NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly 309
An anonymous reader writes: The Nouveau driver developers working on open-source support for the GeForce 900 Maxwell graphics cards have found this new generation to be "very open-source unfriendly" and restricting. NVIDIA began requiring signed firmware images, which they have yet to provide to Nouveau developers, contrary to their earlier statements. The open-source developers have also found their firmware signing to go beyond just simple security precautions. For now the open-source NVIDIA driver can only enable displays with the GTX 900 series without any hardware acceleration.
And this is news... (Score:2)
Re:And this is news... (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC, This has always been the case.
The news is that NVidia's behavior is getting worse.
Re:And this is news... (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, This has always been the case.
The news is that NVidia's behavior is getting worse.
Well, given that one of the linked articles on NVidia's firmware signing is now 7 months old (September 2014), it's not getting worse all that quickly, it's just that the people who were complaining about it before are complaining about it again. And as they point out, there's a perfectly fine proprietary driver; they just don't like those drivers. The problem, of course, being that the Open Source driver can't legally use the Sorenson CODECs, or the MPEG-LA patent pool without violating the law in many countries.
Re:And this is news... (Score:4, Interesting)
The open-source radeon driver has hardware media coding/decoding working since a long time, with both VDPAU and OpenMAX interfaces. The codecs actually reside on the card and you already pay for their license when you buy it, what is missing is just an API to use them.
Re:And this is news... (Score:5, Insightful)
How much does it cost to migrate all your users to "any decent country"?
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But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes? So why try to restrict that in any way whatsoever?
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But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes?
A common misconception, with complex products there's always so many environments and conditions you never get all the corner cases worked out. So what you want is ten million people playing GTA V on Windows (7/8/Vista), not all these niche users finding subtle ways to break it on their special snowflake of a Linux setup. It costs time and money, hurts your brand and most companies would rather just sell to the 95%+ doing mainstream tasks.
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They licence some of the IP involved in the hardware that does not belong to them. It's not as simple as just letting it out with no restrictions.
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Re:And this is news... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's funny. They had no trouble ignoring these problems before last September, which is when they started requiring signed firmware images.
Nobody is asking for source code or intellectual property rights related to firmware, all they need is the single signed blob of otherwise unreadable code which the new GM20x cards require before doing anything more complicated than simple mode switching. The kind of thing that nVidia said they would provide last year, but haven't [freedesktop.org].
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The ten cards you sell ($4000 revenue) by spending 80 hours of developer time ($4000 expense) to fix extreme edge cases aren't worth it, as they still have to pay to manufacture the cards. Those developers could be fixing issues that will shift hundreds of thousands of units instead.
(Numbers based on $400 / card, $50/hr developer - not out of the realm of possibility)
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But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes? So why try to restrict that in any way whatsoever?
Some of their most expensive hardware is almost identical to their cheapest ones, with the main difference being what the driver allows.
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But why? It seems counter to business interests. The more people using your hardware, the better, yes?
Closed source means customer lock-in. So they lose 0.0001% of their sales today to a tiny fringe that care about OSS. But they get far more sales in the future, and customers are locked-in to "NVIDIA-only" solutions. This isn't just a problem with graphics drivers. It is also a problem with GPU computing for things like neural nets, which tend to be based on CUDA rather than OpenCL. When Skynet arises, it will likely be running on NVIDIA GPUs.
Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Interesting)
With Valve pushing for Linux gaming, they need to apply some inside pressure on AMD/Nvidia to make their shit work at 100% with Linux.
Since we know neither company is willing to do the work themselves, that means they need to release full documentation so the FOSS people can develop/maintain proper Linux support.
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Valve would rather have open source drivers but they would be content with closed source drivers that work well (if not on par with the windows drivers)
Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve needs to use their clout
What clout? Is Valve some sort of major customer of Nvidia GPUs? Valve has no clout over Nvidia.
With Valve pushing for Linux gaming, they need to apply some inside pressure on AMD/Nvidia to make their shit work at 100% with Linux.
Nvidia's drivers do work 100% with Linux.
Since we know neither company is willing to do the work themselves, that means they need to release full documentation so the FOSS people can develop/maintain proper Linux support.
They don't need to do any such thing. Their important *nix customers are people doing CAD, rendering work or GPU computing not the tiny fraction of people playing games.
Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Funny)
Stop making sense and be outraged, dammit!
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Valve basically owns PC gaming marketshare.
They literally have more power than any other company, without exception, when it comes to mindshare of people who actually BUY PC games and games hardware.
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" what, exactly?
We shall complain about you on Slashdot.
Reddit even ...
Again.
Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Funny)
"or we'll release Half Life 3 as AMD only and spam AMD all over Steam"
That exactly.
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Steam Manager 1: Ok, lets tell NVidia what's what. Make HL3 AMD only. Somehow.
Steam Manager 2: Sir, I'm just looking at the Hardware Survey that we run, and just over half of our customers use NVidia.
Steam Manager 1: Oh. Ok, lets not throw away half of our potential sales.
Steam Manager 2: Good call.
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Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine, for a moment, Valve talks to AMD/Nvidia about open source support, and AMD actually follows through on open source support (stifle that laughter and bear with me).
Nvidia doesn't.
Steam starts running ads promoting AMD.
SOMETHING LIKE 90% of ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS are seeing ads for Nvidia's competitor. Valve refuses to run Nvidia ads until they improve Open Source.
THAT is how Valve can use their clout.
Will they? Probably not. But they *should*, if their stated goal of legitimizing Linux Gaming is true. Otherwise they'll still be stuck at the mercy of Microsoft, which is the whole reason Valve is pushing for Linux gaming (they view the Windows Store as a HUGE threat to their livelihood)
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Would that really help?
I'd think steam users fall into two main camps; the casual 'whatever came with my PC' camp, and the 'hardcore gamers' camp. Hardcore gamers are either going to blindly go with their favorite platform, or they're going to go by benchmark numbers.
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Valve can have significant impact on that. It would just also significantly impact themselves.
Steam knows or can know what GPU you run it on, along with drivers etc. It could simply fall back to VGA without hardware acceleration for yet-to-be-released Nvidia GPUs.
That would significantly affect the Nvidia bottom line in the future. It would also place Valve in a bad spot.
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As you point out, Valve views Microsoft as a huge threat to their business. They don't want nVidia as an additional enemy who could retaliate by only enabling some optimizations on versions purchased from Microsoft.
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That would be funny.
Step 1: Boot computer.
Step 2: Fire up Steam.
Step 3: Watch AMD Advertisement.
Step 4: Start [insert game here]
Step 5: Watch NVIDIA "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" Advertisement appear.
Step 6: Not give a crap about the purity of your drivers happy in the knowledge that having either card seems to work fine under Linux.
Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:5, Insightful)
They *should*, if their goal of legitimizing Open Source video drivers is true.
Legitimizing Linux gaming is not really dependent on having open source the drivers. It is dependent on having good drivers. Valve does not have a stated goal of supporting open source. Their goal is to sell games.
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No, Linux gaming is not absolutely dependent on open-source drivers. However, open-source drivers work much better on Linux systems than proprietary drivers; the proprietary ones usually take extra work to install, they break on updates, etc. The Linux desktop ecosystem just isn't set up very well for proprietary drivers (by design).
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That's total hogwash. There is nothing about how Linux works in practice that makes BLOB drivers any less reliable or any harder to deal with. What problems may have existed have been fixed already and fixed for a long time already.
You sound like some stupid Lemming working out of an outdated playbook.
Just take advantage of the fact that Unix is well suited for automation.
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However, open-source drivers work much better on Linux systems than proprietary drivers;
I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the Nvidia binary driver works better than Nouveau does. I'm currently running a GT640 rev2 under Fedora 21. Previously I ran a GT220 and a 6150SE.
the proprietary ones usually take extra work to install, they break on updates, etc.,
When you read of some guy's Nvidia drivers breaking on updates, it means he did things the HARD way and installed the ".run" package from Nvidia's website manually instead of taking the Easy Button way of using their distro's package manager.
On Fedora, if you're using a card supported by the current driver, it's as eas
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For the most part this just isn't true. Most Linux distributions today have extremely easy ways to install proprietary video drivers, and have packages that do not break on kernel updates.
The biggest difference that I've noticed between proprietary and open-source drivers is KMS: KMS allows significantly faster wake-up from sleep mode. Though it does look as if KMS support is coming for nVidia proprietary drivers, as near as I can tell it isn't yet available.
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They *should*, if their goal of legitimizing Open Source video drivers is true.
