Hacker News Reader

Comment by gh123man | Hacker News Reader

I am also not an expert in this space - but if I understand correctly the reason the linux Nvidia driver sucks so much is that it is not GPL'd (or open source at all).

There is little incentive for Nvidia to maintain a linux specific driver, but because it is closed source the community cannot improve/fix it.

> Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL?

I think the answer to this is: drivers are expect to use the GPL if they want to be mainlined and maintained - as Linus said: other than that you are "on your own".

View on HN

> drivers are expect to use the GPL if they want to be mainlined and maintained

I think parent comment wasn't asking for third party, non-GPL drivers to be mainlined, but for a stable interface for out-of-tree drivers.

There is just no incentive for this that I can see. Linux is an open source effort. Linus had said that he considers open source "the only right way to do software". Out of tree drivers are tolerated, but the preferred outcome is for drivers to be open sourced and merged to the main Linux tree.

The idea that Linux needs better support for out of tree drivers is like someone going to church and saying to the priest "I don't care about this Jesus stuff but can I have some free wine and cookies please".

Full disclosure my day job is to write out of tree drivers for Linux :)

I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows?

How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?

Nvidia has a proprietary Linux driver that works just fine for GPGPU purposes. But because it's not GPLed, it will never be mainlined into the kernel, so you have to install it separately. This is in contrast to AMD GPUs, for which the driver lives in the Linux kernel itself.

Critically, Nvidia has a GPL'd shim. In the kernel code, which lets them keep a stable ABI. The kind of shim Linus isn't interested in for ZFS.

CUDA works fine, and I have found (completely non-rigorously) that a lot of the time where the workload is somewhat mixed between GPU and CPU you'll get better performance on Linux.

The _desktop_ situation is worse, though perfectly functional. But I boot into Windows when I want battery life and quiet fans on my laptop.

You make it sound like the idea is "if you GPL your driver, we'll maintain it for you", which is kinda bullshit. For one, kernel devs only really maintain what they want to maintain. They'll do enough work to make it compile but they aren't going to go out of their way to test it. Regressions do happen. More importantly though, they very purposefully do no maintain any stability in the driver ABI. The policy is actively hostile to the concept of proprietary drivers.

Which is really kinda of hilarious considering that so much modern hardware requires proprietary firmware blobs to run.

My experience is that linux nvidia drivers are better than the competitors open source drivers.

Nvidia proprietary drivers work OK for me, mostly (I needed to spoof the video card ID so KVM could lie to the Windows drivers in my home VFIO setup, but it wasn't hard.)

But it means I can't use Wayland. Wayland isn't critical for me, but since NVidia is refusing to implement GBM and using EGLStream instead, there's nothing I can do about it. It simply isn't worth NVidia's time to make Wayland work, so I'm stuck using X. If the driver were open-source someone would have submitted a GBM patch and i wouldn't be stuck in this predicament.

I can't wait for NVidia to have real competition in the ML space so I can ditch them.

No you can use Wayland as long as your window manager/environment supports GBM. Gnome and KDE both do (Which for most Linux users is all that is needed).

Now you can't use something like Sway but their lead developer is too evangelical for my taste so even if I had an AMD/Intel card I would never use it.

> No you can use Wayland as long as your window manager/environment supports GBM.

You can do that on Intel and AMD drivers and other open source graphics drivers, which due to being open source allow 3rd parties like redhat to patch in GBM support in drivers and mesa when required.

Nvidia driver does not support GBM code paths. Therefore wayland does not work on nvidia. And because nvidia driver is not open source, someone else cannot patch GBM in.

I'm fairly sure parent meant 'EGLStream', not GBM. KDE and GNOME's Wayland compositors both support EGLStream.

Technically, you can use Wayland.

What you cannot use is applications that use OpenGL or Vulkan acceleration. GBM is used for sharing buffers across APIs handled by GPU. If your Wayland clients use just shm to communicate with compositor, it will work.

Is that experience recent? AMD drivers used to be terrible and Intel isn't even competition.

Depends also on the AMD GPU. Vega is fine, Raven Ridge had weird bugs last time I looked, with rx590 I couldn't even boot the proxmox 6.1 installer (it worked when I swapped in rx580 instead).

Why is Intel not a competition? In laptops, I want only Intel, nothing else. It is the smoothest/most reliable/least buggy thing you may have.

Performance wise, Intel is streets behind.

I know. But do you need that performance for what you do on the computer?

For most uses, Intel GPU is fine.

But if you do need that performance, Intel isn't an option. If you don't, there is no reason to even consider Nvidia. They serve different needs.

I'm currently running a AMD card because I thought the drivers were better. I was mistaken, I still have screen tearing that I can't fix.

No doubt someone more knowledgeable about Linux could fix this issue, but I never had any issues with my nVidia blobs. That's not to say nVidia don't have their own issues.

this was my experience as well. I eventually bought an NVidia card to replace it so I could stop having problems. It's been smooth ever since.

I have both an Nvidia and an AMD card. AMDGPU is the gold standard.

This was true until relatively recently, but no longer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com