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Open nVidia Linux Driver Pledge Nearly Complete
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 09, 2007 04:01 PM
from the encouragement dept.
from the encouragement dept.
Ciarán Mooney writes to let us know that the Pledgebank drive to raise $10,000 for Project Nouvaeu is almost complete — at this moment it needs only 196 more people to sign up. Project Nouveau aims to provide open source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards. The drive was started by David Nielsen, whose blog explains what he hopes will happen.
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Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
For that matter, why bother with a "pledge drive"? If you think they need $10, why not just send them $10?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hereby announce I will take on the project of solving world hunger. Please give me a giant no-strings-attached donation as a "thank you" for my initiative. I will then make very little progress toward my goal before finally abandoning it as too difficult.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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This is a worthy cause (Score:5, Informative)
Also Fedora 7 (dure April) intends to include the nouveau drivers - which is great as out-of-the-box Fedora can't include the binary nVidia driver necessary to have AIGLX working.
And to anyone who thinks this is unnecessary as there is the binary driver - just wait until you card is dropped from the official support and the old driver stops working with some future kernel.
Re:This is a worthy cause (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with this statement, I think this project is the wrong way to go about it, simply because we do finally have a vendor who has committed to open source driver support: Intel [intellinuxgraphics.org]. Now, I will grant you that their cards are slow and crappy but they should be up to the task of accelerating the linux desktop. Also, the current release supports [intellinuxgraphics.org] only an integrated video chipset and some older cards... but voting with your dollars is an absolute necessity. For any non-gamer, it should be a sufficiently powerful graphics system, and the G965 Express Chipset supports Core 2 Duo and Pentium D, so you can combine it with very good CPU power. If I were building a system today (aka if I could afford to build a system today) this is the combination I would elect to use.
But most importantly, we need to monetarily support vendors who give us working hardware with working linux drivers, or even vendors who simply give us enough information to write drivers. This is not ATI or nVidia. This apparently is intel. They're also just about the only vendor providing any useful wifi drivers.
If we actually spend money to sponsor driver development this will be a clear message to all graphics card manufacturers that we will put up with their bad behavior.
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Re:This is a worthy cause (Score:5, Insightful)
This shouldn't be that hard to figure out - apparently even the moderators got it this time. See, corporations only feel hits to the wallet. Most of their feedback comes from sales figures, and if they get less love than their competitor (or simply less love than they expect) they hurt, they know something is wrong. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily know why.
However, if ATI or nVidia should lose some market share, they will certainly know that it is not because of their lack of linux support, simply because the OSS community is willing to do the work itself. The proof of this principle is that people are willing to spend money to have someone else do their job for them. Simply buying their products is bad enough, but spending MORE money to support them (they benefit from a driver because it can increase sales) is a clear statement that they don't need to develop open source graphics drivers.
If you really think that this is not on their radar, you are incredibly naive. Linux is the fastest-growing segment in computing, Linux is the only operating system gaining market share in the server space, and Linux is probably the only platform gaining any significant ground in education. Linux will only become more important with time, and Windows less. The change shows every sign of being extremely slow, but that doesn't mean that it's not occurring.
Finally, if it were so unimportant as to not even be on their radar, they wouldn't even have developed their own Linux drivers, closed and crappy as they may be. (Well, nVidia's work pretty well... too bad about ATI.)
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Re:This is a worthy cause (Score:5, Informative)
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just wait until you card is dropped from the official support and the old driver stops working with some future kernel.
Open source drivers drop support for devices too. And unless you're a kernel module developer, you're just as much at the mercy of others as you are with a binary driver from the manufacturer.
Besides, isn't patent licensing part of the reason nVidia and Ati won't release fully OSS drivers? I believe Intel has patents on certain memory bus related technologies which are used by both nVidi
Re:This is a worthy cause (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't see how, unless someone's somehow managed to obtain patents that don't disclose information publicly and, as such, would suffer material harm in disclosing the patented ideas publicly by releasing source code.
In other words, any vendor that tells you that is lying.
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Not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is a worthy cause (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the possible issues is _lack_ of patent licensing. Nobody really knows what trivial and obvious techniques have been patented by some patent-troll, but as long as the patent troll can't prove nvidia are doing something the troll's patent potentially covers, they have no reason to sue or shake nvidia down for license fees. Open source drivers would feed the trolls.
