9 ms·

Nvidia PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

95 points by llambda 14y ago

twiceaday 14y ago
I was hoping for something written by a human and instead got a robot regurgitating copy. Whatever.
- zainny 14y ago
  I was actually pleasantly surprised by this response. Most PR responses to public criticism are much much worse.
  - MortenK 14y ago
    Agreed, this a measured, professional response to a childish, unrestrained rant from a community primadonna.
    - jfoutz 14y ago
      given, "a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance." Linus is certainly temperamental, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone he's less that a world-class developer, and critical to the linux community.
      - loxs 14y ago
        His creation is used to run half of the world's smartphones and probably 90+ percent of the world's servers. His other creation (git) is used to develop maybe half of the world's software projects. Having this in mind, I can't really imagine how can he have an "inflated view of their own talent or importance". I would say he is even quite modest...
    - jey 14y ago
      I see Linus's rant as just pragmatic realpolitik. He's just one guy and he's wielding his influence in an effective way. He wouldn't be able to have nearly as much of an impact if he played by this idea that he should operate in a "professional" manner using only formal language and press releases.
ajross 14y ago
It's remarkably straight-talking for a press release, actually. Money quote is this one: "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure.". Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change. I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree. (Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)
- loxs 14y ago
  Yup, totally the kind of bullshit Linus gave the finger to... I can imagine how much of this "PR" stuff one like Linus gets to deal with...
- tadfisher 14y ago
  Which is ridiculous, considering they cherry-picked RandR of all the technologies in the "Linux common infrastructure" to support with their latest driver release. I suppose I should be grateful that my projector can work without opening up NVIDIA Settings and tweaking about, but it certainly flies in the face of this statement and belies their true motivations: they'll implement the bare-minimum Linux-only feature support that will keep their business/edu customers from fleeing to AMD, and that's about it.
  - mhurron 14y ago
    RandR is a Xorg extension, it's not a Linux kernel thing. To continue to provide graphics options for their customers that use OS's with recent Xorg installs (they make a FreeBSD driver available too) they had to support RandR. This is right in line with 'we support our customers/users' not whatever the Linux kernel guys feel like doing today.
ineedtosleep 14y ago
This makes me wonder: are there any truly `built-for Linux` video card/chips out there? Aside from ATI/AMD, nVidia and Intel, I can only think of Matrox and S3 -- with S3 being recently bought by HTC, and I have no idea what Matrox does these days, especially after the Parhelia failure.
- loxs 14y ago
  Well, maybe the ones that are installed in half of the world's smartphones?
  - jevinskie 14y ago
    I believe most of those are still supported with binary-only drivers.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      I'd be interested to know which Android devices are the exceptions to this general rule of binary-only video drivers.
      - Symmetry 14y ago
        I believe that ARM's Mali GPU is fairly open source friendly?
        hollerith 14y ago
        Not as friendly as Intel recent GPUs on the desktop if the need to reverse engineer Mali is any indication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ARM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ARM
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  Intel releases Linux support for every new graphics chipset they build, before the hardware ships. That seems about as close to "built for Linux" as you can get.
wtracy 14y ago
Again, employer is sucking and blocking access to Phoronix for me. Is the text of the release available anywhere else?
- rwar 14y ago
  http://pastebin.com/3fyLWT3W http://pastebin.com/3fyLWT3W
- brettnak 14y ago
  Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience. Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/ http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier. While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system. As a result: 1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux. 2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. 3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations. At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.
blinkingled 14y ago
This solves nothing - the driver support for NVidia GPUs in Linux is still crappy, FreeBSD is worse, Kernel upgrades on machines with Nvidia GPU and binary driver are still a pain, instability and bugs are still plenty etc. So this PR response deserves another huge "FU" to Nvidia for refusing the provide documentation - especially in the face of ATI and Intel doing so successfully. I stopped buying anything Nvidia - all my machines are AMD or Intel only. It's also very easy to avoid Tegra based Androids.
- binarycrusader 14y ago
  Kernel upgrades on machines with nVidia GPUs and binary drivers are a pain because the Linux kernel developers have chosen to not provide a stable binary interface, and in some cases, have deliberately broken interfaces by changing them to "GPL-only". Meanwhile, Windows, Solaris, and FreeBSD users generally have no problems between kernel updates.
  - blinkingled 14y ago
    Oh, not that binary API stability flamewar again :) It is what it is - Nvidia doesn't play well with it is the problem - others do it well.
luser001 14y ago
I just went from the open source Nouveau drivers to the closed source one a few days ago. My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right. Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this? Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.
- mcpherrinm 14y ago
  As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.
- rcxdude 14y ago
  The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine. The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.
  - luser001 14y ago
    Ok, thanks. I didn't realize people were working around limitations of the Nvidia driver etc.
tux1968 14y ago
