Nvidia PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMjk

by llambda • 14 years ago

95 104 14 years ago

phoronix.com

twiceaday• 14 years ago

I was hoping for something written by a human and instead got a robot regurgitating copy. Whatever.

zainny• 14 years ago

I was actually pleasantly surprised by this response. Most PR responses to public criticism are much much worse.

MortenK• 14 years ago

Agreed, this a measured, professional response to a childish, unrestrained rant from a community primadonna.

ajross5• 14 years ago

It's remarkably straight-talking for a press release, actually. Money quote is this one: "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure.".

Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change.

I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree.

(Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)

loxs3• 14 years ago

Yup, totally the kind of bullshit Linus gave the finger to... I can imagine how much of this "PR" stuff one like Linus gets to deal with...

tadfisher2• 14 years ago

Which is ridiculous, considering they cherry-picked RandR of all the technologies in the "Linux common infrastructure" to support with their latest driver release. I suppose I should be grateful that my projector can work without opening up NVIDIA Settings and tweaking about, but it certainly flies in the face of this statement and belies their true motivations: they'll implement the bare-minimum Linux-only feature support that will keep their business/edu customers from fleeing to AMD, and that's about it.

mhurron2• 14 years ago

RandR is a Xorg extension, it's not a Linux kernel thing. To continue to provide graphics options for their customers that use OS's with recent Xorg installs (they make a FreeBSD driver available too) they had to support RandR.

This is right in line with 'we support our customers/users' not whatever the Linux kernel guys feel like doing today.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

It is relevant to the controversy if you are being called "the worst company to work with in the Linux community" by the chief Linux guy.

ajross5• 14 years ago

Only insofar as that quote lives out of context. Linus was quite clearly responding to a question about graphics drivers.

freshhawk2• 14 years ago

Basically: "We only care about keeping a checkbox next to 'linux support' in our feature grid. We don't care about how shitty the experience is for linux users"

It is refreshingly blunt, i'll give them that.

keypusher• 14 years ago

I'll take nVidia over ATI for a Linux box anyday, the driver difference is night and day.

kyrra• 14 years ago

There could be a number of reasons for what Nvidia is choosing to do here. I've worked for a company that provided a kernel module separately (though, it was all GPL). There were a number of reasons for this:

* The architecture of our driver did not fit with the subsystem we were playing in (this was a SCSI module). We worked with the package maintainers, and without a near complete re-write of our code, it would not have been accepted.

* Part of the above design was cause by cross-platform code we had (parts of the driver was shared between Windows, Linux, AIX, others).

* When supporting customers that run older version of a distro, there would be no-way to give them the latest features if the code was part of the kernel. So our latest product offerings would be incompatible with older systems. We would have been at the mercy of RedHat and SUSE to backport our drivers into their older releases. (or would have had to pay them a lot of money to do it).

We had a driver that basically started development in 1997 or so, that there was no-way we were going to rewrite it just to get it into the linux kernel.

For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.

cube13• 14 years ago

I agree, they get points for not trying to hide the fact that Linus is right.

Unfortunately, "Yeah, so what?" is not the kind of PR you want here. This was an opportunity to go "Yes, that's how it is now, but in the future, we're planning on supporting all this wonderful stuff on Linux!"

Instead, it's an advertisement for ATI/AMD's Linux support.

rsanchez16• 14 years ago

They don't care about how shitty it is for Windows users either. Optimus works very poorly with nVidia's PhysX and 3D Vision, for example.

runjake• 14 years ago

> It's remarkably straight-talking for a press release

It was? They didn't even address the huge issue that it was Linus, the guy who created Linux, exacting the criticism.

ineedtosleep• 14 years ago

This makes me wonder: are there any truly `built-for Linux` video card/chips out there? Aside from ATI/AMD, nVidia and Intel, I can only think of Matrox and S3 -- with S3 being recently bought by HTC, and I have no idea what Matrox does these days, especially after the Parhelia failure.

loxs3• 14 years ago

Well, maybe the ones that are installed in half of the world's smartphones?

jevinskie• 14 years ago

I believe most of those are still supported with binary-only drivers.

