10 ms·

Nvidia to release documentation on Nouveau project

256 points by throwaway2048 13y ago

zurn 13y ago
There have been these baby steps lately, enabling the 2d support on the tegra 2 and now supporting "out of the box" functionality (i guess getting a functioning 2d desktop). I wonder what the relationship is with their stance on 3D support. These aren't really contradicting the proprietary driver monopoly on 3D acceleration that they like to keep.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  Could it be they hope to offload the basic driver support to an open source project, especially with the shift towards DRI/DRM, and they plan to move the proprietary 3d support to a blob attached at the mesa layer? I feel like this would be a positive move overall, even if it's not completely ideal.
  - swetland 13y ago
    That's the model we've ended up with with most of the mobile GPU drivers in Android -- open source kernel side managing resources and queueing and proprietary goop in a library in userspace where it can do limited harm (can't crash the kernel, clobber arbitrary memory, etc). Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel.
    - exDM69 13y ago
      > Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel. FWIW, the most of the Nvidia proprietary driver works in a user space library too. It would be a really bad idea to make your OpenGL implementation and other high-level facilities running in kernel space.
      - duaneb 13y ago
        Unfortunately, it's the drivers that are the issue. I have no doubt the open source community could at least maintain nvidia's code for them.
  - bostik 13y ago
    > I feel like this would be a positive move overall There is one aspect which really could gain from this: the eventual reduction of the harm from the "3/11 rule" fallout. If and when Nvidia's hardware works acceptably well out of the box on linux systems, there will be less need for annoyed forum postings and endless "help, please" threads. AFAIK Google weighs recently updated pages more than older ones, so the negative PR hits from badly behaving hardware should fizzle and die out in time. From a purely personal point of view, a unified DRM/KMS access scheme will be nice with Wayland in mind.
thejosh 13y ago
After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.
- tete 13y ago
  I remember, long ago when the Linux community was much smaller everyone wanted a killer feature so hardware vendors would do something like this. Never thought something like Steam could be such a killer feature.
  - devx 13y ago
    Gaming is definitely a "killer app" of any platform. Heck, there are devices out there with platforms that only do that, and they are very successful. I'm talking about consoles, obviously. Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only). It took Google even more years after that to finally put 2 and 2 together, and realize that the reason why so many still choose iOS over Android is because of gaming. Same goes for Facebook with Farmville, and so on. So yeah, if you want a very successful platform/OS, definitely focus on gaming as much as you can. It's what brings the "mainstream" in.
    - masklinn 13y ago
      > Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only) This is a common misconception nowadays, but if you look at the early keynotes Jobs was more dismayed than thrilled by his baby being coopted by games. He resigned himself more than realized it. It just happens that — on iOS anyway — gaming concerns and Apple concerns align in that both want a good equilibrium between CPU and GPU rather than a CPU-focused device.
    - ajuc 13y ago
      Unix was supposedly created to make it easier to develop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)
tete 13y ago
This is amazing. Well, not really as amazing anymore from a technical perspective, but the Nouveau-Project, which had a really hard road came into existence because such a move seemed to be impossible, back then.
devx 13y ago
Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware? Especially after the NSA scandal, we should really demand open source firmware from hardware manufacturers with every chance we get.
- swetland 13y ago
  Proprietary drivers and firmware are really two separate issues. Proprietary drivers usually are the result of licensed code that can't be open sourced or IP concerns (giving away the "secret sauce", patent worries, etc). Provided it can't be updated behind your back, I don't see proprietary firmware as particularly harmful unto itself -- it'd be nice if it were open and make the device less of a black box, but from the POV of the driver or user, there's not really much difference between a device with an embedded CPU running some firmware and a device implementing the same functionality in the asic.
- exDM69 13y ago
  > Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware? While this is arguably true for most hardware, GPUs are different from mundane hardware like ethernet adapters. The driver source code will reveal secrets about the hardware architecture, and the architecture changes in every generation. The advantage is not in the software itself, it is not showing the cards you are playing with. In theory, it would be possible to give out the source code to the video drivers but it would not make sense to give out the source for chips in development. At best, you could get source code dumps after a new chip has rolled out. This is not really open source. Yes, I want quality open source video drivers but on the other hand I want bleeding edge hardware and competition that drives hardware development. Disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living and I'm an open source enthusiast.
