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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#241

Post by doublepg23 »

_noqo wrote: post #204

Slightly unrelated but can anyone speculate on the reasons why Nvidia doesn't open source its drivers? I'm curious.

My understanding is _a lot_ of stuff in Nvidia drivers isn't _technically_ owned by them. As in they license out A company to make Y thing with Z license. After 20+ years of legacy those weird licenses add up, and no-one feels comfortable with releasing the code. Whether or not that's true? Hard to say... For comparison AMD has been (since 2015) working hard to make nearly all parts of their drivers upstream in some fashion (amdgpu). While that's not a 1:1 comparison there (AMD has less capital than Nvidia) it shows it _is_ possible to free these drivers.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#242

Post by murderfs »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #232
joshuamorton wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Do you honestly think that it's reasonable or acceptable for Chrome to allow an arbitrary website to hard lock a user's machine?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#243

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

murderfs wrote: post #242
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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. Do you honestly think that…

Do you honestly think that there isn't a page which can crash any driver? WebGL is a poorly thought out mess.

That being said, you're right, but a more appropriate response than blacklisting nouveau would be blacklisting this particular WebGL feature on nouveau.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#244

Post by iddqd »

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”.

They are making Chrome work for nouveau users by disabling the hardware acceleration.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#245

Post by joshuamorton »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #232
joshuamorton wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

The bug being discussed today is just one of "some bug reports on other rendering issues with Nouveau". It fails the conformance tests, a quick search showed that same bug about crashing having been reported to chrome. Let me say that one more time:

There is a set of conformance tests to verify API compatibility. Nouveau fails them. It's not just buggy, it is literally non-API-conformant. You can't keep pretending its API conformant when it fails the API conformance tests. When Nouveau is actually API compliant, perhaps it will get un-blocked.

Until then, Chrome is doing exactly what you'd do if Nvidia claimed to implement the APIs but just made the system crash instead: block a nonconformant API implementation that lied to its clients and degrade gracefully instead.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#246

Post by frabbit »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #230
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.

No, they don't want to waste time trying to make a broken driver work. It's an Ubuntu/Nvidia problem, not a Google problem. AMD and Intel open source drivers work just fine.

Exactly. Nvidia have been relentlessly hostile to Free Software for ever. No one who wants an easy life or a stable, upgradeable operating system would buy an Nvidia card.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#247

Post by slavik81 »

AnssiH wrote: post #220
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.

> NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. That is simply not true. Various docs, provided based on requests by Nouveau developers: https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ Documentation released in the last year include e.g. https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryTweakTable/1/... https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryClockTable/1/... htt…

It's true they don't literally do nothing, but are Noveau developers getting the information they need about newer hardware? I think these benchmarks are illuminating: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-...

You get 3x better performance with a GTX 780 Ti than a GTX 980 Ti. From reading the explanation from a Nouveau developer in the comments, I get the impression that NVIDIA just wants the open source drivers to work well enough that you can boot your computer and download the proprietary drivers.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#248

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

joshuamorton wrote: post #245
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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. The bug being discussed today is just one of "some bug reports on other rendering issues with Nouveau". It fails the conformance tests, a quick search showed that same bug about crashing having been reported to chrome. Let me say that o…

>There is a set of conformance tests to verify API compatibility. Nouveau fails them. It's not just buggy, it is literally non-API-conformant. You can't keep pretending its API conformant when it fails the API conformance tests. When Nouveau is actually API compliant, perhaps it will get un-blocked.

It doesn't matter. Nouveau is a buggy implementation but an implementation nevertheless. No one is going to blame Chromium for their desktop freezing up. It's the user's decision to buy Nvidia and Ubuntu's decision to use a buggy driver. They've weighted the tradeoffs and come to a decision which is theirs to make. It's NOT Chromium's place to make that call.

These bugs are not causing daily issues to Chromium users, or even frequent issues, for nearly all users. The blacklisting does affect all users, daily.

It is not Chromium's place to decide which driver their users will use. It's not okay to write vendor specific code. It is not okay. You write code for the APIs and if the implementation of those APIs is buggy, it's their bug, not yours. Changing your code to fix someone else's bug is the objectively incorrect thing to do. Fucking over an important upstream Linux driver in favor of a proprietary driver from a bad actor is outright morally wrong.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#249

Post by jolux »

loeg wrote: post #187
vetinari wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora is Wayland-by-default for several releases already.

Sort of. It falls back to X for drivers that don't support Wayland, which has included nvidia for a long time. (Maybe there is some progress there more recently.) And the proprietary nvidia driver is widely used.

Does it really? I had grotesque lag when installing Fedora on a System76 laptop with an Nvidia card and had to switch to X manually.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#250

Post by cwyers »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #217
cwyers wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not well enough, people are filing bug reports with Chromium that are really bugs in noveau.

So Chromium should direct these users to the right place and close their ticket.

That is a "should" based on your feelings about Nvidia, not about what is the correct decision for users. They are falling back to software rendering when the GPU driver does not properly support the hardware acceleration. That's not uncommon, and it's certainly not the outrage you are trying to make it out to be here. Everybody gets it, you disagree with Nvidia's decision to not have open-source drivers. Not everyone else shares your views there, and it is not their obligation to support your views.
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