Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

A) Drivers reveal a surprising amount of "secret sauce" for a GPU. The "public-facing" interface to a GPU is something like HLSL or GLSL, but the real interface is some proprietary ISA. The manufacturers are slowly moving in this area, but the culture of the ISA being proprietary remains. That leads to things like implementation details getting inserted into ISA docs, or code comments, or driver architecture designs, because they're for internal use only anyway. This philosophy is slowly changing, but it's still the case quite a bit.

B) There's much less difference than you would expect between a $500 gaming GPU and a $2,000 workstation GPU. It's totally plausible that you are one FOSS driver away from a much more expensive GPU. That is a problem for everybody, including the gamers who want to keep buying $500 GPUs.

C) There is a VERY complicated balance of power between OEMs (who control the purse), Intel (who sometimes competes and sometimes complements the video card manufacturers) and Microsoft (for better or for worse, a de facto standards body) and increasingly, new kinds of competitors like PowerVR. So this is just a hypothetical, but one way it could go down is like this: NVidia decides to fully embrace FOSS. Microsoft gets pissy and tries to write them out of the standard. NVidia forced to lower prices to get PC makers to buy. Apple swoops in and places a huge order of the now-cheap parts. Intel gets pissy that Apple is shipping too many Nvidia GPUs per Intel GPU, raises Apple's CPU pricing to cover the loss. The price of Macs goes up driving some customers to iPads. PowerVR's royalty fees double, and since they don't have to manage any inventory, they are increasingly more attractive to investors than traditional manufacturers like NVidia. NVidia's stock price falls, and some C-level forgoes a vacation in Europe.

a) If the drivers were open patent trolls and competitors would sue.

b) I have heard stories about some graphics vendors who have a lot of duplicated code in their drivers for supporting different generations of cards. Instead of building abstractions that achieve generality theyve succumbed to the copy paste rabbit hole.

c) If we all saw the mess that lives in the drivers none of us would be okay with it running it as a kernel module.

d) There are questionable optimizations that vendors would be caught on.

I think it's this. From what I've been told, the line between software (driver) and hardware (graphics card/chip) is blurry, and moves around from generation to generation. The "graphics processing model" is only partly executed in hardware; the rest is in software.

They've already been much better in the ARM SoC space than they were on the more traditional GPU side, and I really hope that some day I can just apologize for ever giving them the finger.

Let's hope it works out. There are still some showstopper bugs like suspend not working and touchpad locking up.

Bumblebee was always a stopgap and a kludge - and a lot of credit is due for the enterprising bumblebee hackers.

If Nvida could fix Optimus for other OSes, there might be more Linux users/gamers.

Hopefully, this new openness will lead to better general support for Nvidia cards, as it is there are distros (Arch for instance, my favorite) where Nouveau and Nvidia proprietary driver cannot detect my GPU properly.

And in any case the NVIDIA proprietary userspace driver stack doesn't work with the Nouveau kernel driver anyway. Maybe this means there is hope that it will someday.

It's almost certainly not gamers that complain abut the lack of free drivers. But people like me that want good performance but don't like the problems the proprietary drivers bring, or people concerned about the driver's security (everybody is paranoid now) and not wanting it at their datacenter.

  1. We are doing this anyway because of Steam OS.
  2. Might as well get good community karma for it.

One has to wonder about Canonical and Intel falling out recently.

One of the main reasons for the lack of performance is clock/power management of the cards. The proprietary driver clocks up the GPU while nouveau does not. I would guess this is one of the reasons for why they asked for the power management documentation.

Not really that bad. On Kepler+ cards it sucks, but I threw Nouveau on my old gtx 285 pc back before I realized Nvidia were anti-opensource assholes (tbh, just like Intel is with cpus) and it can run most games at 60 fps at 1080p as long as they are running at medium or so settings.

That has to be in context, though, since I was only running minecraft, darkplaces, doomsday, flash games, and humble bundle games like Torchlight and Bastion on it for my mother to play. But you can enable reclocking, and it does run ok, but it is around half as fast as the proprietary driver is in the same games at best.

This is pure conjecture on both our parts, of course. I was simply taking issue with your prediction of Nouveau not being useful for a 'long time'. It almost sounded like you were suggesting this was a useless gesture on Nvidia's part.

Seems like they just want Nouveau to work better during normal desktop usage. I doubt they plan to release enough information to make them competitive with their proprietary drivers.