Nvidia drivers on Linux are trash | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia drivers on Linux are trash

nvidialinuxdriversaretrash.github.io

95 pointsddtaylor43 comments

Honestly, I've had fewer problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers than with nouveau, even on fairly old hardware.

Both of my wife's desktops (home and office) started locking up randomly with a kernel oops due to the nouveau driver after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. I realized that she had this bug, but in Ubuntu 18.04: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1559178. No problems since switching to the proprietary drivers.

I use FreeBSD, and also run the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

Same here. I have also had fewer problems than with both the old proprietary or open source AMD drivers (never tested the new AMDGPU one). This went to far that I had to sell an AMD card to buy an Nvidia one, because features would not work the way there were supposed to. Eventually, I decided to stop buying AMD cards altogether. In contrast to that, the proprietary Nvidia drivers have been a godsend: Features just work, including complex multihead configurations. So, they may not be perfect, but, for the most part, they actually work.

I'll match you anecdote for anecdote -- one of the machines at work only works with Nouveau and locks up hard if you try the proprietary driver. Another works only with the proprietary driver and locks up hard if you try nouveau. A third one is flaky either way, unless you're running KDE. In which case it locks up hard. We've had no trouble at all with Intel or AMD.

Even under Windows, we've had trouble with NVidia drivers randomly crashing and taking the system down with them.

The problems I always had with the Intel drivers in the past is that you often needed to be running a bleeding edge kernel to get support for them. This is less of a problem on Ubuntu now with the hw enablement kernels.

I honestly stopped using AMD for graphics a decade ago when I had a card that was too old for the proprietary flglrx driver, but not old enough for the (at the time) feeble, community supported open source drivers. Maybe I should take another look at them.

Amusingly, I'm typing this from an AMD Threadripper2 running with Nvidia graphics.

2 years ago I’ve started using Arch Linux for my laptop because of slow nvidia graphics driver updates from Ubuntu... Don’t know how things are nowadays

Arch, being a rolling-release distribution, can always get you the latest driver updates with the package manager (but with the cost of being a little bit more work to maintain)

I also use Arch, so I can't speak to the Ubuntu situation. I'd certainly hate to have to stay abreast of drivers on any other distribution. For all that Ubuntu promises that it Just Works, it seems like way too much trouble compared to Arch.

Regardless of how well they work, the #1 problem is that they are a proprietary blob, which kills any chance of being able to trust it.

Just purchased a ThinkPad E585 with Ryzen 2700U because the nVidia card in my ancient laptop is no longer supported.

Worked fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and then one day I do an "apt-get update" and hit this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-dr...

Yes, I should not expect indefinite support for old hardware, but this would not have been a problem if the drivers were open source (hence my move to AMD).

I sometimes think Nvidia goes out of its way to screw with Linux users. Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother. They just have crap support for a market that realistically they don't even need to support.

Except for their GPU drivers for machine learning: that's a fairly hot market right now.

I mean, technically, they are a manufacturer of Linux boxes (the DGX Station has Ubuntu preinstalled), so intuitively one might expect they would offer good Linux support.

> Then I remember that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market so why bother.

CUDA

I'm curious to know what the bifurcation is between the pieces of the driver used for Cuda, and the pieces used for gaming. I think most people running Cuda are running it on Linux, and I've never had a problem with it. So I'm wondering if all these issues are really targeted at gamers only?

Yes, but the types of bugs/issues that plague actual graphics don't necessarily apply to CUDA.

Given all the frequent complaints, would Linux users prefer if nvidia just pulled the plug and stopped offering their driver altogether?

Maybe some other long-term Linux users will remember how the situation was with accelerated graphics on Linux before the binary nvidia driver existed... (and personally, it never gave me trouble, but maybe that's just me.)

Here's a different idea: if Linux had stable ABIs for drivers, across kernel versions and distributions, creating a good driver would certainly be easier for third parties.

Intel is able to make it work really well. AMD went through a bad time but is now in the Kernel and getting much better. Nvidia seems to be the odd-man-out here.

I will go against the grain and say that I never had any issues with nVidia drivers ever since I got my first GeForce card more than 10 years ago.

For the first years I manually installed it on Fedora Core, until finally the ak-version were stable enough. Once I switched to Ubuntu, the proprietary drivers always worked without a flaw.

I don't think they read HN but a shout-out to Zander and AaronP, I've spent many hours OpenGL programming and playing games on Linux throughout the years thanks to their work.

I was hoping this would have a big picture of Linus giving Nvidia the finger.

An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.

> An issue I had that isn't on the list is installing Nvidia drivers on an encrypted install of Ubuntu 16.04. After installing the drivers it would no longer boot, so I could only encrypt my home folder.

This makes no sense, do you understand the actual cause enough to explain it?