I have refused to use Nvidia products for years even on any Windows machines; because of their policy towards Linux. Wish more people who cared about Linux would vote with their wallets. What gets me about Linus' response though is that he's constantly labeling free software advocates as "religious" nuts. Nvidia's stance seems consistent with a certain pragmatism that I'd have thought he was fine with. He's had no aversion to using closed source proprietary software when it suited his purposes (eg. Bitkeeper) But now he's upset that Nvidia don't want to play ball? Having said that it's nice to see him make such a strong statement that I wholeheartedly agree with, just wish it hadn't been so long in coming.
- j_baker 14y ago
  I think open sourcing drivers makes pragmatic sense to the Linux community more than it does with Bitkeeper. Without open source drivers, how can the Linux community make Nvidia's drivers a better citizen of their ecosystem?
  - sounds 14y ago
    Some more thoughts along the same lines - Linus probably doesn't care if Nvidia wants to keep their GPU _accelerated_ drivers closed for desktop machines. Nvidia Optimus is what Linus is talking about. It switches between an Intel GMA and an Nvidia GPU "transparently" for power saving reasons. Nvidia gave the whole Linux community the shaft and didn't provide any Linux support at all for those laptops and notebooks. Laptop and notebook designers generally end up with designs that only work when power saving works correctly, and the failure mode isn't "runs slower," it's "catches fire and destroy things." So the lack of any help from Nvidia is not something that can be ignored - your laptop will be worse than useless if you put Linux on it. This is why (my guess) Linus is so upset.
    - rsanchez1 14y ago
      That is why I sympathize with Linus here. I'm also very upset with nVidia over Optimus, but on Windows, for reasons I've mentioned in other comments. Optimus really just seems like an afterthought to nVidia. As long as it switches GPUs when the PC goes into energy-conserving mode, they think it's working just fine.
voidr 14y ago
Optimus was my first huge disappointment for me from NVidia. When I used Linux, I preferred NVidia over ATI, because it worked out of the box with the official NVidia driver. This all changed when I bought a laptop with NVidia Optimus, it didn't work at all. If NVidia had provided a proprietary driver, that would have been fine, but they simply ignored it, which was the "fuck you" to the consumers who wanted to use Linux on their laptops which had NVidia Optimus. NVidia, should just do what they did before: make things work for the [Linux] consumer. Just make a proprietary/open source/open core/semi open source driver that just works with Optimus hardware without having to hack stuff. It's 2012, video should just work.
unreal37 14y ago
I'm listening to Torvalds talk that this comment came from, and it's actually quite interesting. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMTc http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...
- cfn 14y ago
  Yes the talk is quite good and it is worth watching. Quite a few insightfull questions and answers. I would even say that the nVidia outburst was the least interesting part.
dangerboysteve 14y ago
The first lines speaks volumes. NVIDIA PR Responds. I would think Linus deserves at least a rebuttal from their CEO.
stblack 14y ago
Note the press release doesn't address an important part of Linus' rant: that Nvidia is a huge PITA to deal with. I hope that folks at Nvidia took note of this, at least.
- nemo1618 14y ago
  I hope they aren't as awful as he makes them out to be. I was aspiring to work for them someday :|
  - rmk2 14y ago
    As has been discussed here before, the individual developers might not be bad people, this seems to be more of a management issue. You can see developers replying on the nvidia forums regarding bugs, asking for bug reports etc.[1]. So you will probably be alright if you work there. If you go into management however... (gives you the evil eye) ;) [1]: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c782088ee2a9ae1ff59c5ac9&t=179956&page=5 http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c78...
robomartin 14y ago
At the risk of having the Linus Torvalds fan-boys fire all missiles in my general direction I'll stick my head out and say this: I can only admire the guy for what he has created and accomplished. He is, without dispute, a key figure in the history of modern computing. And, he can be a real asshole. I have not watched a lot of his talks, just a few. The two that stick in my memory is one at Google and the one where he, well, makes friends with nVidia. In the Google case he tells people who are in the room that they are stupid. In the nVidia case he tells the entire company "fuck you". How unbecoming. While I found both talks to be very interesting, as a professional, I don't take kindly to this kind of behavior. It really diminishes the person in my mind to the level of an immature kid. Sophomoric behavior and jokes have their place and time. He seems to admit that he is not polite and that he found a need to be direct. OK. Armed with that information one ought to temper childish impulses to engage in that sort of name-calling. One can be very direct and firm in making points and voicing opinion without resorting to diminishing and talking-down to those you are addressing. Here one of Mark Twains sayings is very appropriate: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." He should stop and think for a fraction of a second before verbally defecating all over his audience like that. He is and should be smart enough to understand the value of not being a jerk. Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course. Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.
- sophacles 14y ago
  And some of us prefer humanity, with it's imperfections and emotional content over plastic perfectionism. Your point?
  - robomartin 14y ago
    Hmmm. How to explain? OK. Here it goes: I think you are a a stupid asshole. Fuck you! Your work is stupid. Your ideas are stupid and the choices your made are stupid. Of course, I don't mean that at all. Not even for a microsecond. Now think about how you would have felt if my reply to your post contained that. And if I meant it. Would you be inclined to have a conversation with me? Or work with me? Or attempt to find common ground? Or even have a discussion where we could continue to disagree yet still be able to explore each others' mental space? Probably not. There is no excuse in my book for being a jerk in almost any context. No matter who the person might be or their prior and current accomplishments.
rsanchez1 14y ago
The real problem is that Optimus still sucks on Windows 7. Optimus causes problems for games, problems for nVidia's 3D Vision technology, even problems with PhysX. I could be playing so many games much more smoothly and at higher quality if Optimus would actually work well with games and other nVidia technology. Unfortunately, don't expect good Optimus support on Linux until nVidia gets their Optimus act together on Windows.