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

Intel releases Linux support for every new graphics chipset they build, before the hardware ships. That seems about as close to "built for Linux" as you can get.

duskwuff• 14 years ago

Not necessarily very good support, though: http://communities.intel.com/message/158477

technomancy• 14 years ago

I learned my lesson years ago and have stuck with Intel for my last four laptops. I haven't had any compatibility issues or manual configuration necessary since then.

pmahoney• 14 years ago

I seem to recall at least one attempt several years ago at making an "open source" video card. Not sure if this is the one I remember, but it seems similar (from 2008):

http://www.tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/21/2136243/Open-Sou...

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

Intel. Works very, very closely closely with Linux devs, and AFAIK releases full specs. Given that Intel are expanding well beyond their CPU origins (Intel NICs are among the best I've worked with, graphics chipsets are pretty good, others generally work well), this is cool stuff. In the case of my most recent Thinkpad purchase (May 2011), it took updating to the latest kernel on Debian 3-4 months after purchase to iron out all the bugs (hangs/restarts), but since then it's been golden.

AMD aren't far behind, and since they picked up ATI (Radeon graphics), the Radeon support is also quite good.

S3 were making some noises about being very solidly behind Linux as of 4-5 years ago (bought me a round of drinks at a Linux conference, so their support is demonstrably liquid, if not solid). I've had pretty good experience with older Matrox chipsets, no idea where they are now.

My experience is largely desktop, server, and some light video viewing. Hard-core gamers may have other complaints, but my understanding is that you'll probably end up on Windows or a dedicated gaming platform in that case anyway.

wtracy• 14 years ago

Again, employer is sucking and blocking access to Phoronix for me. Is the text of the release available anywhere else?

rwar• 14 years ago

http://pastebin.com/3fyLWT3W

brettnak• 14 years ago

Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience.

Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier.

While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.

As a result:

1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.

2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.

3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.

At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.

pja• 14 years ago

Try here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=184564

blinkingled2• 14 years ago

This solves nothing - the driver support for NVidia GPUs in Linux is still crappy, FreeBSD is worse, Kernel upgrades on machines with Nvidia GPU and binary driver are still a pain, instability and bugs are still plenty etc. So this PR response deserves another huge "FU" to Nvidia for refusing the provide documentation - especially in the face of ATI and Intel doing so successfully.

I stopped buying anything Nvidia - all my machines are AMD or Intel only. It's also very easy to avoid Tegra based Androids.

binarycrusader• 14 years ago

Kernel upgrades on machines with nVidia GPUs and binary drivers are a pain because the Linux kernel developers have chosen to not provide a stable binary interface, and in some cases, have deliberately broken interfaces by changing them to "GPL-only".

Meanwhile, Windows, Solaris, and FreeBSD users generally have no problems between kernel updates.

blinkingled2• 14 years ago

Oh, not that binary API stability flamewar again :) It is what it is - Nvidia doesn't play well with it is the problem - others do it well.

luser0012• 14 years ago

I just went from the open source Nouveau drivers to the closed source one a few days ago.

My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right.

Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this?

Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.

mcpherrinm• 14 years ago

As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.

rcxdude• 14 years ago

The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine.

The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.

luser0012• 14 years ago

Ok, thanks. I didn't realize people were working around limitations of the Nvidia driver etc.

tux1968• 14 years ago

I have refused to use Nvidia products for years even on any Windows machines; because of their policy towards Linux. Wish more people who cared about Linux would vote with their wallets.

What gets me about Linus' response though is that he's constantly labeling free software advocates as "religious" nuts. Nvidia's stance seems consistent with a certain pragmatism that I'd have thought he was fine with. He's had no aversion to using closed source proprietary software when it suited his purposes (eg. Bitkeeper) But now he's upset that Nvidia don't want to play ball?

