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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#111

Post by Dylan16807 »

shhehebehdh wrote: post #84
lultimouomo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

If the chrome team doesn't have the resources for testing the most common Linux configurations, it's not a good sign. Linux market share is low but it's a useful signifier.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#112

Post by tomnipotent »

ddevault wrote: post #39
geofft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

Note: I edited my comment to simply be a copy of the email I sent to the devs. You quoted the original text. >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. So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users? No, of course not. They should do their best to…

> So should they also blacklist Windows because it's spying on its users?

That's such silly rhetoric, no wonder you're in the situation you're in.

> This is also a very dumb anti-practice.

So is crashing users machines and then blaming Chrome for doing what's best for its users.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#113

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #66
zokier wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would be true only if they weren't rewarding the proprietary driver. If their goal was to pressure Nvidia into being a better player in FOSS they'd disable GPU accelleration on the proprietary driver.

So you're suggesting Google should slow down Chrome for even more users than are currently impacted, in order to stick it to nVidia?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#114

Post by magic_quotes »

gnarbarian wrote: post #82
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 proprie…

> 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.

Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#115

Post by geofft »

shhehebehdh wrote: post #84
lultimouomo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Which, to be clear, seems entirely justifiable because software rendering exists.

If Nvidia wants their cards to work well on an all-free-software stack, they can provide a free software driver. If users care about making an unofficial driver work, they can do the work or fund the work. Chrome is just trying to get web pages on the screen and it doesn't seem like it's worth the boil-the-ocean level of effort of taking responsibility for implementing a reverse-engineered graphics driver when they can just get web pages on the screen using software rendering.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#116

Post by ajross »

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.

Not for a free product, no. It's not our place to decide for Google what they want to do. If we want our open source software to work we should make it work. You can rebuild chromium to change the blacklist, or just use the command line to tell it to ignore the blacklist. It's not like Google doesn't provide options.

And in any case the reason nouveau sucks (and yes, folks, nouveau sucks) isn't Google's fault to begin with.

You seriously want to complain about Google's lack of support for an open source driver that barely exists because of NVIDIA's lack of support?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

jenscow wrote: post #95
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be true only if they weren't rewarding the proprietary driver. If their goal was to pressure Nvidia into being a better player in FOSS they'd disable GPU accelleration on the proprietary driver.

They're "rewarding" the driver that works .

The reason it's the only one that works is bad behavior, so it also rewards that bad behavior.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#118

Post by zanny »

gnarbarian wrote: post #82
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 proprie…

In the last 6 years I've used a 7870, 290, and 580 as my desktops GPU. All have been stellar cards that have only gotten better over time.

Back when I got that 7870 circa 2012 I was taking a major risk - at the time the 6870 was the premiere foss card and radeonSI was brand new with growing pains. The 290 was another risk being the first major architecture update to GCN. But I was validated in both purchases with usable cards at first that within a few months became excellent.

I've played a lot of the major Linux AAA releases on these cards shortly after release - Borderlands 2, Civ 5, Metro Last Light / Redux, Tomb Raider, etc. There used to be quite a few bugs at release and glitches. Nowadays everything is pristine. And I get about twice the framerate in BL2 today than I did four years ago on that 290.

I'm almost certainly going to buy a Navi card next unless we have another crypto bomb ruin the market again.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#119

Post by bobthepanda »

zanny wrote: post #104
bubblethink wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market That's still less than a percent of the market I think. Maybe shave off another order of magnitude. So the economic argument is not the one to make. However, it sucks nonetheless.

Its still probably hundreds of thousands of users. I hate arguments about "but Linux is only a fraction of the market!" because the total OS / browser usage market is in the billions of people. Even small fractions of that pie could found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation.

If the market share were compelling enough, couldn’t some other maintainer step up and do this work? OSS doesn’t necessarily mean support for everything under the sun at all costs; Chromium may be open source but that doesn’t mean they have carte blanche from Google to test every possible combination of distro and GPU.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#120

Post by [deleted] »

bubblethink wrote: post #94
lultimouomo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

> most widespread linux distribution for one of the two most widespread GPU producers in the market That's still less than a percent of the market I think. Maybe shave off another order of magnitude. So the economic argument is not the one to make. However, it sucks nonetheless.

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