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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#51

Post by drewg123 »

baby wrote: post #28

What is nouveau?

A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use this driver by default, since it is open source.

There is an arguably superior driver supplied by Nvidia. It is faster, has better hardware support, and is arguably more stable (1). However, it ships as a closed source binary blob with a source-based shim layer to integrate it into the kernel.

(1)My wife has 2 Linux desktops with Nvidia GPUS. She ran nouveau by default. However, on both machines, it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up, but I realized from the stack traces that were recorded that it was the GPU driver. I then switched the machines to the Nvidia driver, and they have been stable ever since.

I personally always buy hardware from Nvidia, because they provide a binary driver for FreeBSD. They are one of the few companies in the non-server space to provide good packaged drivers for FreeBSD.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#52

Post by freedomben »

ddevault wrote: post #26

From: Drew DeVault To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor…

While I mostly agree with what your email says, if I received a message that said, "I expect it to be rolled back as soon as possible" and accused me of being "a bad actor on Linux" I would probably be quite put off. You make some good points, but rather than coat them in honey, you soaked them in vinegar. Might get a better result by improving your tone, and maybe giving them credit for at least open sourcing their work and supporting graphics acceleration on at least some cards (firefox doesn't). I also appreciate that they support linux so well, even if not perfectly.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#53

Post by rzzzt »

cheald wrote: post #12
bubblethink wrote: post #10

This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?

The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.

AMD drivers have an OS-independent hardware abstraction library at the core and they "only" have to adapt it to different systems: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#54

Post by jandrese »

bubblethink wrote: post #34
monocasa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What else are they going to ship ? Including Nvidia's binary driver by default. Obvs Debian, gNewSense, and GUIX can't do that, but since when have corps cared about them? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm a FOSS or GTFO kind of guy, running Debian and Replicant, but shipping proprietary drivers by default is what chrome is hinting at obviously.

Beyond the whole foss aspect, there are good technical reasons too. For instance, blob won't work with wayland (at least right now AFAIK), and ubuntu was (is) debating switching to wayland as default.

My impression was that the 17.10 Weyland stuff was kind of a mess so the switch is probably premature at this point.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#55

Post by computerex »

bubblethink wrote: post #24
moonbug wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia also does an excellent job of supporting linux. It's just not open source.

Excellent is a stretch. It works for things they support. Look at optimus and wayland for instance. Also, they restrict nouveau from working by signing blobs and enforcing checks. And this is years after Linus flipping the bird and other repeated requests.

Optimus was the single most pain in the ass thing I have ever experienced in linux. Never again, am I going to run linux on an optimus machine with Bumblebee.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#56

Post by zokier »

ddevault wrote: post #26

From: Drew DeVault To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor…

> If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux.

By making Chrome significantly slower on nvidia systems they effectively are pressurizing nvida to act better. Trying to work around the problems would be more like supporting the status quo instead of driving change.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#57

Post by zozbot123 »

ryanobjc wrote: post #45
ddevault wrote: post #26

From: Drew DeVault To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor…

Why do you expect it to be rolled back? What evidence leads you to believe that? Also, with this email it seems it is you who is turning a routine technical decision into a hostile relationship. As they say, them fighting words.

> Also, with this email it seems it is you who is turning a routine technical decision into a hostile relationship.

Yeah, I don't get that. Does the author think that this'll make the Chromium project more willing to sponsor work on nouveau, or for that matter, to expend some of their influence on nouveau's behalf via Nvidia? It makes no sense to me.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#58

Post by stuaxo »

nolok wrote: post #9

For anyone interested, the link really should be the full bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=876523 The current link says it as if Chrome was not being fair, but reading their reasoning it makes total sense. Key quote from said bug report: > We thought about blacklisting nouveau driver long time ago, and decided to let more adventurous users to play around. Now that Ubuntu ships with no…

Chrome without acceleration == one very hot laptop in many cases (ie watching videos on YouTube).

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#59

Post by vetinari »

monocasa wrote: post #27
bubblethink wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now that Ubuntu ships with nouveau on default, maybe it's time to blacklist it in Chrome. I don't get this. All linux distros under the sun ship with nouveau, and always have. It is a kernel driver afterall. What else are they going to ship ?

> What else are they going to ship ? Including Nvidia's binary driver by default. Obvs Debian, gNewSense, and GUIX can't do that, but since when have corps cared about them? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm a FOSS or GTFO kind of guy, running Debian and Replicant, but shipping proprietary drivers by default is what chrome is hinting at obviously.

You can't, for the same reason you can't ship ZFS.

The combining of proprietary and GPL code has to be made by the user and the result is un-distributable. That's why distributions cannot ship it.

What they can do is to make the above step easy (which Ubuntu does).

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#60

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

freedomben wrote: post #52
ddevault wrote: post #26

From: Drew DeVault To: graphics-dev@chromium.org Subject: nouveau blacklisted in Chromium I'm writing to complain regarding the decision to blacklist nouveau in Chromium. You're creating a hostile relationship with one of the most important projects on Linux. If you do anything about this problem, you should be using your influence to pressure Nvidia into being a better citizen on Linux. Hell, you could even sponsor…

While I mostly agree with what your email says, if I received a message that said, "I expect it to be rolled back as soon as possible" and accused me of being "a bad actor on Linux" I would probably be quite put off. You make some good points, but rather than coat them in honey, you soaked them in vinegar. Might get a better result by improving your tone, and maybe giving them credit for at least open sourcing their…

Firefox supports GPU accelleration on nouveau and all Mesa drivers from Mesa 8.0 forward.
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