Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

> nvidia for not providing OSS drivers

It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau.

Phoronix link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...

Ouch, that's mean. IMHO the only way to react to that is to close down shop. Ideally including Linux throwing out support for Nvidia cards.

I have a strong opinion on this as I was involved a few years ago in the Kindle homebrew community. After a while I decided that my time could be used better than on a product by a company that tries to prevent us from making his product better and more interesting to its users.

There is so much energy and time wasted when you have to fight against the manufacturing company and in the case of a graphics card, the result is that it just works as well as the other graphics card option that is fully supported OOTB. And then that's just for a piece of hardware that you can replace on average for a few hundred bucks.

Is that really worth the hassle?

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 everyone I know not to buy Nvidia, I have built gaming computers both professionally and for family that I've actively advised against buying Nvidia parts for because of their business practices, and when I buy notebooks its a real PITA to get one without some Nvidia GPU in it but I do that too.

But Linux cannot "throw out" support for Nvidia. Nvidias driver is wholly independent of Linux, its why its such a PITA to work with. Its a DKMS blob driver and way too much other useful stuff depends on that interface to break it just to stop Nvidia. Fortunately nobody is going out of their way to support Nvidia either, such as their stupid attempt to fragment Wayland development with eglstreams nonsense.

The most valuable thing any of us can do is constantly decry Nvidia for being the reprehensible company they are and use what influence we have over those we know to distance them from buying their products the same way you should distance friends and family from buying Nestle or Exxon products or should avoid shopping at Walmart.

Would you mind giving an overview of their reprehensible business practices for those of us who just buy GPUs without following the companies?

I'm nowhere as fanatical about it since when it's come to corporations there is no black and white, but there at least few cases I can recall:

* Even decade ago they did a lot of shady stuff when they initially separated GeForce and Quadro series. There was time when you can make little hardware mod on Geforce product that make driver think you have Quadro and magically a FP64 become twice faster and CAD application performance was doubled and tripled.

* Their OpenGL implementation was ever non-standard and allowed both code and shaders to work in situation where it's clearly should not. As result games and apps that was debugged on Nvidia hardware would never work on more conformant Intel / AMD drivers.

* In terms of Nouveau back in 2014 Nvidia started to require signed firmware files [0]. They promised shortly after to provide Nouveau with the files with clear licensing, but it took years. When files were finally released everything related to power management was missing and still not released until this day. So Nouveau can't implement recloking. On top of that they intentionally obfuscate the way firmware files stored within driver binary and also make GPU load firmware via DMA to make extraction much harder.

* Sabotaging of OpenCL in general by not implementing spec for years and keeping it generally much slower that it's supposed to be.

* Several years ago Nvidia twice added checks to their Windows drivers to stop consumer GPU drivers to work when passed into virtual machines. Both bypassed by hiding KVM identifier and changing HyperV hv_vendor_id, but it's was annoying [1].

* Nvidia forbidden to use consumer hardware drivers in datacenters [2]

* Nvidia tried to push some crazy anti competitive program to make exclusive deals with GPU vendors so they can't sell AMD GPUs in any kind of "gaming" product lines [3]

Again it's not like AMD is perfect, but that's a lot of shady stuff and I likely not even listed half of it.

[0] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/27/1254219/nvidia-...

[1] http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002068

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675557

> There was time when you can make little hardware mod on Geforce product that make driver think you have Quadro and magically a FP64 become twice faster and CAD application performance was doubled and tripled.

Do you think that overclocking a CPU clock is "magic", too? You were just running the hardware out of spec! Yes, FP64 and CAD were a lot faster, whatever; are you going to trust these faster-reached results to be always correct? Or that the card isn't going to break down in the midst of some important workload? The whole point of labeling something "Quadro" is to say "these cards are good for that sort of critical stuff - they've been extensively tested for reliability".

If you do any machine learning you'll likely still need Nvidia for CUDA, it was the deal breaker for going AMD in my case.

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

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

If everyone from FOSS world will show them the middle finger like Linus did, maybe, just maybe they will become friendlier a bit. But our only true hope if this company will go bankrupt and out of the market.

Well, not quite. The charitable way to put it is that they are requiring signed firmware in hardware, in order to help stem fraud by 3rd party resellers (where some card model X is sold to naïve buyers as a more desirable model Y, with a hacked firmware to match) and project noveau is obviously impacted.

Problem is that Nvidia did much more than just signing firmware:

* Separated firmware that needed for basic and fully functional driver and given Nouveau only bits they wanted.

* Obfuscated and hidden firmware files within the driver binaries so they harder to extract.

* Changed loading process so GPU read it via DMA to make reverse engineering of firmware loading harder.

It's pretty clear that all of that was exclusively done to harm Nouveau.

> It's worse than this. Nvidia does not merely not provide open source drivers, they actively preclude work on Nouveau.

If the noveau developers had true hacker spirit, they would move nouveau development into the darknet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com