4 ms·

>and without the Nouveau baggage that's built up over the years in supporting NVIDIA GPUs going back to its early days. Not supporting most nvidia hardware is

>and without the Nouveau baggage that's built up over the years in supporting NVIDIA GPUs going back to its early days. Not supporting most nvidia hardware is not a good thing. I hope it's adoption by commercial users (home users don't have the latest nvidia gpu generally) doesn't mean Nouveau bitrots from lack of companies with deep pockets paying for dev work. As for the inherent memory safety, well, remember how safe memory safe java was?

nickpsecurity 3y ago
Java the language was memory safe. The runtime and libraries weren’t all memory safe. The JIT’s can break memory safety. Applets had integration issues. So, what hurt Java were opportunities to go around memory safety instead of attacking that memory-safe code. Memory-safe, system languages (eg Ada, Rust) address this by having as much as possible in memory safety with either little or zero runtime. Rust makes things safe that weren’t before. It has unsafe which is less used than some other languages. The type checker can also catch many logic-level errors. The safety situation is better with Rust than Java code. That doesn’t mean it will solve NVIDIA users’ problems, though. They are usually worried about compatibility, performance, and reliability. Rust mostly helps in one area. We’ll see about the rest, especially compatibility, as you said.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Java was crippled by a terrible standard UI library and a failure to recognize the opportunity for a natively-compiled systems language other than C++.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    JetBrains is doing quite well with such terrible UI library, with I would take any day over Electron crap, and AOT compilers have been available since 2000, even if only on commercial JDKs, which naturally did not did well on communities that won't pay for their work tools.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      I think the GP is talking about AWT, which is indeed terrible. JetBrains uses Swing, which is... still not really the best, but IIRC they've done a lot of work to write their own abstractions and helpers and whatnot on top of it to make it more bearable.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Swing is quite powerful, the only downside is that it requires reading books like "Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications" to actually understand how to take advantage of its features, and the bad decision to not use by default the platform's L&F.
      - opless 3y ago
        Actually AWT wasn't awful. It was certainly more performant than swing, in fact swing was the main thing that had me avoiding UI work and eventually dropping java in favour of .net I thought jetbrains used their own UI layer for their IDE, or am I confusing it with Eclipse there?
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Eclipse, they use SWT.
      - KronisLV 3y ago
        > JetBrains uses Swing, which is... still not really the best, but IIRC they've done a lot of work to write their own abstractions and helpers and whatnot on top of it to make it more bearable. Swing feels pretty okay to me, at least in the times I've used it, especially when IDEs have GUI builders when you just want to do RAD. I do wonder whatever happened to JavaFX, there was some hype around it years back but it doesn't seem like it got super widespread adoption: https://openjfx.io/ https://openjfx.io/
        pjmlp 3y ago