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I'll bet you DRM is behind the driver secrecy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, there may be some secret sauce in there that makes for shinier 3-D graphics at a higher frame rate. But I suspect that shiny graphics aren't on the top of the list of things they're protecting. It's DRM. Macrovision's built into every video card that has a TV output port (so you can't use a VCR and tape a DVD movie.) Soon, HDCP will be built into every new graphics card so you can watch HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies without being able to exercise Fair Use legally. And very likely, all you have to do to turn off Macrovision and completely piss off the MPAA is flip a single bit in a particular register. And it's likely that if hardware programming information was known about newer cards, cracking HDCP would be trivial.
That's why we're stuck with proprietary drivers.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not entirely accurate, and not a fair comparison. When a corporation drops support of their product in a binary-only driver, that's the end of the story. When an open-source driver 'drops' support of a product, what they're doing is failing to maintain support. Other people are free to pick up the slack. If a device was supported by open-source software at one point, getting that support up-to-date is far easier than, say, starting from scratch.
Excuse me. (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds, for lack of a better phrase, retarded to me.
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Yes, Nvidia has NDAs which would be violated if they turned around tomorrow and released a GPL driver. However, those NDAs were negotiated by Nvidia and it would be trivial for them to be renegotiated. I very much doubt the people who developed the components care either way - as illustrated by how quickly intel was able to open-source their driver.
I think the "We'd be breaking our supplier agreements" line is nothing more than a red-herring.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
nVidia and ATI drive the entire graphics card market with their competition and neither wants to give away any info by open sourcing a driver to the very small number of people who even care. Even if you had full 3D accelleration on Linux, there are hardly any games to take advantage of it.
And breaking the supplie
Re:Excuse me. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
Outsiders scoffed at the insurmountable task they were undertaking, saying it was a waste of time given Sun's implementation.
Now, with nothing to lose, Sun is on the verge of releasing Java under the same license that classpath uses!
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What I hope will happen - by D.N. (Score:4, Funny)
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What is wrong with the proprietary driver? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with the proprietary driver? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What is wrong with the proprietary driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
I switched to a FireGL 8700 (R200-based) for this reason (and it was an upgrade from a GeForce FX 5200). With regards to ATI cards, there are usable and stable open source drivers for all R300-based and lower video cards. Additionally, ATI no longer supports R100-based or lower video cards on Linux. Fortunately, the open source drivers are available to pick up the slack.
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nVidia Linux Drivers support x86-64 (Score:3, Informative)
You are either misinformed or a liar. The nVidia Linux drivers support x86, x86-64, and IA-64 architectures. This is actually one more archit
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or simply imprecise. To rephrase your parent poster, "one of the problems is that the drivers support the x86, x86-64, and IA-64 architectures only." People on other architectures are out of luck.
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And, in case anyone wants a reference:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php
Now can we please stop with the BS complaints that nVidia allowed a known security hole to exist in their drivers for two years.
Re:What is wrong with the proprietary driver? (Score:5, Informative)
Now for me that wasn't much of a problem. I sighed, logged in as root, found the original installer I downloaded from NVidia, ran it, agreed to the license, pressed continue and was greeted with a message about missing kernel headers. Sighed again, downloaded linux-headers-`uname -r`, reran NVidia installer, etc, etc, ad nauseum every time I update the kernel.
As I said, I know why and how I do this but not everyone does and the whole point of bringing true open source 3d graphics to the desktop for Linux users is so they don't have to learn how or why they need to do this.
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Re:What is wrong with the proprietary driver? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a few things off the top of my head...
nVidia has dropped support for cards older than the GForce4. I have a GForce2 with 64MB and TV tuner that would benefit from this driver.
A while back I was running Hardened Gentoo. When I asked the maintainer why the nVidia driver was masked (blocked), he replied:
I suggest you email the nvidia vendor and request that they stop taking shortcuts in the driver code and release something that's
1) PIC proper [no TEXTREL's]
2) stop using JIT.
Several projects have worked to create versions of xorg or window managers that take advantage of 3D hardware. However, xorg relies on nVidia's driver (with nVidia hardware) for 3D. That code can't be modified.
Finally, my understanding is that the nVidia driver only works with x86 hardware. All of my hardware is x86, so I've never verified this.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
F.e. they taint the kernel - if things crash (one of my nvidia cards *did* with some Linux kernel version and their binary blobs) you cannot debug and fix it. Hell kernel developers will tell you to go on
Like it or not this is how Linux philosophy and developement looks - we have (and don't want to) no stable kernel ABI and expect everything (at very lea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If nVidia ever decides to drop a piece of hardware and stop compiling a certain driver for newer kernels, then users will either have to upgrade hardware (gee, I wonder if nVidia would have an incentive to make people do that) or else use an old kernel. Ouch!