95 points by llambda 14y ago

twiceaday 14y ago

I was hoping for something written by a human and instead got a robot regurgitating copy. Whatever.

zainny 14y ago
I was actually pleasantly surprised by this response. Most PR responses to public criticism are much much worse.
- MortenK 14y ago
  Agreed, this a measured, professional response to a childish, unrestrained rant from a community primadonna.
  - jfoutz 14y ago
    given, "a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance." Linus is certainly temperamental, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone he's less that a world-class developer, and critical to the linux community.
    - loxs 14y ago
      His creation is used to run half of the world's smartphones and probably 90+ percent of the world's servers. His other creation (git) is used to develop maybe half of the world's software projects. Having this in mind, I can't really imagine how can he have an "inflated view of their own talent or importance". I would say he is even quite modest...
  - jey 14y ago
    I see Linus's rant as just pragmatic realpolitik. He's just one guy and he's wielding his influence in an effective way. He wouldn't be able to have nearly as much of an impact if he played by this idea that he should operate in a "professional" manner using only formal language and press releases.

ajross 14y ago

It's remarkably straight-talking for a press release, actually. Money quote is this one: "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure.". Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change. I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree. (Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)

loxs 14y ago
Yup, totally the kind of bullshit Linus gave the finger to... I can imagine how much of this "PR" stuff one like Linus gets to deal with...
tadfisher 14y ago
Which is ridiculous, considering they cherry-picked RandR of all the technologies in the "Linux common infrastructure" to support with their latest driver release. I suppose I should be grateful that my projector can work without opening up NVIDIA Settings and tweaking about, but it certainly flies in the face of this statement and belies their true motivations: they'll implement the bare-minimum Linux-only feature support that will keep their business/edu customers from fleeing to AMD, and that's about it.
- mhurron 14y ago
  RandR is a Xorg extension, it's not a Linux kernel thing. To continue to provide graphics options for their customers that use OS's with recent Xorg installs (they make a FreeBSD driver available too) they had to support RandR. This is right in line with 'we support our customers/users' not whatever the Linux kernel guys feel like doing today.