Having said that it's nice to see him make such a strong statement that I wholeheartedly agree with, just wish it hadn't been so long in coming.

j_baker• 14 years ago

I think open sourcing drivers makes pragmatic sense to the Linux community more than it does with Bitkeeper. Without open source drivers, how can the Linux community make Nvidia's drivers a better citizen of their ecosystem?

sounds2• 14 years ago

Some more thoughts along the same lines -

Linus probably doesn't care if Nvidia wants to keep their GPU _accelerated_ drivers closed for desktop machines.

Nvidia Optimus is what Linus is talking about. It switches between an Intel GMA and an Nvidia GPU "transparently" for power saving reasons. Nvidia gave the whole Linux community the shaft and didn't provide any Linux support at all for those laptops and notebooks.

Laptop and notebook designers generally end up with designs that only work when power saving works correctly, and the failure mode isn't "runs slower," it's "catches fire and destroy things." So the lack of any help from Nvidia is not something that can be ignored - your laptop will be worse than useless if you put Linux on it.

This is why (my guess) Linus is so upset.

rsanchez16• 14 years ago

I'm done with nVidia products, not because of their Linux support, but because of their lack of support of Optimus on ANY platform. Until I can use Optimus in an optimal way, with PhysX and 3D Vision working properly and more games running at max settings, instead of the crippled version they ship, I'm done with nVidia.

Optimus causes headaches to many more people than just the Linux community.

voidr• 14 years ago

Optimus was my first huge disappointment for me from NVidia. When I used Linux, I preferred NVidia over ATI, because it worked out of the box with the official NVidia driver. This all changed when I bought a laptop with NVidia Optimus, it didn't work at all. If NVidia had provided a proprietary driver, that would have been fine, but they simply ignored it, which was the "fuck you" to the consumers who wanted to use Linux on their laptops which had NVidia Optimus.

NVidia, should just do what they did before: make things work for the [Linux] consumer. Just make a proprietary/open source/open core/semi open source driver that just works with Optimus hardware without having to hack stuff. It's 2012, video should just work.

unreal37• 14 years ago

I'm listening to Torvalds talk that this comment came from, and it's actually quite interesting.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

cfn2• 14 years ago

Yes the talk is quite good and it is worth watching. Quite a few insightfull questions and answers. I would even say that the nVidia outburst was the least interesting part.

dangerboysteve• 14 years ago

The first lines speaks volumes. NVIDIA PR Responds. I would think Linus deserves at least a rebuttal from their CEO.

stblack• 14 years ago

Note the press release doesn't address an important part of Linus' rant: that Nvidia is a huge PITA to deal with.

I hope that folks at Nvidia took note of this, at least.

nemo1618• 14 years ago

I hope they aren't as awful as he makes them out to be. I was aspiring to work for them someday :|

rmk2• 14 years ago

As has been discussed here before, the individual developers might not be bad people, this seems to be more of a management issue.

You can see developers replying on the nvidia forums regarding bugs, asking for bug reports etc.[1]. So you will probably be alright if you work there. If you go into management however... (gives you the evil eye) ;)

[1] http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c78...

robomartin6• 14 years ago

At the risk of having the Linus Torvalds fan-boys fire all missiles in my general direction I'll stick my head out and say this:

I can only admire the guy for what he has created and accomplished. He is, without dispute, a key figure in the history of modern computing.

And, he can be a real asshole.

I have not watched a lot of his talks, just a few. The two that stick in my memory is one at Google and the one where he, well, makes friends with nVidia.

In the Google case he tells people who are in the room that they are stupid. In the nVidia case he tells the entire company "fuck you". How unbecoming.

While I found both talks to be very interesting, as a professional, I don't take kindly to this kind of behavior. It really diminishes the person in my mind to the level of an immature kid. Sophomoric behavior and jokes have their place and time.

