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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

The article starts by saying:

"Most GPU drivers found in Arm processors are known to be closed-source making it difficult and time-consuming to fix some of the bugs since everybody needs to rely on the silicon vendor to fix those for them, and they may even decide a particular bug is not important to them, so you’d be out of luck."

Why is it then that nvidia is singled out for hatred in this regard? nvidia is an evil, baby-killing company for not open sourcing its drivers, but all the others with closed drivers (including ARM up until today) don't get hated on.

The drivers are not open source, but nvidia has released quite a few open source projects. I admit I haven't used any of them, maybe they are shit, I don't know. I just googled "nvidia open source" to find them.

https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source https://github.com/NVIDIA

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For mobile GPUs the situation has always been shitty, so expectations were low.

A decade ago the situation on the desktop was different too. Nvidia was the gold standard, drivers were closed but so were AMDs, but Nvidia drivers actually worked. Intel was open, but you couldn’t use the GPUs for anything serious anyway.

Today AMD has good open drivers and Nvidia is the last one with closed drivers on the desktop.

On mobile people are much more used to a closed environment, so less are complaining.

AMD has good open drivers provided one has one of the blessed cards, otherwise it is more like it does DirectX 11 and GL 4.1, but only gets OpenGL 3.3 and be happy it works at all.

Mostly because there aren't many arm devices that target the popular linux use cases (desktops, laptops, servers). And even then servers don't generally use GPU's for anything other than AI. Nvidia on the other hand rules the laptop market for dGPUs and has a big share in Desktops.

Secondly, unlike ARM, Nvidia goes out of it's way to make it's hardware not work with open drivers. Most ARM vendors generally ignore open source drivers. Nvidia on the other hand locks down the hardware with very insidious tricks (very low default clocks that can only be reclocked to their advertised speeds by a Nvidia signed driver) to specifically block any alternate open drivers. So even if the community is determined and funded to reverse engineer and make an alternative driver, they quite literally can't.

Nvidia is singled out for hatred on desktop, because everybody else has cleaned up their act quite a bit. ARM is practically irrelevant on desktop, so the fact that ARM only has closed-source options is just not that big of a deal.

ARM is very relevant on mobile, and on that front so much is closed that basically everything deserves plenty of hate. The GPU is not a frontier there.

This article is describing Arm collaborating on development of open source drivers for its graphics architecture - none of the other mobile GPU architecture developers are doing that so I think Arm deserves some credit for that.

nVidia is collaborating on their embedded Tegra driver. Rather, they are driving its open source development. nouveau is a viable option on the desktop GPUs, if not a performant one due to the lack of re-clocking, at least it works. LIMA, Panfrost, Etnaviv, freedreno, V3D... The last bastion is powerVR, but I am afraid that this might never happen.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181112100406/https://libv.live...

> Why is it then that nvidia is singled out for hatred in this regard? nvidia is an evil, baby-killing company for not open sourcing its drivers, but all the others with closed drivers (including ARM up until today) don't get hated on.

Because they're a target of a dedicated smearing campaign from certain OSS communities who are pissed that they didn't just rewrite their drivers on their one-sided command. The kernel team rejected the nVidias API and built their own and now they expect nVidia to just bow to them.

After decades of providing fast and stable Linux 3D accelerated support.

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