y ago
      Xorg
      • anthk 3y ago
        Neither.
        • gymbeaux 3y ago
          Oh I get it, I originally said “window manager” rather than “window server.” You’re so helpful, thank you!
• chaostheory 3y ago
  Yeah with my CUDA setup, it feels like I just ducktaped my deployment. I am very hesitant to make changes and it’s not easy to replicate
• nextaccountic 3y ago
  > CUDA is the only reason I have an Nvidia card, but if more projects start migrating to a more agnostic environment, I'll be really grateful. What AMD really needs is to have 100% feature parity with CUDA without changing a single line of code. Maybe for this to happen it needs to add hardware features or something (I see people saying that CUDA as an API is very tailored to the capabilities of nvidia GPUs), I don't know. If AMD relies on people changing their code to make it portable, it already lost.
  • javchz 3y ago
    I think that could work too. I wonder if they could do a translation layer, something like Apple with the M1 chips that translates JIT x86 to ARM.
    • JonChesterfield 3y ago
      That's a fun idea. Qemu parses a binary into something very like a compiler IR, optimises it a bit, then writes it out as a binary for the same or another target in JIT like fashion. So that sort of thing can be built. Apple's rosetta is functionally similar, I expect it does the same sort of thing under the hood. Valgrind is another from the same architecture. It would be a painful reverse engineering process - the cuda file format is sort of like elf, but with undocumented bonus constraints, and you'd have to reverse the instruction encoding to get sass, which isn't documented, or try to take it directly to ptx which is somewhat documented, and then convert that onward. It would be far more difficult than compiling cuda source directly. I'm not sure anyone would pay for a cuda->amdgpu conversion tool, and it's hard to imagine AMD making one as part of ROCm.
  • mrweasel 3y ago
    > I see people saying that CUDA as an API is very tailored to the capabilities of nvidia GPUs I'm wondering how true that is, because that could give NVidia issues in the future if they need to redesign their GPU should they hit some limit with the current designs. Dependence on certain instruction makes sense, but there's not technical preventing AMD from implementing those instructions, only legal mumbo jumbo.
• orangetuba 3y ago
  Nvidia on Linux is more like running Windows 95 from the gulag, and you're covered in ticks. I absolutely detest Nvidia because of the Linux hell they've created.
• codemk8 3y ago
  From my recent experience, ROCm and hipcc allow you to port cuda programs fairly easily to AMD arch. The compiling is so much faster than nvcc too.