  - RamiK 13y ago
    I don't see why nVidia can't release a semi open-source driver. For previous generations they can open up everything while the latest generation would come with an pre-compiled blob that can be disabled with a simple compile flag for the purists. This will allow them to play nice with the kernel, support previous products while taking bug reports and patches, and help game engine designers target 90% of nVidia's user base without signing an NDA.
shmerl 13y ago
At last. This is great news.
mortdeus 13y ago
I just hope nvidia builds wayland support into their proprietary drivers. I mean if nvidia chooses not to support nouveau as their main DRI drivers, thats fine. However the least they can do is make sure they do as much as they can to invest in Linux moving forward and not force users (and app developers) to make painful decisions regarding whether they should use the proprietary drivers or nouveau. For example if nvidia decides to focus and invest all their effort solely into mir and unity support for their closed drivers, thus giving everybody who backs wayland the shaft in the process, its going to end up being a major problem for developers like myself. Philosophically and pragmatically.
- zanny 13y ago
  Well, as someone who should understand the value of free software, it is kind of your fault for buying a part from a company who has never supported foss before, and this move is quite a change of pace from them. If they pull an AMD, except they do it right (ie, just depreciate the proprietary driver for enterprise compute usage and focus entirely on making gallium great) they have my business forever. I'm thinking of getting a tegra note next month, on the pretense that at least Nvidia provides open source Tegra drivers through a 3rd party so that the platform is hackable. The new Nexus 7 is a disgrace since smart people have to waste their time reverse engineering the gpu in the Snapdragon because Qualcomm is being a dick.
jrockway 13y ago
I think the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX, and the kind of people nVidia wants to hire don't want to contribute proprietary blobs to Linux when they can just work for the competition on open-source stuff. Thus, nVidia is kind of forced by the market to let the engineers make at least token contributions to Linux. (This is also why DRM never works; the type of person that could implement it correctly wouldn't want to implement it correctly.)
- Arnt 13y ago
  BTDT, signed the NDA, and the DRM I know is as good as it realistically can become.
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  >the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX I agree with you about Windows but note that outside of the U.S. very few software engineers ever even get to work with OS X.
  - jon-wood 13y ago
    Really? Every developer I know in the UK who doesn't develop for an MS stack is running either Linux or OS X, and that's been the case for the last ten years.
    - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
      I was in academia in Japan and there cygwin and Windows were the favorite tools. Some of the people used Linux in VMs, on the other hand, some new students installed XP on their notebooks. In 2012. And I think this was even a rather progressive lab, I suppose industry only uses Windows.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        Japan is a Windows loving country so its hardly representative.
blinkingled 13y ago
This, again, doesn't really mean anything. Nvidia did the 2D only nv driver for the same reasons - to make their GPUs usable out of the box on Linux. Now instead they are doing documenation that someday will help do the same but using nouveau driver and the community's efforts. The key areas where the documentation will be needed and have impact - power management and clocking, 3D stuff etc. - Nvidia isn't promising anything on that. If they hired a bunch of OSS developers and promised to release all docs eventually like AMD that would be news. So no Nvidia - I am still not buying anything you sell.
RamiK 13y ago
Check out the base directory: ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/ That Thumbs.db pretty much says it all :)
surrealize 13y ago
After the "Linus flipping off Nvidia" thing, one of the Nvidia people asked what they could do better on a linux mailing list. Matthew Garrett responded, "Move your 3D driver to userspace and use nouveau for command submission." [1] I thought that would be a marked improvement over the status quo; keeping the proprietary stuff out of kernel-space would make things so much easier. I hadn't seen any possibly-relevant follow-ups until now though. Here's hoping! [1] http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-discuss/2012-June/000336.html http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-dis...
drill_sarge 13y ago
So Nvidia is now doing what AMD is doing with their engagement on freedesktop and kernel recently? Good step but it's not the "breakthrough" like all the news sites are trying to make this up.
Finster 13y ago
This isn't in reaction to Valve's SteamOS announcement, is it?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

