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I still don’t understand why it’s so damn hard to use a NVIDIA GPU on Linux vs Windows. The NVIDIA drivers are closed source for both. Once deep learning took o

by fny 3y ago

I still don’t understand why it’s so damn hard to use a NVIDIA GPU on Linux vs Windows. The NVIDIA drivers are closed source for both. Once deep learning took off, I expected things to change, but the other day I tried to install drivers for a new card and my Bluetooth and WiFi stopped working.

smoldesu 3y ago
The main difference is probably that Linux has a dozen+ desktops and (even ideally) multiple desktop implementations to support. Windows has just one, and they update it continuously (not to say it works perfectly either). In the end, Windows has more users that report bugs on fewer setups. That makes fixing things much easier than Linux.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I... Don't think either of those is true? Driver support is once for all of Xorg and once for all of Wayland AFAIK; it's not like you have a different driver for each desktop environment. And I was rather given to believe that Linux users were far disproportionately likely to report bugs compared to Windows users, though I suppose there are so many more Windows users that they might still manage a higher absolute number of bug reports.
tedunangst 3y ago
The driver API in the windows kernel changes about once a decade. And they're not actively hostile to loading closed source drivers.
- dietr1ch 3y ago
  Poor multi-trillion company unable to support open source drivers
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Their business plan seems to be working out for them.
    - mhh__ 3y ago
      Ok?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - phendrenad2 3y ago
        Companies won't do anything unless it makes them money, there's no other factor like pride or social pressure. A human might be motivated to change by being looked down upon, but not a corporation.
  - xcdzvyn 3y ago
    Who are you trying to argue?
  - ladyanita22 3y ago
    Poor us. The multi-billion dollar company is doing just fine.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Maybe they should contribute their drivers to the kernel instead of fighting it at every turn.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    There's always AMD
  - justinclift 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278
  - paulmd 3y ago
    They are, they released an open driver and it’s being upstreamed into the kernel. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules People still search for reasons to shit on it because they don’t like the company in general and want to back AMD. Nothing is or ever will be good enough for the haters. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html It's software development, if you're searching for a reason to be discontented, you're always going to find one, it's clearly an unfalsifiable situation for people who just dislike the company on personal grounds.
    - johnny22 3y ago
      that driver is not being upstreamed and never will be as long as it can only work with the proprietary userspace. It's being used as a reference implementation to improve nouveau.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      I've got nothing against nvidia at all. I just don't like running proprietary software on my computer. Looks like they're finally improving and I'm definitely happy about that. However, the driver has not been upstreamed yet. I just wish they'd let the nouveau developers do their thing.
michaelmrose 3y ago
It seems likely that in the course of installing your gpu driver via your package manager you installed additional updates that effected other functionality. It is plainly impossible for your GPU driver to effect your wifi. Its been painless to install closed source nvidia drivers for 20 years so long as your distro provides a package.
- MadnessASAP 3y ago
  I can think of a dozen ways for a GPU driver to affect Wireless NIC. They're both kernel mode so good ol' fashioned SW bugs is a start. Then you could have bad firmware tables causing one driver to trample on the wrong device. All the way too the GPU interfering directly on the bus.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    If this was so you would be able to trivially reproduce in 60 seconds by rebooting with the in kernel driver in place of the NVIDIA driver. Then you can write a blog post exploring the nature of a bug as likely as you finding out you were the secret love child of Elon Musk and the direct descendant of the Lindbergh baby.
OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
Nvidia targets Windows, not Linux. It's as simple as that
- loeg 3y ago
  They put a lot of work into maintaining a Linux driver, actually.
bayindirh 3y ago
NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards (Teslas). Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market. This was not like that before their Tesla series took off with such momentum.Currently, X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people. I think some parts of their drivers do some black magic, because if that was not the case, there should not be a tug of war about the technical details for providing Wayland support. Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly, but not the CUDA parts, because it’s the money making part.
- jdiff 3y ago
  To be, frankly, more fair than they deserve, with CUDA they don't have to worry about anyone else. It's their API, they just have to maintain it themselves. When supporting X or Wayland they have to play nice and integrate with other people and their APIs.
- loeg 3y ago
  They put a ton of effort into supporting the Linux desktop market, all considering.
- hellozomo 3y ago
  Not sure where you're getting that from. NVIDIA has supported professional desktop Linux usage since before anyone was doing AI on their GPUs. All of their GPUs worked well. I've been running NVIDIA GPUs on Linux workstations in personal and professional settings for almost 20 years. It's been always been an extremely functional and high performance experience. It's annoying that the drivers are proprietary, and have to be rebuilt during kernel upgrades, but they have worked very well for a long time.
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    Same. I have been running on and off Nvidia on Linux for more than 20 years and they have committed to the platform for all this time. It would of course be better if the drivers where OSS and integrated in the kernel, but for more than a decade Nvidia was the only option for high performance graphics on Linux (Intel always had very good stable OSS drivers but not the hardware to match).
vondur 3y ago
I got used to it back in the days. I would download the driver from Nvidia, make the installer executable. Then drop into run level 3 and run the installer from there. Reboot, and it worked. Every time there was a kernel upgrade I believe you needed to reinstall the drivers, as the Nvidia software installed kmod's. Needless to say, I use ATI cards now. I wonder if Nvidia supported Wayland natively, maybe the installations will go much smoother?
- pmontra 3y ago
  I had a laptop with an ATI card, 2006 to 2013. Then some 3.x kernel dropped the driver and I had to choose between buying a new laptop and stop upgrading the kernel. I stopped the upgrade but no more ATI cards for me after that experience.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Nowadays their Linux support is probably better than nvidia; when I bought my nvidia card, the amdgpu drivers were just starting to be a thing, and the radeon drivers were so bad I went nvidia, and it's been a pain ever since. I recently got wayland working, but to give you an idea of performance, I get 86FPS on glxgears when maximized on my 1200p screen.
askiiart 3y ago
I'm amazed no one's posted is yet, so I guess I'll have to do the honors. "Nvidia, fuck you" - https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ
- paulmd 3y ago
  And there’s the thought-terminating cliche, like every nvidia thread
cpburns2009 3y ago
You install the Nvidia drivers through your distro package manager. That's worked for me for the past 10 years. In recent years, the driver or some component of it recompiles via dkms whenever you install a new kernel. The Nouveau drivers have never worked for me.
- boredtofears 3y ago
  That’s never worked for me other than to maybe get the native monitor res working. Refresh rates are always off and any remotely advanced configuration has never worked with distro drivers.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Yeah, I see a lot of people bemoaning the difficulty of installing the nVidia driver on Linux, but in my experience it amounts to clicking a box in the configuration and letting DKMS do its magic. Actually easier than the Windows driver that you have to go to their website and download. Downside is the driver version is usually somewhat behind the Windows version, but that's not been a showstopper for me.
- fny 3y ago
  This is exactly how I borked my Bluetooth and WiFi.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
idonotknowwhy 3y ago
It's really not hard anymore. I've used it for years, since I got rid of my abomination of a Vega64. AMD drivers are built into the kernel and work out of the box, but they're still buggy. In my experience, at least 3 times I couldn't boot after a kernel upgrade due to buggy Vega64 drivers.
still_grokking 3y ago
It's much simpler on Linux. You just do `# apt install nvidia-driver`, and reboot. That's all. This also won't install all the horrible security nightmares that come with the Windows drivers, as that stuff doesn't exist on Linux. So overall a much better experience than on Windows.

