Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
lists.freedesktop.org
lists.freedesktop.org
I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that the rest of their market segments will. But to do silly things like release official Linux binary drivers without so much as a changelog just reeks. They got enough bad blood from that to start releasing drivers with changelogs again, but support for kernels/xorg server versions still typically lags far behind nvidia's. And I can't do something as simple as run multiple monitors without seeing all kinds of weird graphical artifacts with high frequency.
My next card with be an nvidia if things continue on their current trajectory. I know that their binary drivers aren't perfect, but compared to AMD...
Edit: Also, I can't use the OSS drivers, so they don't weigh into my buying decision at all. Good on AMD for doing better there, but the binary drivers are the only ones that can run my setup.
He spelt it the way he wants to spell it, who cares?
I've been around enough to know that there is always an effect of being called out in public, by a credible critic, inside of a company. What that effect is can vary based on how the corporate culture views itself.
In this particular case I have had over the years a bit more visibility inside [1] the company than some others. And I had been working very hard to get access to their acceleration into third party OSes. The developer program was verbally very supportive of that, but actually not so much. After a lot of work and investigation the proximate cause was the extreme patent mess around graphics and Nvidia's aggressive use of same to deal with competition.
I also discovered that at the executive level there was a belief that Nvidia was very supportive of Linux and third party use of their drivers. And even though I suggested reality was quite different than that, it didn't really affect their thinking.
When Linus called them out, and the coverage of that went viral, I thought to myself "This is going to be hard to explain in the context of an impression of support." In some ways having Nvidia not threaten or attack the nouveaux work was a big step forward. Actually contributing patches suggests to me complete surrender (or acceptance) of making "real" the notion of supporting third party use of their gear.
[1] My history was that a friend of mine from Sun was one fo the founders, he introduced me to the development program when the NV1 came out, I interviewed with them but did not take the job, but while at NetApp they were one of NetApps "Top 20" customers and I often spent time with their engineering teams working on ways their design flow would work better on network attached storage. A couple of former Intel colleagues ended up there, and a number of folks came over from there to Google when I was at Google as well. So while visibility was certainly incomplete, it wasn't strictly what was reported by the press.
How much of that is legal impossibility, secrets protection or simply not caring enough, well ...
In any case, the interface exposed by most consoles to game developers is significantly lower level than anything resembling a desktop graphics driver, especially since each platform only has to support a single GPU configuration, so I highly doubt there's any useful (for our purposes) code tied up in there.
However in my experience ATI's GPU docs project plus the resources they invested in getting OSS driver to properly support ATI hardware means that normal users shouldn't really need to install binary drivers if they have a recent ATI GPU. And it works good enough for 3D and power management is supported so laptops benefit too.
Nvidia's patches referenced here are for Tegra which is strictly a mobile chip - nothing to do with desktop/laptop. In desktop/laptop department NVidia's OSS support is still non existent and Nouveau doesn't work as well as OSS ATI driver due to lack of documentation.
The most recent issue was getting my brother's HP laptop to run Ubuntu. The OS installed but would not launch the X server. The fact that there are multiple different drivers possible for his card made matters much more confusing and neither the official docs nor the Ubuntu forums provided any ready-made answers past "install package X" which we did. I was able to get it to work but it took hours.
On the other hand the Nvidia binary blobs just work. You install it and start the X server. That's it. They don't seem to be bothered by the kernel upgrades when running Ubuntu either.
As far as I'm concerned, just buy Nvidia. Welcome your binary blob overlords and don't waste time on getting things working. I do of course wish that Nvidia just open sourced their current drivers, but for me usability of the system out of the box is worth much more than having or not having yet another binary blob.
With nvidia the terrible stability and kernel upgrade hassles plus the need to externally install the drivers means it should be much uglier an experience than out of box ATI OSS drivers. Anyway as long as it works...
That's no longer the case. http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
> There really shouldn't be any reason for all but newest ATI GPUs to not work out of box.
So you don't have any problems if you have a recent ATI GPU, unless you have a recent ATI GPU?
Here's a thread where I test my Nvidia 670 and my AMD 6870 in Linux. I explain why I like one over the other:
http://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1vpngo/which...
The big change is definitely dynamic power management in the OSS drivers - now my PC doesn't sound like a turbine while I'm in Linux all the time.
> and it likely still is.
Actually everything just works
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeo...
Actually, they are both theoretically very interested in the Linux market because of their GPGPUs. Windows is pretty much unheard of in scientific computing (in November it powered a whopping 2 of the 500 comuters in top500). AMD does offer a good range of development tools for their CPUs; I haven't worked on their GPUs, but I've heard nothing but complaints about it.
Nvidia definitely targets the Top 500 and is currently (Nov 2013) providing the GPUs for #2 and #6 in the Top 10 of the list and dozens more lower down the list. There's a lot of money in supercomputers, in the Top 500 scale and smaller installations too.
(The board is SuperMicro's X9SAE, the first of a new line of workstation boards they're doing, they have a Haswell X10SAE, but it's a little early to try to make one of those work.)
I tried to setup a dual-gpu notebook for a friend last week. It was impossible. fglrx doesn't support the chips anymore and ubuntu doesn't support the legacy blobs. Complete fail. I had to tell her ubuntu won't work on her computer. (The gpus will overheat without a proper driver)
So thank you AMD for basically not providing any drivers at all, and if you do, them crashing randomly taking the kernel with them. Thank you Nvidia for just working.
Imho in that regard Linus didn't know what the f*ck he was talking about.
The in-kernel, fancy KMS, AMD drivers should just work right now for many people. 2D is faster than the proprietary driver and the 3D speed is a significant fraction of the proprietary driver.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Dynamic_power_manag...
and
Mesa is getting close to OpenGL 3.3 support, and I already have OpenGL 3.1 on my Radeon HD 4650.
In fact for me having a usable open-source driver has been the reason to switch from Nvidia and its proprietary driver.
Edit: I see you mentioned this down-thread, having to do with large number of monitors.
Still, a great news
This would mean that you could run a full open source graphics stack on an ARM System on Chip (SoC). I don't know if this is possible on any current SoC out there.
Commentor in G+ thread: > They aren't there yet, more middle finger recommended.
A little chuckle to start the day ;-)
Nvidia's Linux support is generally pretty decent these days; however, the one issue that gets the middle digit moving in their direction is power management in a multi-head laptop setup. Ouch, max power = heat = fan noise.
I had to flash the VBIOS in order to force the chip into low power mode (not a gamer, just need to drive multiple displays).
Doesn't help that they remove PM features from anything but their high end chips; have a K2000M here, nvidia-smi shows a bunch of N/A, can't do diddly.