311–320 of 411 posts
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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.
My impression was that the 17.10 Weyland stuff was kind of a mess so the switch is probably premature at this point.
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> nvidia for not providing OSS drivers It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau. Phoronix link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
Ouch, that's mean. IMHO the only way to react to that is to close down shop. Ideally including Linux throwing out support for Nvidia cards. I have a strong opinion on this as I was involved a few years ago in the Kindle homebrew community. After a while I decided that my time could be used better than on a product by a company that tries to prevent us from making his product better and more interesting to its users.…
Nouveau is the joke. It _still_ doesn’t work with Pascal cards, which are 3 years old now. Not to mention newer Turing cards. It’s only good for some obsolete hardware more than two generations ago. The first thing I have to do before installing fresh Ubuntu or Fedora is looking up how to blacklist nouveau, as the system won’t even boot otherwise. It’s time to deprecate it for good everywhere.
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>> 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 begi…
The driver is hopeless? Fine.
You don't want to spend money on people that will most probably install an ad blocker? Go ahead.
You don't have the resources? Come on.
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I've personally actively avoided buying anything with Nvidia hardware in it for 8 years now because of how awful their software business is. That has meant I've even skipped over tablets and phones using their chips and will never buy a Nintendo Switch because... well... firstly consoles are bullshit crippling perfectly good computers with proprietary OSes but secondly because it has an Nvidia chip in it. I tell ever…
Would you mind giving an overview of their reprehensible business practices for those of us who just buy GPUs without following the companies?
* Even decade ago they did a lot of shady stuff when they initially separated GeForce and Quadro series. There was time when you can make little hardware mod on Geforce product that make driver think you have Quadro and magically a FP64 become twice faster and CAD application performance was doubled and tripled.
* Their OpenGL implementation was ever non-standard and allowed both code and shaders to work in situation where it's clearly should not. As result games and apps that was debugged on Nvidia hardware would never work on more conformant Intel / AMD drivers.
* In terms of Nouveau back in 2014 Nvidia started to require signed firmware files [0]. They promised shortly after to provide Nouveau with the files with clear licensing, but it took years. When files were finally released everything related to power management was missing and still not released until this day. So Nouveau can't implement recloking. On top of that they intentionally obfuscate the way firmware files stored within driver binary and also make GPU load firmware via DMA to make extraction much harder.
* Sabotaging of OpenCL in general by not implementing spec for years and keeping it generally much slower that it's supposed to be.
* Several years ago Nvidia twice added checks to their Windows drivers to stop consumer GPU drivers to work when passed into virtual machines. Both bypassed by hiding KVM identifier and changing HyperV hv_vendor_id, but it's was annoying [1].
* Nvidia forbidden to use consumer hardware drivers in datacenters [2]
* Nvidia tried to push some crazy anti competitive program to make exclusive deals with GPU vendors so they can't sell AMD GPUs in any kind of "gaming" product lines [3]
Again it's not like AMD is perfect, but that's a lot of shady stuff and I likely not even listed half of it.
[0] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-...
[1] http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html
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> nvidia for not providing OSS drivers It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau. Phoronix link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
Well, not quite. The charitable way to put it is that they are requiring signed firmware in hardware, in order to help stem fraud by 3rd party resellers (where some card model X is sold to naïve buyers as a more desirable model Y, with a hacked firmware to match) and project noveau is obviously impacted.
* Separated firmware that needed for basic and fully functional driver and given Nouveau only bits they wanted.
* Obfuscated and hidden firmware files within the driver binaries so they harder to extract.
* Changed loading process so GPU read it via DMA to make reverse engineering of firmware loading harder.
It's pretty clear that all of that was exclusively done to harm Nouveau.
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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 takin…
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If you download the current Windows ISO image and install that offline, you won't get a proper driver for your nVidia card either. Yet, this is accepted as normal. Some Linux distributions that do not hamper themselves artificially on philosophical grounds offer nvidia binary drivers in their package repositories like they do with every other driver they contain. Your focus on the kernel sources is too narrow. There…
Parent is referring to the fact the Linux drivers are meant to be baked into the kernel and Nvidia doesn't wish to play ball. You can't compare Linux and Windows when it comes to drivers, they have different methods of providing those drivers.
So to me it seems to work just fine.
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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.
>found their own countries and be of reasonable size for a nation. Honestly, you could fill up the number of people using nouveau with chromium in a stadium more likely. From the small pie of linux users, you drill down to nvidia, and then further down to nouveau. All laptop users, even with nvidia cards, will only use the intel gpu unless they explicitly enable the discrete mode and not install the nvidia drivers. D…
To save those users from themselves, Google now disabled GPU accelleration for all Ubuntu users.
Seems like a bit silly to me.