        It is a long story. JavaFX was born as a scripting language[0], which most devs didn't like, and then Sun started the process to port it to Java. In the middle of this, Sun went bankrupt and while Oracle took the JavaFX development further, they didn't see any value in adding yet another GUI framework to Java, and made it open source to the community by the time Java 11 was released. A company, Gluon took over it [1], making their business case as means to use JavaFX to also target mobile OSes [3]. They also took over the JavaFX GUI designer. [2] That was mostly ignored, as Java strong points focused on the server, Android is its own story, with their own frameworks, thus Swing was good enough for the market of desktop applications written in Java. Additionally it didn't help that JavaFX is an additional dependency, with binary libraries, which kind of complicates the deployment story. However, recently Oracle decided to be a bit more supportive of JavaFX, if it still matters, remains to be seen. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX_Script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX_Script [1] - https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/ https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/ [2] - https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/ https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/ [3] - https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/ https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/
- mlindner 3y ago
  Java is forever stuck in my head as a bad language because it's UI library performance were so bad. I grew up being annoyed with anything written in Java because of its poor performance on Mac OS X. Notable was the persistent UI lag with anything written in Java.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
cozzyd 3y ago
indeed, already new official nvidia drivers don't support the aging Nvidia card I have in my desktop at home (the desktop is newer than the video card, I moved it from an older computer).
- lproven 3y ago
  I had this problem at $JOB-1 where I had a big fat Dell desktop workstation with an nVidia card in it. I don't remember the model but it was a "pro" grade device: Fire or Quadro or some such BS marketing name. There were lots of old LCD monitors around the office. As soon as I could, I went dual screen. Then I decided to go triple-head. Problem. I found a 2nd card, another nVidia, but it was a different GPU generation. The same Nouveau driver can run it, but not the nVidia driver, and you can't have two nVidia drivers installed side-by-side. I tried multiple nVidia cards from the office spares pile but I couldn't find two the same generation of GPU for ages. When I finally did, the next kernel upgrade nuked the nVidia legacy driver -- it only supports a certain range of kernel versions. In the end, a colleague took pity and lent me one of his own cards, an old gamer's card with 4 outputs, 3 usable at once. Perfect. But when he wanted it back, to sell it, it was back into driver hell. In the end, I managed to get a huge fat double-slot AMD card from the IT department, with 4 outputs, and it Just Worked™ with a FOSS driver. NVidia driver versions are a massive cluster-fsck and perfectly good working cards are now e-waste because nVidia doesn't maintain its proprietary drivers, doesn't support more than a handful of GPU families in each release, and won't let you install >1 driver at a time. I am not a gamer. I don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance or CUDA or any of those toys. I just want a shedload of pixels in front of me, updated quickly, with some screens in portrait and some in landscape. (And a desktop that properly supports vertical panels so I can use those screens in any orientation I want with effective use of space.)
uluyol 3y ago
The chances of getting Nouveau working well on older Nvidia hardware are essentially zero. There are legal issues with firmware redistribution. > Little hope of reclocking becoming available for GM20x, GP10x and GV100 as firmware now needs to be signed by NVIDIA to have the necessary access From https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/
- kelnos 3y ago
  When they say "early" days, I think they mean really old GPUs, like before the reclocking locks started becoming a thing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rascul 3y ago
Looks like the oldest card nouveau supports is the Riva TNT from 1998. I think it's fine for nouveau to support that and a new driver not to. I didn't get the impression that nouveau is going away any time soon.