I had the same problem, it has something to do with Plymouth, if you use the classic console boot it works

Oh, so you can still boot, they just don't support (or have broken support for) DRM_IOCTL_MODE_CREATE_DUMB.

But what does that have to do with encrypted root? Just plymouth not being available for the LUKS passphrase entry?

I'd expect you to be able to get around that fairly trivially by disabling plymouth, LUKS works without it in any initrd I've encountered.

That effectively is breaking the boot process. Of course, you may be able to tinker with it in order to make things work again, but you have to do that.

It's not a breakage specific to whole-fs encryption, which is what didn't make sense.

I have no idea, its been a year or two since I fiddled with it. I think it just never made it to the login screen? I didn't need to have encrypted root so I didn't look into it too much.

I’m not justifying their lack of efforts for Linux users but I can understand why they limit their resources towards creating better drivers. According to Wikipedia(1), the amount of Linux usage worldwide is barely even a blip compared to windows + macOS. From a business standpoint, it’s hard to see the benefits of correcting these issues.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

Ofc, thats a self-fulfilling prophecy: nvidia should never see high usage in linux if they’re not spending money there, except by accident (ie a cheap, good card also happens to be cracked open enough for good open source drivers to be written, or something like bitcoin crops up again, and linux/nvidia is necessary enough that people use it despite the shoddy drivers).

But it always has to be because the lack of interest by nvidia was overcome

What I don't understand is how come driver for their cards works just fine on Windows AND MacOS then? Maybe it isn't Nvidia at fault alone here?

TBH, I only had problems installing their drivers on Linux, but once they were up and running all was/is good... Except Wayland. But, wayland's gonna way no matter what, so no Wayland for me.

Doesn't apple handle the creation of most of the MacOS drivers itself? I'd assume its the case for graphics cards as well.

Windows ofc is windows, it justifies itself

Nvidia provides their own drivers on their site for MacOS - you need those for newer cards.

Although it doesn’t matter to gamers buying GPUs solely for gaming, it really matters for a lot of the researchers (not just computer science, but any major that uses GPU computing), and also the professionals (using CAD and other software). They are also buying those high-end GPUs alongside the gamers, and are constantly irritated by shaky Linux nvidia drivers. If AMD gets enough support for high-performance computing (ex. deep learning), then researchers might be more inclined to switch to AMD...

Curious to know how does that compare to AMD drivers?

AMD actively contributes driver code to the mainline kernel. So with recent Linux kernels, AMD graphics cards and APUs based on the GCN architecture (launched about 2011/2012 if I recall correctly) work out of the box with full 3D acceleration, just like integrated Intel graphics.

There was a time a few years ago when the mainline kernel driver was significantly worse performance-wise (mainly due to missing power management), but this should no longer be the case.

There still exists a proprietary AMD driver, but this driver is going to be phased out and only required for "Pro" features.

See this AMD slide deck for more information: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/amd_graphics/...

And the unlucky owners of pre GCN cards, like the Brazos APUs just get a driver that kind of works, with less features than the fxglr one.

Would AMD's drivers being bad justify Nvidia making bad drivers too? How is Intel able to make great drivers and fund the development of Mesa?

Nouveau, on the other hand, works just fine! Don't expect to run any games on it, but if you're like me and you're stuck with an Nvidia card on the desktop, nouveau will suffice. Even modern stuff like wayland works well with this driver.

The Nvidia drivers are infamous, to be sure, and Linus and others have spent a good bit of time ranting about how terrible Nvidia is.

But I don't think the existence of a bunch of support requests are much evidence of anything either way. It's pretty easy to find similar problems with AMD drivers, for example.

https://askubuntu.com/search?tab=newest&q=amd%20gpu

I am pretty active on the Ask Ubuntu stack exchange and to be frank I see many more Nvidia related posts. Also consider that sometimes the request isn't even about Nvidia at all, but then we determine that the Nvidia drivers are causing the problem. A good example would be strange compositing glitches and bugs with KDE or other compositors.

The same crappy driver applies to AMD on Linux too. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107261 is open for nearly three months and nothing has been done.

From someone quite removed from low level development:

How much effort is it to develop these drivers? I.e what’s the breakdown for resources allocated toward hardware vs people allocated for driver dev.

For some time their Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) was touted as the solution:

https://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_uda.html

Its been around since at 1999.

Are AMD's any better?

I think the golden standard here are Intel's graphics drivers.

The new amdgpu driver (which has been in mainline Linux for a few years now) works really well for me, on X11 and on Wayland, for all applications that I tried with it (for games, that includes Cities Skylines, Civ 5, various other games based on Source and Unity). AFAIK it works with all GCN models, so basically all graphics cards manufactured by AMD after ca. 2012/2013.

Try AMD just for the lulz

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