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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#81

Post by larozin »

StreamBright wrote: post #50

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

Afaik 10 years ago nvidia drivers were most stable and performant on linux. But yes they are proprietary and implemented in userspace for Xorg. Today Linux graphics stack architecture have been significantly revamped and it requires more kernel code than before for DRM/DRI API and Wayland. nVidia just can't fit into this architecture with its proprietary/nda model without violating GPL for kernel modules.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#82

Post by gnarbarian »

emersion wrote: post #31

Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. On the other hand, Intel and AMD have high-quality drivers and are part of the open-source community.

Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market.

Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period).

Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#83

Post by bubblethink »

willtim wrote: post #70
StreamBright wrote: post #50

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

That is extremely difficult. Lenovo doesn't make any high end laptops without nvidia. You'll be restricted to the X series and the T series. Dell is also quite similar, although at one point they had intel only options for their precision lineup. Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end (i.e., real i7 with 4-6 cores, xeon etc.).

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#84

Post by shhehebehdh »

lultimouomo wrote: post #72
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…

>> Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux So Google doesn't have the resources to test the default driver on the most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market.

Obviously it’s not that Google doesn’t have the resources. They have enough resources to fund whole new OSes. Of course they could fund testing.

Chrome team, on the other hand, does not have the resources. Which is to say that this is not the thing they believe is most important to work on at the margin, and given the amount of engineers Google will fund for the project.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#85

Post by zozbot123 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #49
ryanobjc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, like North Korea's rocket launches are routine technical missions, too. Chromium is slinging mud at nouveau and I can't stand for that.

> Chromium is slinging mud at nouveau

Not sure what you mean by this. If there are versions of nouveau 'in the wild' (widely used by non-technical users) that result in brokenness under some circumstances-- and bugfixes in the driver are not promptly available, it makes sense to prevent use of the hardware driver i.e. "blacklist" it. So, are you saying that using nouveau does not result in broken behavior, and that any such brokenness is quickly fixed?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#86

Post by drb91 »

geofft wrote: post #36
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…

> It's not the browser's place to have any code whatsoever which even so much as glances at the graphics vendor to make meaningful decisions. I'm curious why you hold this position. I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users, and they may believe they get better performance and behavior from unaccelerated rendering. It's no different from websites looking at user-…

> I think it makes sense for the browser to attempt to deliver the best experience it can to users

Are you talking about chrome, the least user friendly of all browsers? This is just corporate talk for “we don’t care about making our software work with nouveau”.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#87

Post by zlynx »

willtim wrote: post #70
StreamBright wrote: post #50

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

I have a Dell XPS with an Nvidia 1050, running Fedora 29.

The Nouveau driver was so bad here that I blacklisted all the drivers and just use the Intel GPU. It's the difference between 3 hours or 6 hours of battery.

It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#88

Post by izacus »

bhaak wrote: post #21

Both projects seem to put the blame on the other project. IMO, there are at least two other factions that can be blamed equally well. First, nvidia for not providing OSS drivers and second, the user who runs an OS on hardware that can't be properly supported on this OS at the moment. For years I have the rule that I prefer hardware that has proper Linux support. Even going a bit further that I try not to buy hardware…

> First, nvidia for not providing OSS drivers and second, the user who runs an OS on hardware that can't be properly supported on this OS at the moment.

nVidia does provide perfectly working closed source drivers on Linux though - how is it their fault that some 3rd party implementation of the drivers doesn't work in a stable manner?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#89

Post by sevensor »

NVidia comes out of this looking very bad. It's not as if a GPU can't have good Linux support (see AMD, Intel), but theirs doesn't. Although I haven't spent my hard-earned money on their hardware since 2005, I have several machines at work that are burdened with it. Some lock up with Nouveau drivers, others crash with NVidia drivers. I can only conclude that the hardware is unstable.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#90

Post by izacus »

willtim wrote: post #70
StreamBright wrote: post #50

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

On all my laptops, nouveau never outperformed the proprietary driver in battery life. It didn't even support power management on most GPUs - when did that change?
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