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Comment by dazzawazza | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame he doesn't go in to specifics, just saying "Fuck you" makes him look like a child, which I am sure he isn't.

What is the problem?

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I don't think that this would have been the right venue to go into an in-depth rant about Nvidia's lack of cooperation. That's certainly not what the audience was looking for and probably not what Linus wanted to go into; moreover, I doubt anybody from Nvidia was there or would even have heard the talk.

The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would probably not have noticed the talk; since Linus decided to be curt, the talk got onto HN and people from Nvidia have no doubt noticed it.

Besides, whatever you think about it, Linus's approach was indubitably effective. We are, after all, talking about the issue right now!

Actually, there at least one Nvidia employee in the room. Have a look at the last question (asked by an Nvidia employee).

Time index for the lazy?

The time link thing doesn't seem to be working for me, but it's at 1h29s

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=1h28s

Linking to a specific time over 1 hour isn't working correctly for some reason, for whatever it's worth. (Or at least it hasn't been for me, anyway...)

Nevermind, we were both just doing it wrong. This should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=1h28s

There were several Nvidia employees in the room, I wasn't one of them because I missed the sign-up for the event. But my co-workers were there and they got the message, and I hope the message propagates upwards to the people who make the big decisions on this.

But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware. And the fact that Nvidia is a hardware company with a strong Windows background, so open source software is quite a strange thing in comparison. It kinda feels like being between a rock and a hard place.

When it comes to mobile software, Nvidia has been doing more open source work and upstreaming quite a lot of our changes. A lot of work has been done in the kernel internals and arm stuff. Not a lot of customer facing stuff but very valuable work if you're trying to build ARM-based system on chips.

you should really post this as a reply to the link. Not many will see this after its been nested all this way down (at the moment)

But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware.

To whom? Certainly not your competitors.

Also what's wrong with releasing specs under NDA?

How exactly do you NDA an opensource driver?

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver. You wouldn't be able to contribute any other driver project (in that specialty area, which might be vast) until your NDA ends.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver.

Many Linux kernel developers have offered to sign NDAs with Nvidia and many other companies.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

How? It's easy to obfuscate certain details of driver code. Think of magic constants, for example.

I guess the problem is that Nvidia pretending to be Linux supporting company (they even joined Linux Foundation) while completely disregards linux users in many ways, e.g Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus in drivers for Linux. What stopped them? Today almost every second laptop goes with GPU built with nvidia optimus technology and it's can be a very painful experience to use linux on such devices.

Presumably he said that because nVidia makes it difficult for developers to develop open source drivers for nVidia devices

Unlike Intel and ATI, Nvidia doesn't play nice with open source developers.

It's still much harder to find ATI drivers for Linux than Nvidia drivers.

Wait, what? There are radeon drivers within the open source ecosystem, and AMD also supplies an alternate proprietary driver, bad quality as it is, for those people who find 3D support essential.

You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.

The open source AMD driver has improved a lot over the past couple of years, it's really pretty good. "Pretty good" is unfortunately not good enough for really 3D intensive tasks like newer games, etc. Good enough for the vast majority of desktop tasks though including hardware-accelerated video rendering etc.

The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway.

My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.

What distro are you using? Did you use aticonfig --dual-head to setup your xorg.conf file ?

Mint13 with Cinnamon; not precisely Gnome3 but close enough.

And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.

You didnt answer my question on whether you used aticonfig? Also which card are you using?

There is basically no nvidia drivers available for many modern mobile GPUs on Linux, so I doubt that Nvidia is more linux friendly than ATI/AMD nowadays.

Which GPUs? The only one I can find that they're not supporting yet is the GeForce GTX 680M.

Any that comes with Optimus. Nvidia's blob just don't see them.

AMD is ruthless about dropping support for older architectures, which hits laptop GPUs especially hard. They're about to drop support for R600 and there's still lower-end devices being sold with those. Fortunately as noted above the AMD open source driver is pretty good, more than good enough for a laptop I would think.

While this is true, nvidia's closed-source drivers do have the virtue of actually working.

(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)

I must have hallucinated playing 3d games on my intel-based systems. (Of course, performance isn't great, but it doesn't work bad at all, at least in my experience).

Intel has really stepped up in the past few years. But it's not too long ago when their h/w was pretty much unusable in Linux so their track record isn't very good.

So far as I can tell, I get similar frame-rates under X11 with Wine as Windows users do on the same hardware. Intel's video drivers are wonderful, including for 3D acceleration, it's just their hardware that's lacking.

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