256 points by throwaway2048 13y ago

zurn 13y ago

There have been these baby steps lately, enabling the 2d support on the tegra 2 and now supporting "out of the box" functionality (i guess getting a functioning 2d desktop). I wonder what the relationship is with their stance on 3D support. These aren't really contradicting the proprietary driver monopoly on 3D acceleration that they like to keep.

stormbrew 13y ago
Could it be they hope to offload the basic driver support to an open source project, especially with the shift towards DRI/DRM, and they plan to move the proprietary 3d support to a blob attached at the mesa layer? I feel like this would be a positive move overall, even if it's not completely ideal.
- swetland 13y ago
  That's the model we've ended up with with most of the mobile GPU drivers in Android -- open source kernel side managing resources and queueing and proprietary goop in a library in userspace where it can do limited harm (can't crash the kernel, clobber arbitrary memory, etc). Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel.
  - exDM69 13y ago
    > Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel. FWIW, the most of the Nvidia proprietary driver works in a user space library too. It would be a really bad idea to make your OpenGL implementation and other high-level facilities running in kernel space.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      Unfortunately, it's the drivers that are the issue. I have no doubt the open source community could at least maintain nvidia's code for them.
- bostik 13y ago
  > I feel like this would be a positive move overall There is one aspect which really could gain from this: the eventual reduction of the harm from the "3/11 rule" fallout. If and when Nvidia's hardware works acceptably well out of the box on linux systems, there will be less need for annoyed forum postings and endless "help, please" threads. AFAIK Google weighs recently updated pages more than older ones, so the negative PR hits from badly behaving hardware should fizzle and die out in time. From a purely personal point of view, a unified DRM/KMS access scheme will be nice with Wayland in mind.

thejosh 13y ago

After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.

tete 13y ago
I remember, long ago when the Linux community was much smaller everyone wanted a killer feature so hardware vendors would do something like this. Never thought something like Steam could be such a killer feature.
- devx 13y ago
  Gaming is definitely a "killer app" of any platform. Heck, there are devices out there with platforms that only do that, and they are very successful. I'm talking about consoles, obviously. Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only). It took Google even more years after that to finally put 2 and 2 together, and realize that the reason why so many still choose iOS over Android is because of gaming. Same goes for Facebook with Farmville, and so on. So yeah, if you want a very successful platform/OS, definitely focus on gaming as much as you can. It's what brings the "mainstream" in.
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only) This is a common misconception nowadays, but if you look at the early keynotes Jobs was more dismayed than thrilled by his baby being coopted by games. He resigned himself more than realized it. It just happens that — on iOS anyway — gaming concerns and Apple concerns align in that both want a good equilibrium between CPU and GPU rather than a CPU-focused device.
  - ajuc 13y ago
    Unix was supposedly created to make it easier to develop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

tete 13y ago

This is amazing. Well, not really as amazing anymore from a technical perspective, but the Nouveau-Project, which had a really hard road came into existence because such a move seemed to be impossible, back then.

devx 13y ago

Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware? Especially after the NSA scandal, we should really demand open source firmware from hardware manufacturers with every chance we get.

swetland 13y ago
Proprietary drivers and firmware are really two separate issues. Proprietary drivers usually are the result of licensed code that can't be open sourced or IP concerns (giving away the "secret sauce", patent worries, etc). Provided it can't be updated behind your back, I don't see proprietary firmware as particularly harmful unto itself -- it'd be nice if it were open and make the device less of a black box, but from the POV of the driver or user, there's not really much difference between a device with an embedded CPU running some firmware and a device implementing the same functionality in the asic.
exDM69 13y ago
> Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware? While this is arguably true for most hardware, GPUs are different from mundane hardware like ethernet adapters. The driver source code will reveal secrets about the hardware architecture, and the architecture changes in every generation. The advantage is not in the software itself, it is not showing the cards you are playing with. In theory, it would be possible to give out the source code to the video drivers but it would not make sense to give out the source for chips in development. At best, you could get source code dumps after a new chip has rolled out. This is not really open source. Yes, I want quality open source video drivers but on the other hand I want bleeding edge hardware and competition that drives hardware development. Disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living and I'm an open source enthusiast.
- RamiK 13y ago
  I don't see why nVidia can't release a semi open-source driver. For previous generations they can open up everything while the latest generation would come with an pre-compiled blob that can be disabled with a simple compile flag for the purists. This will allow them to play nice with the kernel, support previous products while taking bug reports and patches, and help game engine designers target 90% of nVidia's user base without signing an NDA.

