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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#361

Post by kanox »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #278

The author, Ilia, noticed that this is on HN and responded in the mailing list thread. I don't know if I agree with the take, but I'll repost because I found it interesting. --- I've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation [...] and it does seem like people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew that, including the u…

> every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator

Yes, they do and they have very good reasons for it. Working with distros to ensure they ship the right libraries takes an infinite amount of effort so companies that what to ship a product to their users will work around it.

This also happens in the server space with the massive popularity of containers and language-specific package managers.

The traditional Linux Distro model is extremely flawed.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#362

Post by AnssiH »

vetinari wrote: post #272
AnssiH wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't the reclocking support for GM20x and newer the biggest pain point for last several years?

AFAIK yes, and I'm not aware of any positive developments on that front lately, though I haven't been following that closely.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#363

Post by radarsat1 »

apatters wrote: post #261
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…

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,…

One other factor: On 18.04, I have found it nearly impossible to use the NVidia driver. After installing, whatever I do, nouveau takes over. This was not the case on previous Ubuntu versions. Even putting nouveau on the blacklist does not solve the problem -- somehow even if I put it on modprobe's blacklist, also in the kernel arguments, it somehow manages to start up. No idea how or why. I solved it before, eventually, I can't quite remember, but since re-installing my operating system I haven't figured it out again. I think I eventually had to actually move/delete the nouveau ko files, which is a very destructive way to deal with a problem and interferes with apt, and even then they got re-built and re-installed by dkms and took over the display again! I did find a permanent solution which escapes me at the moment.

Anyways, it would be good if NVidia and Ubuntu got together and at least made it easier to make use of the official driver.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#364

Post by atemerev »

imtringued wrote: post #349
atemerev wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

amdgpu is not a stopgap driver. It's mature and reliable enough driver to play videogames including a lot of windows games via proton. I don't see a single reason to use a proprietary OS or driver anymore.

CUDA/OpenCL?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#365

Post by dekhn »

frabbit wrote: post #359
antpls wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

let's step back from the brink. Plenty of good science is done on proprietary foundations. It would be unrealistic to do otherwise. Reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean every component of the system is completely open and inspectable.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#366

Post by craftyguy »

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…

> will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070

Aren't those still adequate to run like, 99.9% of all games on the market? I would (and do) gladly pay for hardware that isn't the absolute fastest if the manufacturer employs a Linux driver team to make that hardware work on Linux.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#367

Post by dleslie »

emmelaich wrote: post #203
dleslie wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately we don't have the resources to test every variation of every GPU/driver combination on linux, let alone investigate & fix bugs in drivers. This is a lie. Google could easily undertake such an act, but is choosing not to. It's not that they _lack the resources to do so_, but that the value proposition of doing so did not weigh favourably towards undertaking the action. Google isn't incapable of this ta…

It's not just gpu/driver, it's library versions, compile flags, compiler versions plus all the flags (static and dynamic). Let's say 50 options. If it costs $1 to test each combo it would cost 2^50, around $10^15 dollars. Google only made $10^9 dollars profit last year. Now of course I'm being facetious but do not underestimate the cost of testing.

That cost assessment is bizarre. Consider how many variants are there in the entire Google software library; somehow I doubt they're spending trillions on testing.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#368

Post by craftyguy »

MrRadar wrote: post #238
hedora wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models

Assuming you can't tell the difference between, say, 100fps and 150fps, isn't the 'performance bar' a bit arbitrary after a certain point if the hardware runs the vast majority of the software thrown at it?

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#369

Post by craftyguy »

shmerl wrote: post #185

I'd say, if you care about using open source driver, you'd avoid Nvidia to begin with, and use AMD or Intel instead. Here is a very good post from one of the key Nouveau developers, about why you should do exactly that: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

And avoid chromium, because there are a number of dependencies under 'third-party' with no/unclear licensing (and thus are assumed to be non-free).

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#370

Post by craftyguy »

pritambaral wrote: post #297
rzzzt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD drivers have an OS-independent hardware abstraction library at the core and they "only" have to adapt it to different systems: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/pal

So does nVidia.

Except the AMD driver is 1) open source and 2) works.
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