341–350 of 415 posts
I'm confused! Why would Nvidia want to keep any of this closed source. Surely they make money when people buy graphics cards, and having open source out-of-the-box graphics support in Linux would mean they would sell more graphics cards?
I'm confused! Why would Nvidia want to keep any of this closed source. Surely they make money when people buy graphics cards, and having open source out-of-the-box graphics support in Linux would mean they would sell more graphics cards?
Drivers are a large part of the development costs of a GPU, just like how an operating system is a large part of the development cost of a general computer. If nVidia open sourced all their drivers tomorrow the risk of some cheap Chinese shop making clones of their hardware and re-targeting the nVidia drivers to get lots of the features would be very high. It'd significantly reduce the value of what they'd built (to…
The amount of time, I was 'sucked' with a black-screen after a reboot and the amount of time I wasted with Nvidia drivers ! I swear I would never buy NVIDIA again !
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And very few AMD GPUs even support it... (and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)
Plus the quality of the overall experience. And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization. The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain. Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use. The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised t…
Nope, it’s much better on the nvidia side actually. The latest AMD GPU with a publicly accessible OSS GIM driver is the AMD S7150, which was released in 2016. (https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/MxGPU-Virtualiza...)
And it’s locked out from most AMD SKUs today, so even if you got a modern GIM driver, you’ll need very special SKUs to enable it and use virtual GPUs.
> The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side
Not anymore. GVT-g is gone on Ice Lake (Intel 10th generation mobile, 11th gen desktop) so that you can no longer do hardware vGPU on newer Intel parts at all.
Sad thing is that what you said used to be true.
Meanwhile NVIDIA GRID needs licensing fees but actually works, with high end GPU options being available. And has all the fancy stuff like vGPU live migration for seamless maintenance too. It doesn’t even compare.
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What would the practical effect be for me as a user, say I render in Blender, or I play a few intensive 3d games?
Currently, you rely on Nvidia to keep the drivers up to date and working with the kernel you use in your OS. If the drivers aren't upstream, a future kernel can break them. So if you update your OS, it might no longer support your GPU without installing an alternative. Nvidia are responsible for getting this fixed in a timely manner. If the drivers are upstream, then people aren't allowed to break them when they make…
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That's a bit of a tired and somewhat misleading argument. Take a look into the kernel-firmware repo, and you will see a tremendous amount of binary firmware blobs. For example the Intel micro-code blobs are protected by ~7 layers deep of encryption, wifi drivers may have government regulatory issues with sharing firmwares in anything but binary form. So let's please drop the evil binary blob nonesense... The kernel d…
This small tirade of yours is arguing against a strawman. GP is likely referring to the userspace component of nvidia's driver, not the actual blob that gets loaded onto the gpu. If it is indeed true that you need to run proprietary userland code, then this open-source release is nothing but a way to circumvent the GPL issues that lead to nvidia's driver partially breaking in Linux 5.??. While not ideal, I like many…
With a security-strengthened operating system, or with a VM/container/sandbox, it is possible to ensure that any opaque user-space program is no security risk.
I prefer very much open-source user-space programs for 2 reasons:
1. I am only seldom content with a program conceived by someone else, because usually I want to do something else than they had in mind and their program is suboptimal for my use case. When the program is open-source, that does not matter. I can modify it and combine it with other programs, to do whatever I like.
2. Whenever there are problems due to bugs, incomplete documentation or misconfigurations, if the program is open source any problem can be solved sooner or later, usually sooner. With proprietary programs, typically one gets only some incomprehensible error messages and it may happen that entire departments of IT professionals try for weeks to solve the problem, without any progress. (I had such a case last year; after upgrading an old company laptop with a new one, MS Teams stopped working; 4 or 5 IT support people distributed over 3 continents attempted to discover the cause over 2 weeks, but they all failed).
These 2 reasons make the open source programs much more desirable, but if you have to also use some opaque user-space programs for specific tasks, e.g. a Synopsys Verilog/VHDL synthesis program for designing with a FPGA, that is no big deal.
On the other hand, using an opaque kernel module which may contain either an intentional back-door or just an unintentional bug which may cause your computer to freeze exactly before saving some large piece of work, or which may corrupt you file buffers before being saved, this is much worse than the use of any opaque user-mode program.
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Sadly, it's also not the actual GPU driver, just the kernel part; you still need their massive closed blob in userspace. Almost had me excited there for a moment.
I came here to say that. This isn't an NVIDIA commitment to open source; it is a slap in the face. Rather than open sourcing the drivers, they are patching the kernel to fit the needs of their proprietary driver. Note that I'm not against proprietary software, however, title of this post was super misleading and NVIDIA needs to grow up and work on an open-source driver. The world will NOT change for them.
You're right that this isn't about nVidia suddenly deciding to open source anything, but it's still good for compatibility reasons.
1) This is unambiguously Good News 2) This is not upstreamable in its current form (nvidia admit this in their press release) 3) In an ideal world, nouveau (the open source driver for nvidia hardware) would be able to target this kernel code. Right now though there's no commitment for any sort of stable userland ABI, and that makes that difficult (moving to a new driver version may break interfaces that nouveau uses)…
Sadly, it's also not the actual GPU driver, just the kernel part; you still need their massive closed blob in userspace. Almost had me excited there for a moment.
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Has any rationale been provided around the blob being closed? Is it licensed, or simply too too complicated to pick apart? Graphics is a complicated field, but the techniques could still be patented - surely their market status isn’t dependent on trade secrets?
Yes. Drivers represent enormous amounts of work and large parts of the overall development/IP effort in a GPU. Asking why nVidia don't open source it is like asking why they don't just open source the entire GPU. Answer: because then they'd have a much smaller and less valuable business, if they even had a business at all.
This does not follow. While GPU drivers are a huge development effort, they are also very specific to the hardware. This is even more true with modern APIs that are closer to how the hardware works.
AMD and Intel both have open source GPU drivers and they are still in business. Are you claiming that their business would be much bigger if not for those open source drivers?