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As far as the timing of this move and the announcement of SteamOS is concerned, I'm having difficulty seeing the reasoning behind it. Wouldn't Nvidia just cont

As far as the timing of this move and the announcement of SteamOS is concerned, I'm having difficulty seeing the reasoning behind it. Wouldn't Nvidia just continue work on their proprietary Linux drivers, and wouldn't most gamers (who are unlikely to care about FOSS) simply use them? I imagine OEMs would include the best drivers available for the devices the choose to use, which at this point means proprietary.

ajross 13y ago
Surely SteamOS will be using a proprietary driver build. There are reasons to desire DRM/KMS-based drivers, and Valve might have been pushing this to NVIDIA, but surely "open sourceness" isn't going to be a feature driver for SteamOS. And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.
- Already__Taken 13y ago
  I can imagine that with valve engineers being used to their pretty open source engine development practices. Starting to talk more with Nvidia hardware people they might be asking for a lot more improvements that nvidia could be starting to realise they might benefit from offloading to the open source world. When Microsoft or sony come knocking to have this conversation they might be more prepared to put a specialist hardware team between the system developers and hardware makers coupled with a very strict QA process.
  - shawn-furyan 13y ago
    This is pretty close to my interpretation. Basically I think that Valve has forced the hands of the graphics card makers to elevate the Linux platform to first class citizen status. Due to the poor integration of the Nvidia proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, it seems like they have two options to get their drivers into a better state: 1. Hire a lot of kernel hackers 2. Try to get the open source driver maintainers to improve integration in a way that is closer to the actual hardware (without giving everything away), and then somehow tie their proprietary driver into that integration code. The letter certainly doesn't express interest in improving the capabilities of the nouveau drivers to a point that they can compete with the proprietary drivers in terms of 3d performance, and I think that it would be prudent of the open source driver maintainers to be skeptical of Nvidia's motives given the timing and limited nature of the release.
    - lallysingh 13y ago
      I agree completely. I'd add: 3. Improve the relationship between NVIDIA and the open-source community. If AMD was both much better on Linux (due to #2/#3), and they were "good enough" for a substantial portion of users who're now using SteamOS, that's a lot of lost revenue for NVIDIA.
      - zanny 13y ago
        Too bad as the target audience of Steam on Linux (mainly, a hacker who also plays games, and doesn't buy Windows licenses) I can't go with either companies products. Nvidia is direly amoral in their completely asinine hatred of FOSS and their inability to contribute. I won't support a business with that mentality. They either grow up and play ball in mesa or I don't give them a cent. But AMD has terrible performance and instability in both drivers, and they still have proprietary firmware. It is like trying to have ones cake and eat it too - "hey look, we have foss drivers, except not!" is not good enough. The whole point of foss drivers is not hiding anything from users, and having binary firmware blobs making their devices impossible to reimplement without reverse engineering defeats the purpose. Then there is Intel, who just makes a foss driver as their only option and does it right. So my next build is using 4600 HD graphics and I'll just play minecraft and quake live rather than whatever shiny new shooter Valve brings to Linux.
        stmartin 13y ago
        funny, you just summarized my thoughts on the issue. Intel should be praised for getting it right. The leadership of the company is awesome.
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        Of course, Intel has it somewhat easier, considering their GPU+driver combo only needs to play minecraft and quake live.
- Jasper_ 13y ago
  NVIDIA's kernel module right now just pokes a hole the size of a truck and reams data in from userspace. Valve is looking at using Wayland to power Steam, which means that NVIDIA basically need a proper DRM/KMS part in the kernel, and that part will likely be the DRM-side of nouveau. My guess is that NVIDIA will contribute to the kernel parts of nouveau using open documentation to get patches accepted, while continuing to work on their closed-source userspace.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
Wayland. That's the answer as far as I can tell. Nvidia's prop driver isn't setup to be compatible with Mir/Wayland as is. Helping nouveau is important or else Nvidia is going to die a fast firey death as Wayland and Mir becoming more and more important.
marcosdumay 13y ago
That's probably more closely related to the bad receiving NVidia is getting by the current Linux users, that have a less closed option nowadays. It's almost certainly not gamers that complain abut the lack of free drivers. But people like me that want good performance but don't like the problems the proprietary drivers bring, or people concerned about the driver's security (everybody is paranoid now) and not wanting it at their datacenter.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sengstrom 13y ago
Ubuntu is moving to Mir instead of X11 - existing proprietary drivers will not work after the switch. It would benefit all parties if graphics support would not be a deal breaker for upgrading 14.04 which is when i think Canonical plans to support mainly Mir. From what I've read it seems that Canonical are actively working on getting this hardware support to work out by talking to vendors. Maybe this is part of that effort?
- hrkristian 13y ago
  Nvidia has already committed to supporting KMS etc in the future, Canonical definitely had a lot to do with that, and I'll bet as did Valve.
cube13 13y ago
Valve's had a surprisingly good track record with getting companies on-board with improving their code. They managed to get a lot of improvements into Apple's OpenGL implementation, which is something that Blizzard couldn't do for years.

ajross 13y ago

Surely SteamOS will be using a proprietary driver build. There are reasons to desire DRM/KMS-based drivers, and Valve might have been pushing this to NVIDIA, but surely "open sourceness" isn't going to be a feature driver for SteamOS. And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.