shmerl 13y ago

At last. This is great news.

mortdeus 13y ago

I just hope nvidia builds wayland support into their proprietary drivers. I mean if nvidia chooses not to support nouveau as their main DRI drivers, thats fine. However the least they can do is make sure they do as much as they can to invest in Linux moving forward and not force users (and app developers) to make painful decisions regarding whether they should use the proprietary drivers or nouveau. For example if nvidia decides to focus and invest all their effort solely into mir and unity support for their closed drivers, thus giving everybody who backs wayland the shaft in the process, its going to end up being a major problem for developers like myself. Philosophically and pragmatically.

zanny 13y ago
Well, as someone who should understand the value of free software, it is kind of your fault for buying a part from a company who has never supported foss before, and this move is quite a change of pace from them. If they pull an AMD, except they do it right (ie, just depreciate the proprietary driver for enterprise compute usage and focus entirely on making gallium great) they have my business forever. I'm thinking of getting a tegra note next month, on the pretense that at least Nvidia provides open source Tegra drivers through a 3rd party so that the platform is hackable. The new Nexus 7 is a disgrace since smart people have to waste their time reverse engineering the gpu in the Snapdragon because Qualcomm is being a dick.

jrockway 13y ago

I think the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX, and the kind of people nVidia wants to hire don't want to contribute proprietary blobs to Linux when they can just work for the competition on open-source stuff. Thus, nVidia is kind of forced by the market to let the engineers make at least token contributions to Linux. (This is also why DRM never works; the type of person that could implement it correctly wouldn't want to implement it correctly.)

Arnt 13y ago
BTDT, signed the NDA, and the DRM I know is as good as it realistically can become.
telephonetemp 13y ago
>the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX I agree with you about Windows but note that outside of the U.S. very few software engineers ever even get to work with OS X.
- jon-wood 13y ago
  Really? Every developer I know in the UK who doesn't develop for an MS stack is running either Linux or OS X, and that's been the case for the last ten years.
  - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
    I was in academia in Japan and there cygwin and Windows were the favorite tools. Some of the people used Linux in VMs, on the other hand, some new students installed XP on their notebooks. In 2012. And I think this was even a rather progressive lab, I suppose industry only uses Windows.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Japan is a Windows loving country so its hardly representative.

blinkingled 13y ago

This, again, doesn't really mean anything. Nvidia did the 2D only nv driver for the same reasons - to make their GPUs usable out of the box on Linux. Now instead they are doing documenation that someday will help do the same but using nouveau driver and the community's efforts. The key areas where the documentation will be needed and have impact - power management and clocking, 3D stuff etc. - Nvidia isn't promising anything on that. If they hired a bunch of OSS developers and promised to release all docs eventually like AMD that would be news. So no Nvidia - I am still not buying anything you sell.

RamiK 13y ago

Check out the base directory: ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/ That Thumbs.db pretty much says it all :)

surrealize 13y ago

After the "Linus flipping off Nvidia" thing, one of the Nvidia people asked what they could do better on a linux mailing list. Matthew Garrett responded, "Move your 3D driver to userspace and use nouveau for command submission." [1] I thought that would be a marked improvement over the status quo; keeping the proprietary stuff out of kernel-space would make things so much easier. I hadn't seen any possibly-relevant follow-ups until now though. Here's hoping! [1] http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-discuss/2012-June/000336.html http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-dis...

drill_sarge 13y ago

So Nvidia is now doing what AMD is doing with their engagement on freedesktop and kernel recently? Good step but it's not the "breakthrough" like all the news sites are trying to make this up.

Finster 13y ago

This isn't in reaction to Valve's SteamOS announcement, is it?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]