Legitimizing Linux gaming is not really dependent on having open source the drivers. It is dependent on having good drivers. Valve does not have a stated goal of supporting open source. Their goal is to sell games.
Decent open source drivers might even contradict their goal of legitimizing Linux gaming.
Anyone using Steam is obviously open to running proprietary code on their computer, the only question is how much proprietary code.
If there's decent open source drivers then a subset of the Linux user base is going to use those and they've got to be supported. That's more work for Valve and game publishers since there's another driver to test against. Costs go up, bugs go up, and fewer people develop games for Linux.
The
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Source engineers can debug into free drivers more easily than proprietary drivers.
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Steam starts running ads promoting AMD.
Why would they do that? They aren't a retailer for AMD products. They don't care what graphics chip you have, they just want to sell games. If the game doesn't support the graphics you have, that's just too damn bad. You've opened the product and you can't get your money back, and Steam won't let you transfer the registration so you can't resell the game to someone else to get your money back.
Been there, done that. Duke Nuke'm Forever looked like it would run on my system but did not. The dealer would exc
Re:Valve needs to use their clout (Score:4, Interesting)
Valve basically owns PC gaming marketshare.
Which is only around a couple of percent of all PC users. Translated to Linux that's a fraction of a fraction of one percent. And Nvidia's highest margin customers are those who buy their workstation and GPGPU cards.
They literally have more power than any other company, without exception, when it comes to mindshare of people who actually BUY PC games and games hardware.
The flaw in your logic is that you think that PC gamers are the reason Nvidia makes a Linux driver. It isn't and never has been. Consumers are supported by the fact that Nvidia shares source code between their drivers, but were not the prime motivation. As I said previously, Nvidia made their *nix driver for commercial and GPGPU computing customers.
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game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly
Yeah, because when you own 1,000 games, you want to register with 1,000 different web sites and manually track every game you own. I want a single management interface for all of games. I no longer purchase any games that are not on Steam or from Blizzard. The last thing I want is to track my games.
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"Nvidia's drivers do work 100% with Linux."
Do they? It's been a long time since I have used Nvidia. Do their drivers work properly with Xinerama and XRandR now? So you can do things like setting up your multiple displays, screen rotation, etc... inside of the normal config panel of your favorite desktop manager?
Or do you still have to use that funky proprietary Nvidia utility for that which writes stuff to the xorg.conf file that only Nvidia cards undertand.
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Oh, and do you still have to recompile a wrapper every time you upgrade the kernel?
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No, that hasn't been the case for years. When you hear about some dude's nvidia driver breaking on a kernel update it's because he didn't install the driver in the "Easy Button" way.
Use the package manager NOT Nvidia's silly ".run" package from their website.
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You realize I'm not asking "can Nvidia do those things". Nvidia had "Twinview(tm)" when I last used them which allowed multiple monitors and was compatible with Xinerama on an API level.
That just meant you could extend your desktop across two monitors and when you maximize something it only maximizes in the monitor it is displayed in. It doesn't stretch across the whole virtual desktop splitting itself between the two screens.
However.. since it was only an Nvidia proprietary thing which was emulating Xinera
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You realize I'm not asking "can Nvidia do those things". Nvidia had "Twinview(tm)" when I last used them which allowed multiple monitors and was compatible with Xinerama on an API level.
That just meant you could extend your desktop across two monitors and when you maximize something it only maximizes in the monitor it is displayed in. It doesn't stretch across the whole virtual desktop splitting itself between the two screens.
However.. since it was only an Nvidia proprietary thing which was emulating Xinerama that meant utilites meant for configuring Xinerama didn't work with Nvidia cards.
Here's why that matters.
If you were using for example KDE (and I am assuming Gnome was similar) you could go into the control panel and change how your multiple monitors are set up. You could switch between desktop stretching vs cloning. You could swap left/right, etc... It was very easy and tidy... very Windows like.
BUT if you had an Nvidia card.. nope! You still have those functions in your control panel... but... THEY DON'T WORK! Instead you had to load this proprietary Nvidia app which then makes edits to your xorg.conf for you. Then.. it would restart X! So... all your applications you had open... now are closed.
I just did a Google search for Nvidia and Xinerama. The first result was an Ubuntu page about using Twinview. I take that to mean that your "years and years" comment is wrong and you are just assuming everything is ok because yes.. you can have two monitors.
