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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#121

Post by threeseed »

vetinari wrote: post #59
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.

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).

I thought you could just have the drivers be downloaded and installed during installation i.e. never technically shipped with the OS.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#122

Post by ajross »

vetinari wrote: post #63
geofft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does llvmpipe do these days? I remember being excited about it ~5 years ago and I can only imagine both LLVM performance and CPU speeds have gone up.

llvmpipe is the gpu part, not the display part of the graphic card. Otherwise, when using it in KVM VM, it can run the desktop compositor quite nicely.

I didn't look at the bugs at issue, but I rather doubt mode switching is what Chromium cares about. It's sure to be video decode or GPU output.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#123

Post by StavrosK »

mikewhy wrote: post #110
StavrosK wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I upgraded to 18.10 and my XPS's brightness control doesn't work. The Prime switchy thing can't change cards without a reboot, and if the screen goes to sleep between switching cards and rebooting, it never comes up again. Actually, with 18.10, it never comes up again anyway. I have a whole host of issues with nVidia cards, my next card is going to be AMD.

18.10 isn't even supported by Dell.

Awesome, a laptop with one-year OS support...

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#124

Post by gnulinux »

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…

AMD GPUs are definitely competitive unless you made a business out of computing things in GPU. For most daily tasks like graphics (games) or even moderate number crunching (OpenCL), AMD GPUs are perfectly usable and high value.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#125

Post by jlarocco »

geofft wrote: post #99
drb91 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

I think Chrome is empirically quite user friendly - it's not installed by default anywhere and people choose to use it. It is true that Chrome isn't particularly power -user friendly for certain use cases, but that's different. Also, if you look at the bug report, it's quite clear they spent a lot of time trying to make nouveau work.

There's more to being user friendly than having a dumbed down UI and being technically correct.

Helping corporations spy on users is definitely not user friendly, and Chrome is by far the worst offender there. Saying, "nobody cares," because they're ignorant that it's going on is no excuse, either.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#126

Post by ender7 »

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.

No, in fact one of the bug comments refutes this sarcasm:

> The default driver on the distribution we support is broken.

They do test the default driver on the distributions they support. The tests show that the driver is unacceptably unstable. It may work better on other distros/versions, but they don't have time to test those. They're happy for others to help out in testing these unsupported combinations, however:

> Again, if someone wants to spend the time to test thoroughly to narrow down the blacklist, we will accept patches.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#127

Post by Klathmon »

cwyers wrote: post #106
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's why I used that language (and though I edited the comment, it was not because I rethought the use of the phrase): it is not the Chromium team's place to make this decision, and this decision actively harms the health of the Linux ecosystem. The decision of which driver to use is up to the user and up to the distro, and Chromium has absolutely no right to interfere with that. Nvidia is one of the worst actors o…

They aren't "interfering." They are falling back to software rendering when the GPU driver is incapable of supporting valid calls without crashing. If Windows or macOS started shipping buggy/crashing OpenGL drivers and not fixing them, Chromium would be entirely justified to fall back to software rendering there, and it would not be "interfering" with Windows or macOS development to do so.

>If Windows or macOS started shipping buggy/crashing OpenGL drivers and not fixing them, Chromium would be entirely justified to fall back to software rendering there

And they do just that, quite often! Just take a look at the list of drivers/hardware/os/feature combinations that are blacklisted in their file at [1].

Tons of MacOS and Windows things on there (and Android, and Linux!)

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/5e87d14bfc6...

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#128

Post by ec109685 »

vetinari wrote: post #59
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.

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).

This isn’t correct. WiFi router ships with GPL Linux and proprietary router software. The company / foundation creating the distribution just needs to have a license for the proprietary bits.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#129

Post by zamalek »

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 get the predicament that caused Chromium to blacklist Nouveau. Nothing against the incredible work done in Nouveau, it's just reality: given a thousand eyes, apparently not all bugs are shallow (see also: Heartbleed and Shellshock). That being said:

>I'm curious why you hold this position.

Agreed. There are countless AAA titles (games) that do vendor checks on the GPU. Game developers are a bunch of people who have been working with GPUs for more than a decade, possibly approaching two decades. For some reason, GPUs are the one thing that the OS HAL isn't able to sort out. Windows (and Mac?) drivers are always proprietary, so different hardware vendors are all Windows developers have to worry about. I can't imagine the headache of dealing with differing hardware vendors (and families), on top of differing driver vendors.

Reality fucking sucks and I guess this is just Chromium acknowledging it. I doubt there's a grand conspiracy here.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#130

Post by techntoke »

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 .

It works fine on Arch. I'm pretty sure the issue is more to do with Ubuntu's packaging. For them to disable it everywhere due to an issue with Ubuntu makes no sense. Besides, Ubuntu packages old software several releases behind stable.
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