ineedtosleep 14y ago

This makes me wonder: are there any truly `built-for Linux` video card/chips out there? Aside from ATI/AMD, nVidia and Intel, I can only think of Matrox and S3 -- with S3 being recently bought by HTC, and I have no idea what Matrox does these days, especially after the Parhelia failure.

loxs 14y ago
Well, maybe the ones that are installed in half of the world's smartphones?
- jevinskie 14y ago
  I believe most of those are still supported with binary-only drivers.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    I'd be interested to know which Android devices are the exceptions to this general rule of binary-only video drivers.
    - Symmetry 14y ago
      I believe that ARM's Mali GPU is fairly open source friendly?
      - hollerith 14y ago
        Not as friendly as Intel recent GPUs on the desktop if the need to reverse engineer Mali is any indication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ARM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ARM
JoshTriplett 14y ago
Intel releases Linux support for every new graphics chipset they build, before the hardware ships. That seems about as close to "built for Linux" as you can get.

wtracy 14y ago

Again, employer is sucking and blocking access to Phoronix for me. Is the text of the release available anywhere else?

rwar 14y ago
http://pastebin.com/3fyLWT3W http://pastebin.com/3fyLWT3W
brettnak 14y ago
Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience. Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/ http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier. While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system. As a result: 1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux. 2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. 3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations. At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.

blinkingled 14y ago

This solves nothing - the driver support for NVidia GPUs in Linux is still crappy, FreeBSD is worse, Kernel upgrades on machines with Nvidia GPU and binary driver are still a pain, instability and bugs are still plenty etc. So this PR response deserves another huge "FU" to Nvidia for refusing the provide documentation - especially in the face of ATI and Intel doing so successfully. I stopped buying anything Nvidia - all my machines are AMD or Intel only. It's also very easy to avoid Tegra based Androids.

binarycrusader 14y ago
Kernel upgrades on machines with nVidia GPUs and binary drivers are a pain because the Linux kernel developers have chosen to not provide a stable binary interface, and in some cases, have deliberately broken interfaces by changing them to "GPL-only". Meanwhile, Windows, Solaris, and FreeBSD users generally have no problems between kernel updates.
- blinkingled 14y ago
  Oh, not that binary API stability flamewar again :) It is what it is - Nvidia doesn't play well with it is the problem - others do it well.

luser001 14y ago

I just went from the open source Nouveau drivers to the closed source one a few days ago. My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right. Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this? Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.

mcpherrinm 14y ago
As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.
rcxdude 14y ago
The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine. The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.
- luser001 14y ago
  Ok, thanks. I didn't realize people were working around limitations of the Nvidia driver etc.

tux1968 14y ago

I have refused to use Nvidia products for years even on any Windows machines; because of their policy towards Linux. Wish more people who cared about Linux would vote with their wallets. What gets me about Linus' response though is that he's constantly labeling free software advocates as "religious" nuts. Nvidia's stance seems consistent with a certain pragmatism that I'd have thought he was fine with. He's had no aversion to using closed source proprietary software when it suited his purposes (eg. Bitkeeper) But now he's upset that Nvidia don't want to play ball? Having said that it's nice to see him make such a strong statement that I wholeheartedly agree with, just wish it hadn't been so long in coming.

j_baker 14y ago
I think open sourcing drivers makes pragmatic sense to the Linux community more than it does with Bitkeeper. Without open source drivers, how can the Linux community make Nvidia's drivers a better citizen of their ecosystem?
- sounds 14y ago
  Some more thoughts along the same lines - Linus probably doesn't care if Nvidia wants to keep their GPU _accelerated_ drivers closed for desktop machines. Nvidia Optimus is what Linus is talking about. It switches between an Intel GMA and an Nvidia GPU "transparently" for power saving reasons. Nvidia gave the whole Linux community the shaft and didn't provide any Linux support at all for those laptops and notebooks. Laptop and notebook designers generally end up with designs that only work when power saving works correctly, and the failure mode isn't "runs slower," it's "catches fire and destroy things." So the lack of any help from Nvidia is not something that can be ignored - your laptop will be worse than useless if you put Linux on it. This is why (my guess) Linus is so upset.
  - rsanchez1 14y ago
    That is why I sympathize with Linus here. I'm also very upset with nVidia over Optimus, but on Windows, for reasons I've mentioned in other comments. Optimus really just seems like an afterthought to nVidia. As long as it switches GPUs when the PC goes into energy-conserving mode, they think it's working just fine.

