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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#351

Post by MrStonedOne »

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…

The main issue I have with the gpu blacklist is that chrome provides the user with no information or notice when it triggers.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#352

Post by quietbritishjim »

throwaway2021 wrote: post #342
zanny wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's bad about Nestle? I know their products are very expensive, but aside from that? Care to elaborate?

This is a reference to the baby milk scandal [1]. Nestlé would market their powdered baby milk in developing countries as being better than breast milk, even though it's not. Worse than that, they would give away samples to new mothers for free or a substantially reduced price, who would then lose the ability to lactate because they're because they're not actively doing it. After that they would be forced to buy the powder, and not all of them could afford it.

This was at its worse in the late 1970s, but it seems the practice hasn't entirely stopped even today

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#353

Post by purerandomness »

throwaway2021 wrote: post #342
zanny wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's bad about Nestle? I know their products are very expensive, but aside from that? Care to elaborate?

Among the most recent ones, lobbying for water privatization: https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=nestle+water+pr...

And the usual reliance on Palm Tree Oil, as another example

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#354

Post by yogthos »

angry_octet wrote: post #283
yogthos wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh no, means that you can make it work and some people are willing to spend the time to do it right. You'd think that if Mozilla can afford to do this so could Google. The only way the problems in the drivers can get fixed is through usage, if Chrome flat out refuses to work with the driver then the issues can't be fixed. This also illustrates why it's important to have alternatives to Chrome for anybody who cares ab…

I assess with high confidence that that was a satirical comment. It could be working on FF only through a quirk in their rendering, rather than a testing. Chrome certainly has a test suite -- did anyone run it with nouveau and turn bugs into PRs? And arguably, that job belongs to the desktop owners, as well as the nouveau and chromium teams. Browsers are insanely complicated, and who is paying for this work? If I cou…

Maybe it's working through a quirk, or maybe Firefox team writes better code that handles a wider range of drivers. I choose to use Firefox because the team behind it cares about my needs. If Google can't afford to make a browser that works with open source drivers, I will simply choose not to use it and encourage others to use Firefox instead. This is precisely why having alternatives to Chrome is important.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#355

Post by wbond »

apayan wrote: post #154
wbond wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did try both the kernel open source drivers and AMD’s pro edition.

Most likely you aren’t using Display Port 1.2 MST, which is what the Dell UP3214Q requires for 60hz 4K.

My testing was with vanilla Ubuntu 18.04.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#356

Post by josefx »

koolba wrote: post #105
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.

What’s the rationale for NVIDIA for this? As the whole point is to expose hardware features through an API, what do they gain by keeping it closed? Are there features implemented purely in software?

The code might expose the implementation for a lot of NVIDIA specific features and libraries. Having that open and possibly ported to other hardware would not be in NVIDIAs interest.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#357

Post by xzvnjp »

haneefmubarak wrote: post #310
mempko wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, installing recommended drivers on Ubuntu installs the Intel or AMD microcode, which is definitely proprietary, so I don't think that's a particularly reasonable argument. The NVIDIA driver is the driver that yields the best performance and experience; AFAICT the only reason it's not shipped by default is because the kernel is then considered "impure" or something (because source isn't available to debug issues…

> the kernel is then considered "impure" or something

The term is "tainted".

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#358

Post by frabbit »

Macha wrote: post #68
StreamBright wrote: post #50

#year-of-the-linux-desktop On a more serious note what is the motivation for Nouveau? The drivers provided by Nvidia are not good enough or we just need an opensource alternative?

1. Lacking support for old GPUs in a maintained driver. nvidia drivers approach for old gpu is "use an old driver" for cards as recent as the 6xx. 2. People like to run fully open source systems 3. Adding support for things like kms and wayland are really up to the whims of nVidia as to when it happens with the closed driver, while an open driver is more likely to do so (or at least can be forked to do so). In the pa…

Your point #2 is especially important: with all the commotion surrounding the various "management engines" (in effect a completely independent system with privileged access to the carefully secured main system) it is surely obvious that a powerful GPU running unverified code is a foolish thing.

Point #3 is also really good. Who wants to wait around at the mercy of a corporation which has an active interest in NOT being transparent about "its" IP (as speculated elsewhere most of the GPUs probably infringe on some or other patent)?

Anyone buying an nvidia card for Linux should know exactly what they are doing: funding an anti-Free Software company, deeply entrenched in the ethos of secrecy, patents and bullshit; saddling themselves with a white elephant which will suck hours of their precious time.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#359

Post by frabbit »

antpls wrote: post #346
apatters wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a reasonable position in my opinion, but there are two problems (neither of them is Google or Chromium's fault): 1) Nouveau is buggy and problematic (related more to performance and a lack of support for many features) 2) The Nvidia drivers are buggy and problematic (related more to setup and compatibility with the rest of the system) Both of these problems can be traced back to the same root cause,…

> 2) The Nvidia drivers are buggy and problematic (related more to setup and compatibility with the rest of the system) Aren't scientific farm servers running on Linux kernel with Nvidia cards ? It would not be used if it was that buggy, so I think that claim needs precision

Is that science? A bunch of computing units running secret code?!

Reproducibility in computational science is recognized as a huge problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383002/

A lab or institution claiming a publishable result based on discounted hardware from the manufacturer running code that does who knows what for their TensorFlow/whatever calculations is engaged in something other than science. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that they're just engaged in advertising demonstrations, but it's coming close.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#360

Post by mcguire »

cheald wrote: post #12
bubblethink wrote: post #10

This sucks. Chromium doesn't do accelerated video decode for intel on linux either. And now this. What's the AMD scene like ?

The amdgpu drivers in Linux are fantastic these days. Works out of the box with most hardware. No proprietary binaries needed, other than the firmware blobs. AMD is doing a really solid job of supporting their Linux user base.

Which laptops have AMD chips? I've looked casually, but only seen Nvidia.
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