nickpsecurity 3y ago

Java the language was memory safe. The runtime and libraries weren’t all memory safe. The JIT’s can break memory safety. Applets had integration issues. So, what hurt Java were opportunities to go around memory safety instead of attacking that memory-safe code. Memory-safe, system languages (eg Ada, Rust) address this by having as much as possible in memory safety with either little or zero runtime. Rust makes things safe that weren’t before. It has unsafe which is less used than some other languages. The type checker can also catch many logic-level errors. The safety situation is better with Rust than Java code. That doesn’t mean it will solve NVIDIA users’ problems, though. They are usually worried about compatibility, performance, and reliability. Rust mostly helps in one area. We’ll see about the rest, especially compatibility, as you said.

KerrAvon 3y ago
Java was crippled by a terrible standard UI library and a failure to recognize the opportunity for a natively-compiled systems language other than C++.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  JetBrains is doing quite well with such terrible UI library, with I would take any day over Electron crap, and AOT compilers have been available since 2000, even if only on commercial JDKs, which naturally did not did well on communities that won't pay for their work tools.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I think the GP is talking about AWT, which is indeed terrible. JetBrains uses Swing, which is... still not really the best, but IIRC they've done a lot of work to write their own abstractions and helpers and whatnot on top of it to make it more bearable.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Swing is quite powerful, the only downside is that it requires reading books like "Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications" to actually understand how to take advantage of its features, and the bad decision to not use by default the platform's L&F.
    - opless 3y ago
      Actually AWT wasn't awful. It was certainly more performant than swing, in fact swing was the main thing that had me avoiding UI work and eventually dropping java in favour of .net I thought jetbrains used their own UI layer for their IDE, or am I confusing it with Eclipse there?
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Eclipse, they use SWT.
    - KronisLV 3y ago
      > JetBrains uses Swing, which is... still not really the best, but IIRC they've done a lot of work to write their own abstractions and helpers and whatnot on top of it to make it more bearable. Swing feels pretty okay to me, at least in the times I've used it, especially when IDEs have GUI builders when you just want to do RAD. I do wonder whatever happened to JavaFX, there was some hype around it years back but it doesn't seem like it got super widespread adoption: https://openjfx.io/ https://openjfx.io/
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        It is a long story. JavaFX was born as a scripting language[0], which most devs didn't like, and then Sun started the process to port it to Java. In the middle of this, Sun went bankrupt and while Oracle took the JavaFX development further, they didn't see any value in adding yet another GUI framework to Java, and made it open source to the community by the time Java 11 was released. A company, Gluon took over it [1], making their business case as means to use JavaFX to also target mobile OSes [3]. They also took over the JavaFX GUI designer. [2] That was mostly ignored, as Java strong points focused on the server, Android is its own story, with their own frameworks, thus Swing was good enough for the market of desktop applications written in Java. Additionally it didn't help that JavaFX is an additional dependency, with binary libraries, which kind of complicates the deployment story. However, recently Oracle decided to be a bit more supportive of JavaFX, if it still matters, remains to be seen. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX_Script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX_Script [1] - https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/ https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/ [2] - https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/ https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/ [3] - https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/ https://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/
mlindner 3y ago
Java is forever stuck in my head as a bad language because it's UI library performance were so bad. I grew up being annoyed with anything written in Java because of its poor performance on Mac OS X. Notable was the persistent UI lag with anything written in Java.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

cozzyd 3y ago

indeed, already new official nvidia drivers don't support the aging Nvidia card I have in my desktop at home (the desktop is newer than the video card, I moved it from an older computer).

lproven 3y ago
I had this problem at $JOB-1 where I had a big fat Dell desktop workstation with an nVidia card in it. I don't remember the model but it was a "pro" grade device: Fire or Quadro or some such BS marketing name. There were lots of old LCD monitors around the office. As soon as I could, I went dual screen. Then I decided to go triple-head. Problem. I found a 2nd card, another nVidia, but it was a different GPU generation. The same Nouveau driver can run it, but not the nVidia driver, and you can't have two nVidia drivers installed side-by-side. I tried multiple nVidia cards from the office spares pile but I couldn't find two the same generation of GPU for ages. When I finally did, the next kernel upgrade nuked the nVidia legacy driver -- it only supports a certain range of kernel versions. In the end, a colleague took pity and lent me one of his own cards, an old gamer's card with 4 outputs, 3 usable at once. Perfect. But when he wanted it back, to sell it, it was back into driver hell. In the end, I managed to get a huge fat double-slot AMD card from the IT department, with 4 outputs, and it Just Worked™ with a FOSS driver. NVidia driver versions are a massive cluster-fsck and perfectly good working cards are now e-waste because nVidia doesn't maintain its proprietary drivers, doesn't support more than a handful of GPU families in each release, and won't let you install >1 driver at a time. I am not a gamer. I don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance or CUDA or any of those toys. I just want a shedload of pixels in front of me, updated quickly, with some screens in portrait and some in landscape. (And a desktop that properly supports vertical panels so I can use those screens in any orientation I want with effective use of space.)

uluyol 3y ago

The chances of getting Nouveau working well on older Nvidia hardware are essentially zero. There are legal issues with firmware redistribution. > Little hope of reclocking becoming available for GM20x, GP10x and GV100 as firmware now needs to be signed by NVIDIA to have the necessary access From https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/

kelnos 3y ago
When they say "early" days, I think they mean really old GPUs, like before the reclocking locks started becoming a thing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rascul 3y ago

Looks like the oldest card nouveau supports is the Riva TNT from 1998. I think it's fine for nouveau to support that and a new driver not to. I didn't get the impression that nouveau is going away any time soon.