by fny 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago

The main difference is probably that Linux has a dozen+ desktops and (even ideally) multiple desktop implementations to support. Windows has just one, and they update it continuously (not to say it works perfectly either). In the end, Windows has more users that report bugs on fewer setups. That makes fixing things much easier than Linux.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I... Don't think either of those is true? Driver support is once for all of Xorg and once for all of Wayland AFAIK; it's not like you have a different driver for each desktop environment. And I was rather given to believe that Linux users were far disproportionately likely to report bugs compared to Windows users, though I suppose there are so many more Windows users that they might still manage a higher absolute number of bug reports.

tedunangst 3y ago

The driver API in the windows kernel changes about once a decade. And they're not actively hostile to loading closed source drivers.

dietr1ch 3y ago
Poor multi-trillion company unable to support open source drivers
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Their business plan seems to be working out for them.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Ok?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      Companies won't do anything unless it makes them money, there's no other factor like pride or social pressure. A human might be motivated to change by being looked down upon, but not a corporation.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  Who are you trying to argue?
- ladyanita22 3y ago
  Poor us. The multi-billion dollar company is doing just fine.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Maybe they should contribute their drivers to the kernel instead of fighting it at every turn.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  There's always AMD
- justinclift 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278
- paulmd 3y ago
  They are, they released an open driver and it’s being upstreamed into the kernel. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules People still search for reasons to shit on it because they don’t like the company in general and want to back AMD. Nothing is or ever will be good enough for the haters. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html It's software development, if you're searching for a reason to be discontented, you're always going to find one, it's clearly an unfalsifiable situation for people who just dislike the company on personal grounds.
  - johnny22 3y ago
    that driver is not being upstreamed and never will be as long as it can only work with the proprietary userspace. It's being used as a reference implementation to improve nouveau.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I've got nothing against nvidia at all. I just don't like running proprietary software on my computer. Looks like they're finally improving and I'm definitely happy about that. However, the driver has not been upstreamed yet. I just wish they'd let the nouveau developers do their thing.

michaelmrose 3y ago

It seems likely that in the course of installing your gpu driver via your package manager you installed additional updates that effected other functionality. It is plainly impossible for your GPU driver to effect your wifi. Its been painless to install closed source nvidia drivers for 20 years so long as your distro provides a package.

