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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#321

Post by atemerev »

xvilka wrote: post #313
atemerev wrote: post #259

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.

No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.

AMD has their own set of quirks, they are not open sourcing their main driver either. Nouveau was always a stopgap measure, to boot the system and make it somewhat usable until you install the official binary driver; so is amdgpu. Even if you are open source enthusiast who wants nothing but FOSS on your system (and this is a very minor use case), these drivers do no better than your integrated Intel graphics, which is integrated into CPU directly since time immemorial.

Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working, just enough to get something on the screen — no state of the art 3D acceleration, no CUDA/OpenCL. But there is a big difference between “barely working” and “black screen on boot, always”.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#322

Post by zozbot123 »

SXX wrote: post #316
tntn wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind giving an overview of their reprehensible business practices for those of us who just buy GPUs without following the companies?

I'm nowhere as fanatical about it since when it's come to corporations there is no black and white, but there at least few cases I can recall: * 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…

> 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.

Do you think that overclocking a CPU clock is "magic", too? You were just running the hardware out of spec! Yes, FP64 and CAD were a lot faster, whatever; are you going to trust these faster-reached results to be always correct? Or that the card isn't going to break down in the midst of some important workload? The whole point of labeling something "Quadro" is to say "these cards are good for that sort of critical stuff - they've been extensively tested for reliability".

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#324

Post by cwyers »

ddevault wrote: post #253
cwyers wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyon…

>That is a "should" based on your feelings about Nvidia, not about what is the correct decision for users. No, it's not. If you encounter a bug in a piece of software, you should report it to the maintainers of that software. That's true even for, say, bugs found in the Nvidia proprietary driver. Expecting Chromium to fix it is expecting them to do more work, which is the exact thing others have railed on me for "exp…

> If you encounter a bug in a piece of software, you should report it to the maintainers of that software.

I mean, sure. But that's not really the whole of it here. Chromium has encountered multiple bugs in a piece of software, and they decided they don't want to expend the resources to reproduce those bugs and deal with them. In the meantime, those bugs mean that the driver is not properly implementing the functionality for all users, and so Chromium has decided to simply not use that part of the driver. They aren't doing anything to the OS, they aren't bypassing the OS, they're just rendering on the CPU because the driver doesn't properly implement the hardware acceleration features. There is no obligation whatsoever to use software that you know doesn't work just because the OS ships it.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#325

Post by chrismeller »

Aeolun wrote: post #318
geofft wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I understood they could get pages on the screen even with the nouveau driver.

That's the part that I don't understand. The bug report says on Linux the same rendering is used for the UI as well as the page content... but only the UI was ever having a problem?

Something doesn't add up to me there, and no one that I saw ever addressed that in more detail.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#326

Post by [deleted] »

gdwatson wrote: post #231
izacus wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#327

Post by zozbot123 »

jammygit wrote: post #291
gnulinux wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How big is the gap between opencl and cuda right now?

These days Vulkan can be used for compute as well, and it gives the user a far more refined interface than OpenCL. There's very little reason to limit oneself to the latter.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#328

Post by zozbot123 »

bubblethink wrote: post #83
willtim wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.

That is extremely difficult. Lenovo doesn't make any high end laptops without nvidia. You'll be restricted to the X series and the T series. Dell is also quite similar, although at one point they had intel only options for their precision lineup. Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end (i.e., real i7 with 4-6 cores, xeon etc.).

> Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end

Yup. By adding a Nvidia card (or, far less commonly, an ATI/AMD one) they can sell that laptop as a specialty "Gaming" machine - and with margins on commodity hardware being so razor-thin these days, that's exactly what shrewd marketers need!

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#330

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #280
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…

> Because everybody is a developer with copious free time to learn how to fix the problem in their favorite product It takes copious free time to learn how to run chromium with an --ignore-gpu-blacklist argument? What kind of strawman are you trying here? Look. The open source NVIDIA driver is terrible, and Google doesn't want it messing up the experience of the people using its product. Who are you to demand that Go…

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