Two monitors? Hell, I've run 12 monitors on Linux using the NVidia drivers. You can edit the xorg.conf file yourself, also. You do have to restart X, though.
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Restarting X is unacceptable in this day and age. I don't have to do that shit with the open-source Intel drivers; everything "just works". If I plug in a new monitor on my laptop, it's instantly activated and configured, and I can just move windows to it.
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It's too bad that Intel hardware has such crappy performance. I am more interested in the base case. That's FAR more relevant to FAR more people. People bragging about how complicated they can make their parlour tricks are ridiculous and irrelevant.
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Actually you can change the monitor layout without restarting X now.
And the Gnome control for moving the monitors around somewhat works, though it is unclear if they are special casing Nvidia or that NVidia is implementing the necessary parts of xrnr. The Nvidia control works somewhat better.
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And what's more (Score:3)
Valve has little to no Linux gaming clout. Ya they released a rebadge of Ubtunu with Steam on it. Yay. So far it has had very little influence. Most people continue to game on Windows (and to a lesser extent OS-X). They are not migrating in droves, nor are there droves of people who used Linux but didn't game that are now. Valve has changed very little in the Linux gaming space, as of yet,
The Unity engine and Kickstarter have done a lot more for driving any sort of Linux gaming than Valve.
Most of nVidia's g
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On OS-X it is all Apple's way, all the time. You gets the drivers you gets from Apple and live with it.
This is actually less true now - Nvidia is publishing their own driver packages for OS X [nvidia.com] because they are tired of Apple shipping ancient versions whenever they get around to including them in a point release.
They are labeled for Quadro, but they work just fine with GeForce. I'm running a Geforce GTX 780 Ti in my Mac Pro completely unmodified - all I don't get is the uEFI boot screens. Once the kext loads, everything is perfect.
AMD controls console business, leaving PC for NVDA (Score:2)
Is Valve some sort of major customer of Nvidia GPUs?
No, but Valve's users are.
Video games are a leading application for GPUs. The four hardcore video game platforms are Nintendo's AMD-powered console, Sony's AMD-powered console, Microsoft's AMD-powered console, and the PC. With another company owning the console space, NVIDIA's GPU business has to compete for PC makers and PC users with other GPU makers (AMD and Intel). And if PC games work poorly with NVIDIA products, PC users will have little reason to buy NVIDIA products. Valve runs a leading video game s
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Oh good someone else understands
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No, Linus needs to use his finger.
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No, Linus needs to use his finger.
I thought he already tried that. [slashdot.org]
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>> they need to apply some inside pressure on AMD/Nvidia to make their shit work at 100% with Linux.
Of course I'd prefer if nVidia's drivers were open, but don't lump nvidia's own binary-only drivers into the same pathetic group as AMD and nouveau.
I have been a Linux user for decades and in all that time havent stopped periodically ttrying different combination of drivers and GPU brands. In all that time my experience has always been the same: nVidia GPUs with nVidias own binary-only drivers are the
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You mention intel, but fail to acknowledge that they are probably the best bet on linux right now. Their drivers are open, and seem to actually work pretty good (in my fairly limited experience). I've even played a number of humble bundle games on my intel based laptop.
Maybe the performance isn't good, but at least they work enough to get X running across a couple screens without crashing/studdering/etc like the open source AMD/Nvidia drivers, or simply refusing to work (as the nvidia proprietary drivers ha
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Interesting that you actually have a functional issue with the nvidia propriatary drivers.
Pretty much every other anti-nvidia driver argument I've seen until now quickly decomposes under pressure into basically just another factess troll (usually from an AMD fanboi), or just another rant about the lack of open source.
I agree with you that intel could be an ideal solution but my current understanding is that their performance for gaming and full hardware decode of various media stream formats still has a way
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I must have missed when Valve open-sourced their game engines and started pressuring the same as a preference for games on Steam.
Oh wait, they haven't. Why should Valve give a shit about open-source drivers? If it's cheaper or easier or better for them to push NVidia/AMD to open their drivers in order to spur quality-parity with Microsoft Windows, they'll do that. If it's easier for Valve to just pay NVidia/AMD to improve their proprietary Linux drivers, they'll do that. I suspect they'll go for the latter,
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Seriously, I'm not sure why the AC thinks I meant Intel...