Already__Taken 13y ago
I can imagine that with valve engineers being used to their pretty open source engine development practices. Starting to talk more with Nvidia hardware people they might be asking for a lot more improvements that nvidia could be starting to realise they might benefit from offloading to the open source world. When Microsoft or sony come knocking to have this conversation they might be more prepared to put a specialist hardware team between the system developers and hardware makers coupled with a very strict QA process.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  This is pretty close to my interpretation. Basically I think that Valve has forced the hands of the graphics card makers to elevate the Linux platform to first class citizen status. Due to the poor integration of the Nvidia proprietary drivers with the Linux kernel, it seems like they have two options to get their drivers into a better state: 1. Hire a lot of kernel hackers 2. Try to get the open source driver maintainers to improve integration in a way that is closer to the actual hardware (without giving everything away), and then somehow tie their proprietary driver into that integration code. The letter certainly doesn't express interest in improving the capabilities of the nouveau drivers to a point that they can compete with the proprietary drivers in terms of 3d performance, and I think that it would be prudent of the open source driver maintainers to be skeptical of Nvidia's motives given the timing and limited nature of the release.
  - lallysingh 13y ago
    I agree completely. I'd add: 3. Improve the relationship between NVIDIA and the open-source community. If AMD was both much better on Linux (due to #2/#3), and they were "good enough" for a substantial portion of users who're now using SteamOS, that's a lot of lost revenue for NVIDIA.
    - zanny 13y ago
      Too bad as the target audience of Steam on Linux (mainly, a hacker who also plays games, and doesn't buy Windows licenses) I can't go with either companies products. Nvidia is direly amoral in their completely asinine hatred of FOSS and their inability to contribute. I won't support a business with that mentality. They either grow up and play ball in mesa or I don't give them a cent. But AMD has terrible performance and instability in both drivers, and they still have proprietary firmware. It is like trying to have ones cake and eat it too - "hey look, we have foss drivers, except not!" is not good enough. The whole point of foss drivers is not hiding anything from users, and having binary firmware blobs making their devices impossible to reimplement without reverse engineering defeats the purpose. Then there is Intel, who just makes a foss driver as their only option and does it right. So my next build is using 4600 HD graphics and I'll just play minecraft and quake live rather than whatever shiny new shooter Valve brings to Linux.
      - stmartin 13y ago
        funny, you just summarized my thoughts on the issue. Intel should be praised for getting it right. The leadership of the company is awesome.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Of course, Intel has it somewhat easier, considering their GPU+driver combo only needs to play minecraft and quake live.
Jasper_ 13y ago
NVIDIA's kernel module right now just pokes a hole the size of a truck and reams data in from userspace. Valve is looking at using Wayland to power Steam, which means that NVIDIA basically need a proper DRM/KMS part in the kernel, and that part will likely be the DRM-side of nouveau. My guess is that NVIDIA will contribute to the kernel parts of nouveau using open documentation to get patches accepted, while continuing to work on their closed-source userspace.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Wayland. That's the answer as far as I can tell. Nvidia's prop driver isn't setup to be compatible with Mir/Wayland as is. Helping nouveau is important or else Nvidia is going to die a fast firey death as Wayland and Mir becoming more and more important.

marcosdumay 13y ago

That's probably more closely related to the bad receiving NVidia is getting by the current Linux users, that have a less closed option nowadays. It's almost certainly not gamers that complain abut the lack of free drivers. But people like me that want good performance but don't like the problems the proprietary drivers bring, or people concerned about the driver's security (everybody is paranoid now) and not wanting it at their datacenter.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sengstrom 13y ago

Ubuntu is moving to Mir instead of X11 - existing proprietary drivers will not work after the switch. It would benefit all parties if graphics support would not be a deal breaker for upgrading 14.04 which is when i think Canonical plans to support mainly Mir. From what I've read it seems that Canonical are actively working on getting this hardware support to work out by talking to vendors. Maybe this is part of that effort?

hrkristian 13y ago
Nvidia has already committed to supporting KMS etc in the future, Canonical definitely had a lot to do with that, and I'll bet as did Valve.

cube13 13y ago

Valve's had a surprisingly good track record with getting companies on-board with improving their code. They managed to get a lot of improvements into Apple's OpenGL implementation, which is something that Blizzard couldn't do for years.