More appropriate would be to say "or else use a kernel you don't want to." It's just as much of a nightmare being forced to upgrade your kernel as well. Gaming is very sensitive to kernel version (just read the Cedega release notes re: versions 2.6.9 and 2.6.10). Upgrading from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16 caused some Cedega-supported games to stop working.
My major issue with the binary driver is security. Because the driver is a kernel module, remote exploits of the NVIDIA driver will hack the kernel every time. O
GIVE US MOHNEYZ (Score:2)
This better be clean room reverse engineering.
Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead someone has the stupid idea to INCREASE nVidia's market share by getting a community nVidia gives the finger to to buy their products.
Way to encourage companies to support the open source movement... it's basically saying "don't bother writing drivers for Linux, we'll do it at OUR expense!"
Lunacy of epic proportions.
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They don't need money... (Score:5, Informative)
Congratulations to everyone who pledged to throw money at something that doesn't need any.
Open Graphics Project (Score:4, Interesting)
http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=OGPN
The Open Graphics Project is making steady progress.
Does anybody else not see the huge problems.... (Score:2)
For one thing, if it's not worth $10k to nVidia to open up the source code themselvs, then why should it be that the software shouldn't be worth more than that to develop? And if we are looking at somebody who is doing this largely for philanthropic purposes to accept such a paltry sum, then it is just as probable that this person would have been just as able and willing to develop the same thing for free. Giving this $10,000 to the first person to do it also encourages people to compete
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You misunderstand why NVidia refuses to open their driver code. They're not just being dicks, and they probably aren't too scared to expose their own proprietary technologies, because there ARE benefits to gaining the acceptance of the OSS community that translate directly into more profit.
The real problem is that NVidia didn't write all of the driver c
What's In It For Me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or is it just a way to get higher FPS on 3D games running on nVidia HW?
I don't see how this can work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we clone their drivers? Maybe - but it could take years to do that - and no sooner we succeed then we'll discover that there have been four generations of new hardware since we started - and the hardware we can support will be so far behind that very few people will want to use it.
You *might* be able to do this for a relatively simple peripheral like a WiFi card - but graphics chips are probably the most complex (and least standardized) single chip device in existance. The driver has to contain a full-up compiler for the OpenGL shader language for chrissakes! (And no, you can't use an existing compiler or translate to some other language because this is a language that supports 4-way parallel arithmetic and has the bizarrest optimisation requirements imaginable!)
This is a massive undertaking. $10,000 doesn't even scratch the surface of the work involved. I seriously doubt that a cash injection of a million dollars would get you a working, useful driver within a couple of years...let alone maintaining it and continually reverse-engineering the next generation of hardware.
Your driver would probably (by necessity) infringe on a bunch of patents too.
Whilst I'd REALLY like the peace of mind of knowing that there is a working, efficient and up-to-date-with-modern-hardware OpenSourced driver out there - it's *so* not going to happen. We need to find clean ways to wall off the nVidia driver so that it can function without being a security loophole and so it can survive kernel changes and such.
Let me start you off... (Score:3, Informative)
You are not going to get a driver in that amount of time.
But, I will give you clues. The nVidia chip is pretty high on the OpenGL stack. The chip itself handles most OpenGL primitive operations. It just won't do contexts (nor will the ATI). I don't know the underlying protocol to communicate with the chip, but I would guess it is packet based. Registers would prove far too slow. I would imagine that for OpenGL, VGA, video, and mode support you are looking at almost a thousand "registers" or eqivalents.
It may be possible to catch the kernel level packet interfaces -- mode setting and VGA extension should be reversable via emulation. But this won't tell you what any of the commands do. You could try iterating OpenGL and comparing generated packets... but...
Modern chips typically DON'T implement a fixed-function pipeline. So you will have to figure out how OpenGL shader compiler for the chip works (because you have to know the "machine code").
Good luck for a 4 week driver project. The shader compiler itself is almost a C++ compiler which has to be reversed, the communications format and the packet streams. I would give 10 man-years as a first estimate.
Or, you could try to get the vendors to "be nice".
But I won't do it for 10 grand. Sorry.
Re:My closed source NVidia driver works fine (Score:4, Insightful)
What is wrong with that?
1. nVidia can change their minds about Linux support at any time.
2. People may want the hardware to be usable on other arches than i86.
3. It'd be nice to be able to distribute a complete working nVidia Linux system legally.
What is wrong with any of that?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Beyond just allowing for better drivers, this would allow other ISVs who write software that interacts with the kernel to better support Linux and thus grow the Linux ecosystem. But making developers lives easier and more fun was apparently more important.
I've been ranting and railing about the stable API / ABI issue since the new development process was announced. I now have to wait for my distro to stabilise / patch 'their' kernel six ways from Sunday. Even today