Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chromium blacklists Nouveau

lists.freedesktop.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 411 posts

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#231

Post by gdwatson »

izacus wrote: post #92
larozin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it sounds like that the kernel team implemented the APIs in a way that prevent nVidia from integrating with them without opensourcing the driver? Were those changes made as a political statement?

I'm well out of my depth here and welcome corrections:

Managing and multiplexing access to hardware is a core responsibility of the kernel. When video drivers are implemented in user space as X11 has traditionally done there are a bunch of issues: the program that includes them has to be setuid root to have the right access to the hardware, opening up the possibility of security bugs; only one such program can run at a time; and if something goes wrong in user space, it can bring down the system.

The newer kernel subsystem responsible for handling video cards is the Direct Rendering Manager, with the unfortunately confusing acronym DRM. [1] nVidia declined to support DRM in its proprietary driver for quite some time but eventually chose to do so.

They have some quibbles with GBM, one of the parts of the kernel API, but they didn't raise them until after the API was implemented in the kernel, was implemented in the AMD and Intel drivers, and had become a dependency for the Wayland reference compositor Weston. They refused to implement GBM and instead implemented their own alternative, EGLStreams, which is far more complicated. The open source world believes this is the wrong architecture and has had a lot of discussion about how to (reluctantly) support it. The current KDE and Gnome approach seems to be to accept patches from nVidia for EGLStreams support [2][3], but not everyone feels the same way. [4]

nVidia has implemented DRM already. They could implement GBM if they wanted to. I'm sure that having their proprietary driver in kernel space instead of user space makes licensing more complicated, but it hasn't stopped them yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

[2] https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland...

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-K...

[4] https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#232

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

joshuamorton wrote: post #225
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this idea that nouveau is crashing coming from? And don't be ridiculous. All software has bugs, including Chromium. Should I detect Chromium and blacklist it on my sites in preparation for future bugs? Just a few weeks ago I found a Chromium bug when I was working on a website. I did not blacklist the browser, naturally.

This subthread[0] implies that there have been nouveau-caused crashes for webgl since 2015. The linked bug[1] seems pretty cut and dry. Nouveau completely locks the system, Nvidia doesn't. >All software has bugs If those bugs crash the system and the software is made the default, and the change is a performance degradation, yes. Degraded WebGL performance is superior to the system locking up for nontechnical users. >…

>This subthread[0] implies that there have been nouveau-caused crashes for webgl since 2015. The linked bug[1] seems pretty cut and dry. Nouveau completely locks the system, Nvidia doesn't.

Crashing on a page designed to exhaustively test GL features is one thing. How about crashes which actually affect end-users? I expect that the volume of users who will be negatively impacted by blacklisting is far higher than the volume of users impacted by serious nouveau bugs like this. The difference is that the former user hasn't been annoying Chromium devs in their bug tracker yet.

>Did they fix it in less than 2 years?

No. The bug turns 2 next month and shows no signs of being fixed.

>Did it crash the end-user's computer?

No, but like I said I don't think many nouveau users are actually affected by bugs of this scale. The bug which prompted the blacklisting and being discussed today is not such a bug.

>Did people navigating to your website report the bug to you?

Yes.

>Did you perhaps work around the bug?

Yes

>For example by using a polyfill that would provide degraded performance but still allow the end user to access your content

No. If the workaround caused severe performance degredation and encouraged users to switch to proprietary software, I would have patched Chromium.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#233

Post by hedora »

MrRadar wrote: post #147
gnarbarian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for th…

I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway.

It’s by far the best Linux GPU I’ve ever encountered, and that’s with open source drivers don’t set the kernel taint bit.

Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I’ve encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans).

Maybe things have changed (but the 1080 was certainly out back then), but this card wins on every metric other than CUDA support (nonexistent) and absolute performance (close enough to fastest, and certainly overkill for my Linux Steam collection at 4K).

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#234

Post by ndnxhs »

mehrdadn wrote: post #224
ajross wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself This just about sums up the problem with open source. The response is always "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product. It's not like cloning and building Chromium takes hours. Or like you would lose…

The proprietary version is "if you don't like it, learn to like it."

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#235

Post by mempko »

haneefmubarak wrote: post #19
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 ?

I think their point is that by default, even with the "use recommended drivers" option enabled, Ubuntu uses the nouveau driver by default instead of installing and using the NVIDIA driver.

the nvidia driver is proprietary. If nvidia opens the source, maybe they would ship with that instead.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#236

Post by arendtio »

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 fact, when buying graphics cards I am looking much more on the driver support than on the pure FPS performance. I have a Dell XPS with NVIDIA graphics and an AMD RX460 in my desktop PC.

And in my experience, the NVIDIA driver landscape is just a mess. The state of Nouveau can be obtained from the article above and the proprietary driver causes all kinds of weird issues (e.g. UI spinners rotating at different speeds, fans turning faster than they are supposed to be, etc.). On the other hand, the (open source) AMD driver seems to have evolved quite well over the last years.

As a result, I hate my NVIDIA card and like my AMD card quite much. Every time I see those steam survey results I wonder why there are still so many people buying NVIDIA cards for their Linux boxes. They probably just trust the benchmarks and don't compare the experience first hand.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#237

Post by chris_wot »

ndnxhs wrote: post #234
mehrdadn wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself This just about sums up the problem with open source. The response is always "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product. It's not like cloning and building Chromium takes hours. Or like you would lose…

The proprietary version is "if you don't like it, learn to like it."

Which is the same as the open source version?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#238

Post by MrRadar »

hedora wrote: post #233
MrRadar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for th…

I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway. It’s by far the best Linux GPU I’ve ever encountered, and that’s with open source drivers don’t set the kernel taint bit. Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I’ve encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans…

I'm not saying that AMD's current cards are slouches (I'm planning to buy one myself this year when I build my next computer) but they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models (the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX) which is what I mean by "properly high-end". Those are admittedly niche products due to their high pricing but it is important for AMD to have a competitive product in that segment since many people don't do a lot of research and if all they know about GPUs is "Nvidia has the fastest cards" (or an equally-uninformed salesperson tells them that) and buys a 1060 over a 580 based on that "knowledge" then AMD lost a sale.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#239

Post by ndnxhs »

int_19h wrote: post #181
bubblethink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Nouveau isn't working all that well, then clearly a switch to a new graphics stack that would require it is waaay premature, given how prevalent NVIDIA graphics hardware is.

It does actually work fairly well for non gaming uses.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#240

Post by meditate »

mehrdadn wrote: post #224
ajross wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You don't whine at open source providers to support features you want, it's bad form. Go fix it yourself This just about sums up the problem with open source. The response is always "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product. It's not like cloning and building Chromium takes hours. Or like you would lose…

I don't see what the issue here is. If you don't have the time to do it then get someone else to do it. If they won't do it for free then you pay them. The unfortunate part is that if you regularly buy brand new Nvidia cards then the cost of the proprietary driver is built into the price of the card, so it sucks that you would have to pay twice for drivers. But this clearly is a result of Nvidia's decision, they are thes one who are forcing you to take personal responsibility for getting your own libre drivers working, not the developers working on said libre (and gratis) drivers.
Post reply on HN