NVIDIA's Andy Ritger On Linux Drivers 269
tykev writes "The Director of Unix Software at NVIDIA talks about Linux drivers, planned features, development cycle, and the open source Nouveau driver. (The interview is in English but all the comments are in Czech.) Quoting: 'NVIDIA's stance is to neither help nor hinder Nouveau. We are committed to supporting Linux through a) an open source 2d "nv" X driver which NVIDIA engineers actively maintain and improve, and b) our fully featured proprietary Linux driver which leverages common code with the other platforms that NVIDIA supports.'"
Re:Nouveau (Score:5, Insightful)
Until Nouveau gets good, I imagine they'll keep pushing the proprietary driver, though.
Considering (Score:5, Insightful)
I experienced a problem with the "nv" driver on my computer with dual 7600GS cards and three displays. It wasn't possible to run all three displays at all with the "nv" driver, but the binary driver from nvidia works. The part that I'm not satisfied with is the need for an alternate driver.
I haven't tried the Nouveau driver, but somebody else may. As I see it, Nvidia should release all information needed to allow others to write suitable drivers. (should apply to all HW manufacturers).
Re:A question (Score:5, Insightful)
I read & re-read the parent comment, but couldn't see them demanding anything. WTF are you talking about?
I mean, to the exclusion of actually using the software which could make their computer experience better.
Some people have quite pragmatic reasons for preferring open software - particularly kernel software. Driver crashes were one of the things that made windows (particularly in the late 90's / early 2000s) such a mess.
If you're making a hardware purchasing decision and want to run linux, of course you should try to buy from a company that supports FOSS.
Surely we haven't got that many mini-RMSes?
Finish the troll with a flourish. Nice work.
Re:A question (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the exact same reason that lobbying a congressman (without money) works. Once they hear it enough, they know it's important to the people that are most important to them: Their customers. (Or voters, as the case may be.)
When people don't tell a company how to behave, you end up with companies like Walmart. Walmart used to be about the country, the consumer, and the profit, in that order. They gave up on the whole 'made in the USA' thing quite a while back. They gave up on customer service even longer ago. They only care about the profit now. They do it by having cheap goods and cheap wages. For people who only care that the goods are cheap, it's a great store. For the rest of us it sucks.
nVidia has the choice of only catering to the mainstream Windows-based gamers, or also adding on a rabidly-loyal group of fanatics that are willing to work for free to make their business better. All nVidia has to do is LISTEN TO THEM and release their drivers open-source.
Yes, there was a great amount of R&D involved in their drivers, but most of the stuff that makes their drivers 'great' on windows just doesn't apply to Linux, like that massive control panel. That doesn't even exist in the binary Linux driver.
The code doesn't have to be GPL or any such. They could release it under their own license that specifically states the code can only be used for a driver for nVidia cards. The only thing necessary is the ability to improve the code at will. (I think they would find it advantageous to go to GPL later, but that's another discussion.)
nVidia really has little reason not to open their source code to the public, unless they are doing something illegal or extremely unethical in their drivers. (Cheating at benchmarks, etc.)
Noticeable absence (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, while they certainly want to be seen as supporting Linux, they really believe their closed-source drivers give them some source of competitive advantage. That's either in clever code or what the coding reveals about the internal organization of their GPU hardware. It would have been relatively easy and palatable to say: "We'd like to release full GPU asm specs and code, but believe this will help our competitors design better hardware. So we can only provide APIs." They didn't say this, so I think they consider their actual driver code to be very clever (main competitive advantage). No such secret will last.
Yes, I know there are many other explanations for "negative knowledge" -- things that didn't happen. But when they could have and would have been easy, perhaps we need to wonder why they didn't.
Isn't that obvious? (Score:1, Insightful)
First, drivers are the half of the product. They are as important as the actual hardware. Open sourcing drivers would be equivalent to releasing VHDL code for their chips. It would give a huge advantage to their competitors who could utilize the same tricks to improve performance of their products.
Second, not all code in NVidia's drivers is owned by NVidia. They have licensed some stuff from other companies and they can't open source that code even if they wanted. Keep in mind that NVidia isn't developing Linux drivers separately, most (>90%) of NVidia's driver code is common across all OSes.
Re:nVidia's Buggy Closed-Source Drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nouveau (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the point of spending money developing a proprietary driver if everyone just uses the default Free Software one which works reasonably well?
NDAs and Patents Suck Life. (Score:2, Insightful)
What you say is confusing and has the smell of a well crafted lie. Can you set me straight so I can understand why Nvidia is unable to do like Intel and fully co-operate with the free software community?
Given that they make their money off of licensing IP and perhaps selling software (as opposed to selling hardware), this is highly unlikely.
That term, "IP", has confused me. I thought Nvidia made GPUs [wikipedia.org]. What would they lose by telling free software developers how to make their GPUs work?
they own all of the IP for the 2d driver, some parts of the 3d support are licensed from other companies and individuals (who hold the patents). The terms of those licenses forbid nVidia from releasing their code (naturally).
This makes a little more sense, despite that awefull IP term. You are saying it's not Nvida's fault but I'm not sure how that can be true. Nvidia is huge and should be able to set terms better than that. Further, they are releasing binaries, so I'm not sure what Uncle No-No is protecting. Finally, while the free software community may be able to provide some help in convincing Uncle No-No to co-operate, this is something Nvidia could do better.
Nvidia's hostility to free software only hurts their hardware sales. Gamers crave the clean world of free software and will spend more money on cutting edge hardware if their wallets are not bled white by M$. As things stand, upgrading hardware requires a new M$ OS purchase and begging or a cracked version of M$ OS. People like me won't even consider buying a cheap or middle of the line Nvidia card because it won't do much more than heat up the room. The non free drivers are better than that, but they make my system brittle like a M$ system - flaky and harder to upgrade. A system like that is disposable and I might as well buy a Play Station. Nouveau has promise, but the vast majority of GNU/Linux users are going to wait until it's in Debian Testing. You would think they'd want to grow what's going to be a richer market for them.
Re:Nouveau (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Noticeable absence (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do GPU manufacturers think they have more IP stake then CPU manufacturers? Imagine a CPU manufacturer saying that the CPUs opcodes are proprietary that they don't want to release for competitive advantage reasons. Just use our compiler they say. That would be absurd.
Re:Nouveau (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I tried the 2d "nv" driver... (Score:3, Insightful)
It could not even support a dual-head setup. If that's what he means by "NVIDIA engineers actively maintain and improve", then it is simply sabotage:
The nv-driver was my only option on FreeBSD/amd64, yet it would not drive the second monitor, so I changed the card for a Radeon. The open-source driver for ATI, at least, supports dual head and plenty of other features found on the hardware.
Re:NDAs and Patents Suck Life. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nouveau (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes but how long did it take? I know when I first used Linux with my r200 I couldn't get any 3d capable driver except the FireGL and I never really got 3d to work.