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I don't understand what you mean by 'non graphics competitors'. Intel, AMD, and ARM cpu offerings already have integrated GPUs with dual-head capability (and have for a few years now). There are no non graphics competitors.
Currently the best open source kernel and driver compatibility is with the Intel and AMD integrated GPUs. That's what all the KMS work was responsible for giving us. The performance of integrated GPUs has increased steadily over the last few years and has reached a point now where mos
Re:nvidia/ATI should keep their new stuff propriet (Score:4, Funny)
Intel continued to sell these to Atom users years after they should have been killed.
Killing the Atom users seems relatively merciful rather than continually being sold Intel video cards...
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Similar issue with Gsync / FreeSync (Score:3)
It looks like Nvidia's starting to abuse their market status by trying to force everyone onto their systems or at least to make it difficult to have alternatives. You can see a similar situation in the current adaptive sync Gsync / Freesync conflict where one became VESA standard (Freesync) and the other became proprietary and in general more expensive. I'm honestly considering avoiding Nvidia products at the rate they're going.
This will unfortunately only matter... (Score:2)
If (or when) NVidia stops putting effort into supporting Linux enough to produce drivers that are of a comparable quality to their larger markets is when you'll really start to hear an outcry. People are complaining now, but that's nothing compared to what will happen if or when NVidia decides that Linux is just not worth any effort to put any quality amount of effort into.
Of course, as I said... by that time it will be too late.
So... AMD or NVidia... it reminds me of an el
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Is there something wrong with the driver Nvidia supplies?
This is about the open source driver, not the proprietary one that Nvidia ships for Linux that works just as well as the windows one that they ship for Windows.
It might be time to sell the nVIDIA stock. (Score:2)
Its been doing well, but...
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It's been doing okay. NVIDIA is making money, but it is only up 4.5% over the last year. Compare this to 6.6% for Intel, 13% for the Dow Jones, and 16% for the S&P 500. It's only doing well when compared with smaller chipmakers like ARM (up only 4.2% in the last year), Qualcomm (down over 12% in the last year), and AMD (which has lost over 26% in the last year).
Not surprising. (Score:2)
Since the very reason given since the discussions began 15 or so years ago, Nvidia, and most of its competitors (Intel being a special exception for an unrelated reason) have always said that due to fears and concerns about reverse engineering, they - Nvidia and ATI, now AMD, have been slow and limited in making available any documentation or assistance that could directly or indirectly ease reverse engineering of its technology, its intellectual property (IP); not to Open Source / Free Software developers,
Opportunity (Score:2)
They have been, but there's a snag (Score:3)
That being their drivers suck. Also that writing GPU drivers is hard and the OSS community hasn't done a good job.
AMD released a bunch of hardware info, and what code they could (they can't just open up all of their proprietary driver, there are things in it they legally can't release). There were claims of an absolutely amazin' driver that would be made, better than Windows, that there were thousands of skilled OSS programmers who were chomping at the bit to work on it.
Well that was mostly just people brag
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I don't know about you but this is really bad. It's just as if you bought a car and the trunk came locked with a key only NVIDIA staff have.
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I don't know about you but this is really bad. It's just as if you bought a car and the trunk came locked with a key only NVIDIA staff have.
There is nothing locked. You can fully use your GPU with the proprietary driver. These days cars are chock full of proprietary components as well.
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It would be like buying a refrigerator, and discovering that in order to use it, you need to hire someone from the distributor to stand there and open the doors for you whenever you want something
I wouldn't have to hire anyone. The refrigerator would come with one for free.
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Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad analogy.
This is exactly the way it already is in the car industry and is going even more so as cars get more and more computierised. Car manufacturers are (ab)using the technlogy in the car to limit access to who can work on it.
Its only the branded dealerships and service centers that can even get the special tools and software necessary to talk to the car to diagnose, clear and repair faults properly. ith new cars You can't even replace a major compnent yourself since with many brands, the car won't even start if it sees an unrecognised serial number on the network, which you need a dealer tool to set.
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Bad analogy. Everyone opens their trunk from time to time. Very few people write their own video drivers. A better analogy would be a car manufacturer who does not allow you to reprogram the Anti-lock Braking System.
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Please do not feed the trolls.
