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> support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them) This is not true. There were many differences with how Nvidia had been

> support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them) This is not true. There were many differences with how Nvidia had been doing things in their drivers (partially due to them reusing code on all platforms) and how Mesa/Wayland was already doing things, namely with explicit/implicit sync and GBM/EGL streams, but there was no intention to make things hard for Nvidia. Mesa/Wayland ended up supporting explicit sync so Nvidia's driver could work.

ryao 2y ago
DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentionally sabotaged third party driver developers. Saying otherwise is contrary to reality. Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too. That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
  - ryao 2y ago
    It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.
      - ryao 2y ago
        The kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.
        ChocolateGod 2y ago
        You're confusing the userland graphics libraries (Mesa) and the kernel drivers (nouveau etc). The kernel ones are all GPL. The userland libraries are MIT because everything links to them, including propriety software.

ryao 2y ago

DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentionally sabotaged third party driver developers. Saying otherwise is contrary to reality. Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.

ChocolateGod 2y ago
Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too. That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
- ryao 2y ago
  It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.
    - ryao 2y ago
      The kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        You're confusing the userland graphics libraries (Mesa) and the kernel drivers (nouveau etc). The kernel ones are all GPL. The userland libraries are MIT because everything links to them, including propriety software.