voidr 14y ago

Optimus was my first huge disappointment for me from NVidia. When I used Linux, I preferred NVidia over ATI, because it worked out of the box with the official NVidia driver. This all changed when I bought a laptop with NVidia Optimus, it didn't work at all. If NVidia had provided a proprietary driver, that would have been fine, but they simply ignored it, which was the "fuck you" to the consumers who wanted to use Linux on their laptops which had NVidia Optimus. NVidia, should just do what they did before: make things work for the [Linux] consumer. Just make a proprietary/open source/open core/semi open source driver that just works with Optimus hardware without having to hack stuff. It's 2012, video should just work.

unreal37 14y ago

I'm listening to Torvalds talk that this comment came from, and it's actually quite interesting. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMTc http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

cfn 14y ago
Yes the talk is quite good and it is worth watching. Quite a few insightfull questions and answers. I would even say that the nVidia outburst was the least interesting part.

dangerboysteve 14y ago

The first lines speaks volumes. NVIDIA PR Responds. I would think Linus deserves at least a rebuttal from their CEO.

stblack 14y ago

Note the press release doesn't address an important part of Linus' rant: that Nvidia is a huge PITA to deal with. I hope that folks at Nvidia took note of this, at least.

nemo1618 14y ago
I hope they aren't as awful as he makes them out to be. I was aspiring to work for them someday :|
- rmk2 14y ago
  As has been discussed here before, the individual developers might not be bad people, this seems to be more of a management issue. You can see developers replying on the nvidia forums regarding bugs, asking for bug reports etc.[1]. So you will probably be alright if you work there. If you go into management however... (gives you the evil eye) ;) [1]: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c782088ee2a9ae1ff59c5ac9&t=179956&page=5 http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c78...

robomartin 14y ago

At the risk of having the Linus Torvalds fan-boys fire all missiles in my general direction I'll stick my head out and say this: I can only admire the guy for what he has created and accomplished. He is, without dispute, a key figure in the history of modern computing. And, he can be a real asshole. I have not watched a lot of his talks, just a few. The two that stick in my memory is one at Google and the one where he, well, makes friends with nVidia. In the Google case he tells people who are in the room that they are stupid. In the nVidia case he tells the entire company "fuck you". How unbecoming. While I found both talks to be very interesting, as a professional, I don't take kindly to this kind of behavior. It really diminishes the person in my mind to the level of an immature kid. Sophomoric behavior and jokes have their place and time. He seems to admit that he is not polite and that he found a need to be direct. OK. Armed with that information one ought to temper childish impulses to engage in that sort of name-calling. One can be very direct and firm in making points and voicing opinion without resorting to diminishing and talking-down to those you are addressing. Here one of Mark Twains sayings is very appropriate: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." He should stop and think for a fraction of a second before verbally defecating all over his audience like that. He is and should be smart enough to understand the value of not being a jerk. Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course. Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.

sophacles 14y ago
And some of us prefer humanity, with it's imperfections and emotional content over plastic perfectionism. Your point?
- robomartin 14y ago
  Hmmm. How to explain? OK. Here it goes: I think you are a a stupid asshole. Fuck you! Your work is stupid. Your ideas are stupid and the choices your made are stupid. Of course, I don't mean that at all. Not even for a microsecond. Now think about how you would have felt if my reply to your post contained that. And if I meant it. Would you be inclined to have a conversation with me? Or work with me? Or attempt to find common ground? Or even have a discussion where we could continue to disagree yet still be able to explore each others' mental space? Probably not. There is no excuse in my book for being a jerk in almost any context. No matter who the person might be or their prior and current accomplishments.

rsanchez1 14y ago

The real problem is that Optimus still sucks on Windows 7. Optimus causes problems for games, problems for nVidia's 3D Vision technology, even problems with PhysX. I could be playing so many games much more smoothly and at higher quality if Optimus would actually work well with games and other nVidia technology. Unfortunately, don't expect good Optimus support on Linux until nVidia gets their Optimus act together on Windows.