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Open source is a bullshit fad, and I cannot wait for MORE companies like Nvidia to flip the bird right back at the freetards who have hurt all of us developers.
A fad that has lasted decades, and is growing.
Re:How is this really news? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of those linux machines that were required to post this comment also requires a high end GPU. I would venture to guess close to zero. Why sould a GPU manufacturer spend a lot of time supporting such a small user base?
Re:How is this really news? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know, maybe because most super computers on the fucking planet use GPUs? Why would scientists want a GPU manufacturer to support the operating system they do most of their work on? Oh, I can't think of a reason.
Meanwhile, we're trying to do some work in ROS. [ros.org] I certainly don't want CUDA cores to help speed up the processing and filtering of tens of thousands of LIDAR points. Nor could I possibly use shaders for anything outside of gaming.
This much sarcasm is killing me. Please get better opinions before I die.
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I don't know, maybe because most super computers on the fucking planet use GPUs?
Still a very small market. Lets see, they can spend resources working on the next card that can make them million or spend the same resources suppoting a small market that may make a few $100K. If you ran the company which would you choose?
Why would scientists want a GPU manufacturer to support the operating system...
It is not NVIDIA's job to support scientists. Their job is to make money for their stockholders.
Nor could I possibly use shaders for anything outside of gaming.
How is a private company obliged to support your project?
Sorry but "they re not allowing me to do what I want" just sounds very entitled to me.
PS. Using profanity just makes yo
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Since you can not seem to be able to have a civil conversation I will leave it here.
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Yet another person who does not know the difference between "I have a different opinion" and "troll". Here is a hint; "trolls" use profanity. As an ex-military friend of mine says, "Pot pot this is kettle, kettle. Colour check, over."
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Why would those scientists you mention need to use FOSS drivers?
Because they're not playing games, they're using the GPUs' computational power, and the proprietary drivers don't work for that presumably.
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That might have been a good troll in 2005, but it's at best a 2/10 in 2015.
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Now that's better. I'd give that 4/10; I almost thought you were serious until I saw the part about the future success of Windows on the Raspberry Pi.
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Serious comments are useless when the discussion is being drowned in comments from paid shills.
This discussion has made it obvious that Slashdot has been completely taken over by shills, and serious discussion can't be done here any more.
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wat
WTF is this post supposed to mean?
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wat
WTF is this post supposed to mean?
Simple, The graphics card GPU is faster than the main CPU can shovel data for it to process.
Not that I agree with the statement though. I think we are seeing a lot of processing being off loaded from the CPU and pushed onto the GPU. There is a lot of stuff a GPU can do much faster than the CPU, especially when doing modeling and rendering of physical objects or other math that lends itself to being done on GPUs.
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My post wasn't a question of "what does 2 teraflops mean", it was a question of what the fuck "there's no way you can remotely use that level of performance and features in games with an open source driver anyway." is supposed to mean.
It's a gibberish sentence.
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I mean these are so ridiculously powerful cards that if one buy one, that may be because you wanted to run some demanding and advanced game. There are at least a handful available now for linux desktops. But if you use an open source driver, and it manages to run the game without crashing or debilitating bugs, the driver will likely bottleneck you so much you get like 10% or 20% of the performance.
Way to waste a computer upgrade, both GPU and CPU - you do need to upgrade the latter to play advanced and rece
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Because they have TRADE SECRETS to protect. Secretes which are both theirs and ones that they have licensed and contractually are bound to protect.
I don't think they are anti-open source, they are just trying to protect their intellectual property. They are still releasing drivers for these devices and although you may not be entitled to see the source, you can still use that open source operating system with that shiny new video card.
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Because they have TRADE SECRETS to protect.
No. They don't want to protect the binary blobs from your eyes. They're not encrypting, they're signing. They want to prevent you from developing your own blob, by having your video card reject firmware not written by them.
I don't think they are anti-open source,
It's not a matter of opinion. They are anti-open source by definition, it's a fact dictated by their actions. They're locking down the cards that they manufacture in order to prevent their owners from writing open-source software to drive them. You can't get more anti-open source than thi
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How exactly does handing a binary blob to the Nouveau developers reveal any trade secrets? The binary blob is handed out in the driver anyway, it is just a pain to extract now.
This is just an attempt at killing Nouveau. It will most likely succeed.
Re: (Score:2)