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Chromium blacklists Nouveau

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Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#371

Post by dleslie »

mav3rick wrote: post #165
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…

Feel free to use other browsers that do test this.

Other browser vendors don't have Google's resources.

And still, Mozilla manages to do a better job in this regard.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#372

Post by MrRadar »

craftyguy wrote: post #366
MrRadar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree with you however as I explained in my reply to hedora there are important reasons why AMD should have a card in this performance class.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#373

Post by MrRadar »

craftyguy wrote: post #368
MrRadar wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Objectively you are correct. However, as the rest of my comment indicates there are important marketing and brand-value perception reasons to have a true high-end card: how many professional gamers (streamers, e-sports, extreme overclockers, etc.) who do buy this class of GPU are there playing with AMD cards vs Nvidia cards? How many (tens/hundreds of) millions of views do they collectively get playing games with Nvidia hardware? Nvidia has likely gotten millions of dollars in effectively free marketing just for having these cards.

AMD's GPU market share has been shrinking with the general gaming audience despite the fact that their mid-range cards have been very price-competitive with Nvidia's offerings during the same time period they've lacked serious competition at the high-end. While focusing on the mid-range where the highest volume of GPUs are sold is the rational market strategy it may not be a winning market strategy in the real world.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#374

Post by peterwwillis »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #256
peterwwillis wrote: post #252

(off-topic rant) As a Linux user for over 15 years, this is one of the main reasons I am replacing Linux on my next machine, probably with Windows (sigh). Maybe it's just me getting old, but I'm done screwing around with computers to get them to do what they are supposed to do. It's frustrating and embarrassing. It's not just that some drivers or hardware have obvious problems. It's virtually impossible to get a syst…

> The only reason I'd recommend a Linux desktop is if they were looking for a complicated new hobby. Not sure if this was just a typo and you meant "laptop", but I imagine most of the problems you're describing could be avoided on a self-built desktop, because you can choose all the hardware for compatibility. I haven't used Linux seriously in years, but this is how I'm able to make Hackintosh work without constant f…

I meant desktop in the software sense. Mini-tower hardware is probably easier to support, but I want to use one laptop for everything.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#375

Post by staktrace »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #279
staktrace wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not by default. GPU acceleration is off by default in Firefox on Linux. Distros may change that in their bundles, but the official builds have it turned off.

Do you have a source for this? This page disagrees: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive... My unmodified Firefox stable channel on Linux has WebGL enabled OOTB and my distro does not have any specific flags specified for WebGL (or GL in general) in the package.

The page you linked to says:

> GL layers acceleration is not yet enabled by default (see bug 594876). You can enable it by setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true in about:config.

That means off by default. Also maybe relevant is that I'm on the Firefox Graphics team so I have some knowledge of this.

If you want to verify, download a stock Firefox build from Mozilla, run it on a new profile, and check what it says for Compositing in the Graphics section. OpenGL means acceleration, Basic means software.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#376

Post by altfredd »

atemerev wrote: post #321
xvilka wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

"Nouveau and amdgpu were always barely working" — nah, you are spreading misleading information and lumping together completely unrelated projects at different stages of development.

Noveau has been almost close to usable at some point... Until Nvidia started the whole signed firmware nonsence. Then it quickly became intolerable due to Nvidia, supplying no signed firmware or heavily crippled firmware. These days you are actually better off using software renderer/llvmpipe (which at least might benefit from a powerful processor). "amdgpu" is a name of the modern AMD kernel driver, that replaced "radeon" driver. Both drivers were developed with direct help from ATI/AMD. Unlike it's older predecessor, current amdgpu versions include the "display core" code, that was designed to be shared between Linux and Windows AMD drivers (not sure, if that part has worked out yet). All Linux drivers for currently produced AMD cards are open-source, both kernel and userspace parts. AMD also has a "value-adding" package, that is based on their own userspace driver (which is open-source) and simply adds few closed-source components to it.

"amdgpu" is not barely working — AFAIK, it is the only currently available AMD kernel driver, and it worked great for me, both 2D and 3D.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#377

Post by staktrace »

shmerl wrote: post #191
abrowne wrote: post #15

Doesn't hardware accelerated graphics on Firefox on Linux require modifying a preference? AFAIK you need to go to about:config and enable layers.acceleration.force-enabled. (This is speaking as someone who uses Firefox on Linux as my main browser.) The bug for enabling hardware rendering by default on some systems appears to still be open: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876

Yes, Firefox is stuck with blacklisting basically everything. I guess developers didn't revisit drivers situation in the recent times. Just set these in your $HOME/.profile export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1

Please don't encourage people to turn on WebRender without at least warning them that it is experimental, still under development, can cause your computer to blow up, etc. Also the environment variables you specified will force it on even on non-Nightly builds which is very undesirable since those builds are not getting fixes uplifted.

(I work on WebRender for Firefox)

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#378

Post by altfredd »

doublepg23 wrote: post #241
_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…

The real answer is that releasing source code means uncovering (some of) their cards. The company, that relies on selling identical hardware under vastly different prices, won't ever do that. Using game-specific speed-hacks to "fix" games, purposefully written to violate standards, is another issue. Especially, when those games were made with help of Nvidia engineers. Why give up such ability?

I also suspect, that they make use of multiple patented technologies, both in hardware and software. When Java has been re-licensed to GPL, one of the most prominent pain points, that caused endless whining on part of OpenJDK users, happened to be it's font renderer. And we all know, that font smoothing is tricky business, and all font-smoothing tech in existence is patended by MS/Apple/Adobe. When you start replacing closed-source code with free replacement, those patented pieces tend to quickly come up — especially when open-source projects go to great length to work around patent issues instead of shoving them under the carpet.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#379

Post by shmerl »

staktrace wrote: post #377
shmerl wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Firefox is stuck with blacklisting basically everything. I guess developers didn't revisit drivers situation in the recent times. Just set these in your $HOME/.profile export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 export MOZ_ACCELERATED=1

Please don't encourage people to turn on WebRender without at least warning them that it is experimental, still under development, can cause your computer to blow up, etc. Also the environment variables you specified will force it on even on non-Nightly builds which is very undesirable since those builds are not getting fixes uplifted. (I work on WebRender for Firefox)

I've been using WebRender on beta builds on Linux for several months already - it works quite well (AMD / radeonsi).

WebRender is more raw indeed, but regular layers acceleration should surely be re-evaluated instead sweeping blacklisting like it happens now.

Re: Chromium blacklists Nouveau

#380

Post by gnulinux »

zozbot123 wrote: post #327
jammygit wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any Vulkan library you can suggest? Last time I checked Vulkan, it required enormous amount of boilerplate just to connect GPU, compile, send data and run code. So, I ended up using OpenCL for years. Unless there are good high level libraries around I would still stick to OpenCL.
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