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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Do you think Windows or MacOS make compromise on the way they code their kernel to accomodate nVidia ?

No, it's just a matter of economics.

Yes, Windows has a stable driver API you can build upon.

Linux does not, because they want all drivers to be inlined (included in the kernel) and open source. nVidia does not want to release their trade secrets, so they don't want to open source their drivers.

(No idea about macOS)

Of course, AMD managed, so there’s no technical reason that nVidia cannot.

I didn't say there's a technical reason, I said they want to keep their source code secret, which to me is a reasonable argument.

Well then sway maintainer's reason to explicitly deny support for proprietate nvidia driver is a reasonable argument too.

Definitely, it's his software and he can do whatever he wants, and I'm not criticising him, I'm criticising Linux for not offering a stable driver API. As far as I know they don't even want to allow shims like the one Android Treble introduced. It is not a technical decision, it's a political one.

Refusing to open source their drivers is not a technical decision, it’s a political one.

There is a technical rationale that should be read to understand kernel dev's PoV : https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

Except that AMD doesn't have feature parity with Windows driver on open source version and has all the Nvidia driver headaches on closed source version.

I'm not sure what AMD really managed here.

Because it is NOT the same driver. AMD, just like nVidia, want to keep their own secret sauce secret, because that's where the money is.

Is so much of their profit bound up in their software?

I thought these were hardware companies.

It doesn’t have “all” the headaches on the closed source version, afaik - it still implements the standard APIs and thus works with systems that were designed to work with every other driver from AMD to Mali, unlike the nVidia proprietary driver.

AMD's open source driver is fully usable for normal usage (including gaming), and in general more performant than the closed source version.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx590-li...

Still behind the proprietary Windows driver or Nvidia's proprietary Linux driver.

Can you share some source of your statement?

They are not behind their windows driver on OpenGL. And neither for Vulkan, I think. AMDVLK scores a few wins here and there, but RADV is generally more stable, performant, and compatible. Plus being open-source, it is easily extended, like valve is doing with their AC0 experiment [1].

Last I heard, people were installing Linux to use the AMD OpenGL drivers to play emulators (it might have been Cemu, actually ran trough wine).

[1]: XDC2019 slide deck https://xdc2019.x.org/event/5/contributions/334/attachments/...

MacOS user: what's a driver ?

Seriously though, one of the pleasurable things about using macOS is that you don't have to worry about hardware compatibility. Because there is none, outside the small list of parts officially supported by Apple itself. There are some NVidia cards on that list, yes.

Linux has a fairly stable driver API, it just doesn't have an ABI.

The GPU API doesn't seem particularly stable to me.

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