MadnessASAP 3y ago
I can think of a dozen ways for a GPU driver to affect Wireless NIC. They're both kernel mode so good ol' fashioned SW bugs is a start. Then you could have bad firmware tables causing one driver to trample on the wrong device. All the way too the GPU interfering directly on the bus.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  If this was so you would be able to trivially reproduce in 60 seconds by rebooting with the in kernel driver in place of the NVIDIA driver. Then you can write a blog post exploring the nature of a bug as likely as you finding out you were the secret love child of Elon Musk and the direct descendant of the Lindbergh baby.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago

Nvidia targets Windows, not Linux. It's as simple as that

loeg 3y ago
They put a lot of work into maintaining a Linux driver, actually.

bayindirh 3y ago

NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards (Teslas). Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market. This was not like that before their Tesla series took off with such momentum.Currently, X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people. I think some parts of their drivers do some black magic, because if that was not the case, there should not be a tug of war about the technical details for providing Wayland support. Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly, but not the CUDA parts, because it’s the money making part.

jdiff 3y ago
To be, frankly, more fair than they deserve, with CUDA they don't have to worry about anyone else. It's their API, they just have to maintain it themselves. When supporting X or Wayland they have to play nice and integrate with other people and their APIs.
loeg 3y ago
They put a ton of effort into supporting the Linux desktop market, all considering.
hellozomo 3y ago
Not sure where you're getting that from. NVIDIA has supported professional desktop Linux usage since before anyone was doing AI on their GPUs. All of their GPUs worked well. I've been running NVIDIA GPUs on Linux workstations in personal and professional settings for almost 20 years. It's been always been an extremely functional and high performance experience. It's annoying that the drivers are proprietary, and have to be rebuilt during kernel upgrades, but they have worked very well for a long time.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Same. I have been running on and off Nvidia on Linux for more than 20 years and they have committed to the platform for all this time. It would of course be better if the drivers where OSS and integrated in the kernel, but for more than a decade Nvidia was the only option for high performance graphics on Linux (Intel always had very good stable OSS drivers but not the hardware to match).

vondur 3y ago

I got used to it back in the days. I would download the driver from Nvidia, make the installer executable. Then drop into run level 3 and run the installer from there. Reboot, and it worked. Every time there was a kernel upgrade I believe you needed to reinstall the drivers, as the Nvidia software installed kmod's. Needless to say, I use ATI cards now. I wonder if Nvidia supported Wayland natively, maybe the installations will go much smoother?

pmontra 3y ago
I had a laptop with an ATI card, 2006 to 2013. Then some 3.x kernel dropped the driver and I had to choose between buying a new laptop and stop upgrading the kernel. I stopped the upgrade but no more ATI cards for me after that experience.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Nowadays their Linux support is probably better than nvidia; when I bought my nvidia card, the amdgpu drivers were just starting to be a thing, and the radeon drivers were so bad I went nvidia, and it's been a pain ever since. I recently got wayland working, but to give you an idea of performance, I get 86FPS on glxgears when maximized on my 1200p screen.

askiiart 3y ago

I'm amazed no one's posted is yet, so I guess I'll have to do the honors. "Nvidia, fuck you" - https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ

paulmd 3y ago
And there’s the thought-terminating cliche, like every nvidia thread

cpburns2009 3y ago

You install the Nvidia drivers through your distro package manager. That's worked for me for the past 10 years. In recent years, the driver or some component of it recompiles via dkms whenever you install a new kernel. The Nouveau drivers have never worked for me.

boredtofears 3y ago
That’s never worked for me other than to maybe get the native monitor res working. Refresh rates are always off and any remotely advanced configuration has never worked with distro drivers.
jandrese 3y ago
Yeah, I see a lot of people bemoaning the difficulty of installing the nVidia driver on Linux, but in my experience it amounts to clicking a box in the configuration and letting DKMS do its magic. Actually easier than the Windows driver that you have to go to their website and download. Downside is the driver version is usually somewhat behind the Windows version, but that's not been a showstopper for me.
fny 3y ago
This is exactly how I borked my Bluetooth and WiFi.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

idonotknowwhy 3y ago

It's really not hard anymore. I've used it for years, since I got rid of my abomination of a Vega64. AMD drivers are built into the kernel and work out of the box, but they're still buggy. In my experience, at least 3 times I couldn't boot after a kernel upgrade due to buggy Vega64 drivers.

still_grokking 3y ago

It's much simpler on Linux. You just do `# apt install nvidia-driver`, and reboot. That's all. This also won't install all the horrible security nightmares that come with the Windows drivers, as that stuff doesn't exist on Linux. So overall a much better experience than on Windows.