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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#151

Post by geofft »

jlarocco wrote: post #125
geofft wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may all be true but I'm really unsure what that has to do with user-friendliness in the way described. The argument was an attempt to rebut my claim that Chrome is trying to do the best job possible of rendering pages isn't true because Chrome isn't user-friendly. If their goal is to spy on users and have a dumbed-down UI, isn't it all the more important that pages successfully render, so that the sheeple keep using it?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#152

Post by zanny »

drb91 wrote: post #86
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-…

> 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”.

As someone who has used IE (especially 5-9) far too many times because I had to, Chrome could impale my palms with stakes and I'd still probably call it more user friendly.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#153

Post by ajross »

steve19 wrote: post #141
ajross wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 begi…

It's free in the sense you don't pay for it with money, but considering how much Google pays apple to use Google as the default search engine, I would say the Google Browser is a big money maker.

No, Chromium is free in the GNU sense, which is what I meant. You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself, or use hardware that doesn't require this kind of hacky reverse engineering.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#154

Post by apayan »

wbond wrote: post #139
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.

I see it repeated all the time that AMD has great open source drivers, but their latest drivers on their 5xx line card couldn’t run my 4K display at 60hz over Display Port without splitting the screen into two separate X displays. Nvidia’s proprietary driver can handle it no problem. Needless to say I have an AMD card, with awesome open source drivers, sitting in a bin. While the horrid binary-blob Nvidia actually dr…

That's a curious situation. I run my 4k displays over DisplayPort with an RX 580 on Ubuntu 18.04. However, I haven't gone out of my way to obtain drivers from AMD. I'm just using the drivers that ship with the kernel. It might be worth trying a vanilla installation of Ubuntu to see if you can get your set up working.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#155

Post by geofft »

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.

But that's the part that's crashing. I'm suggesting Chrome use llvmpipe to do whatever they needed hardware acceleration for, generate a single boring texture on a single big rectangle, and pass that through to the graphics driver. That way Chrome itself isn't loading the Nouveau libGL and is much more insulated from incompatibilities between Chrome and Nouveau, whosever fault it might be.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#156

Post by techntoke »

canttestthis wrote: post #149
techntoke wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see anything about a black box, except that users had reported issues and they didn't feel that they could investigate them because there were to many variances in Linux distros.

There are screenshots of the issue in the report. They've also said that there is a pattern of Nouveau instability that you don't see in proprietary drivers. Its all in the bug report.

The screenshot was from Ubuntu. I haven't experienced the issue on Arch at all.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#157

Post by lstodd »

bobthepanda wrote: post #119
zanny wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should those would-be maintaners help Google? There's always Firefox to fix.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#158

Post by techntoke »

Klathmon wrote: post #145
techntoke wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are willing you could maybe mention that with some more info about your setup in the bug at [1]. Chrome has the capability of adding all kinds of qualifiers to the blacklist, including explicit exceptions to the rules for a ton of things as well. If enough people can show that some subset of Nouveau users are stable it can be safely enabled for them. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87…

Thanks for pointing that out, and it is something I'll do.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#159

Post by dleslie »

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, let alone investigate & fix bugs in drivers.

This is a lie.

Google could easily undertake such an act, but is choosing not to. It's not that they _lack the resources to do so_, but that the value proposition of doing so did not weigh favourably towards undertaking the action.

Google isn't incapable of this task, they are _unwilling_ to undertake this task.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#160

Post by SquareWheel »

ddevault wrote: post #137
SquareWheel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what a conceited message. If you want to support nouveau, then you can put the work in. You have no right to demand that others do work for you. Especially when they already have a functioning alternative solution in software rendering.

I am not demanding that they do work. I'm demanding that they do not deliberately sabotoge the nouveau driver. If they find the nouveau driver lacking, they should improve it, not sabatoge it. If they don't want to put the work in, then they should just leave well enough alone.

>I am not demanding that they do work.

Sure you are:

>If they find the nouveau driver lacking, they should improve it, not sabatoge it.

Not supporting a buggy driver is hardly "sabotaging it". It's not their job to make it work.

>If they don't want to put the work in, then they should just leave well enough alone.

And in doing so, their least-technical Linux users will suffer from sudden crashes that they don't understand. Now how does that help Linux?

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