He seems to admit that he is not polite and that he found a need to be direct. OK. Armed with that information one ought to temper childish impulses to engage in that sort of name-calling. One can be very direct and firm in making points and voicing opinion without resorting to diminishing and talking-down to those you are addressing.

Here one of Mark Twains sayings is very appropriate: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

He should stop and think for a fraction of a second before verbally defecating all over his audience like that. He is and should be smart enough to understand the value of not being a jerk.

Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course. Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.

sophacles3• 14 years ago

And some of us prefer humanity, with it's imperfections and emotional content over plastic perfectionism. Your point?

robomartin6• 14 years ago

Hmmm. How to explain? OK. Here it goes:

I think you are a a stupid asshole. Fuck you! Your work is stupid. Your ideas are stupid and the choices your made are stupid.

Of course, I don't mean that at all. Not even for a microsecond. Now think about how you would have felt if my reply to your post contained that. And if I meant it.

Would you be inclined to have a conversation with me? Or work with me? Or attempt to find common ground? Or even have a discussion where we could continue to disagree yet still be able to explore each others' mental space?

Probably not. There is no excuse in my book for being a jerk in almost any context. No matter who the person might be or their prior and current accomplishments.

ciupicri3• 14 years ago

> Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course.

The one about manipulation?

> Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.

Yeah, right. Should I point you to the online petitions made to convince nVidia to open source their drivers? Guess what was their result. Nothing.

sseveran• 14 years ago

Has the community tried to buy the info to at least cover nVidia's cost of compiling and releasing documentation?

lhnn• 14 years ago

Yes, the one about manipulation. It's in the title. Go ahead: read, do the opposite of what he suggests, and see how many people thank you for how "not-Dale Carnegie" you are.

wamatt• 14 years ago

His tone may be sophomoric, but your world view seems overly naive.

Having a civil conversation is good. But results are the objective, not the form of discourse.

In other words, I'd take a crude, blunt emotional reaction, if it were in fact useful, over eloquent pontification that doesn't result in anything.

Furthermore, the irony is that Nvidia is taking a practical approach, whereas it is Linus that is being idealistic, much like your own position.

blackhole2• 14 years ago

Do you know what my entire experience with the programming community has been? It has been every single asshole in a mile-radius telling me I am an idiot for some ridiculous reason that serves only to demonstrate how utterly retarded they are and how little they understand about my profession. I've had networking programmers try to tell me I'm writing my graphics engine wrong. It would be comical if it wasn't so incredibly aggravating.

So until other programmers stop being giant assholes, I find the rhetoric surrounding Linus' impoliteness to be ridiculous at best, and hypocritical at worst. Linus is simply doing what is necessary to get brick-headed morons to listen to him.

robomartin6• 14 years ago

If that is your entire experience with the programming community you, my friend, landed on the wrong side of town for some reason. I have never had even a small sliver of that experience, and I've worked with hundreds of people.

This is not about not being polite. This is about PUBLICLY deriding people. That's bad manners, to say the least.

rsanchez16• 14 years ago

Yeah, so what? You know this, I know this, even Linus knows this and admits it. But he doesn't do it just to troll someone. If you've pissed him off enough for him to curse at you, there's (almost) always a good reason why he did it.

If you really think he's a fool, you know nothing of the situation. Linus has been working on nVidia support on Linux, so he does know what he's talking about. He has been frustrated by nVidia's lack of cooperation and he got their attention.

Far more could be accomplished with nVidia if they actually worked with the Linux community. "Civility" has nothing to do with it.

rsanchez16• 14 years ago

The real problem is that Optimus still sucks on Windows 7. Optimus causes problems for games, problems for nVidia's 3D Vision technology, even problems with PhysX. I could be playing so many games much more smoothly and at higher quality if Optimus would actually work well with games and other nVidia technology. Unfortunately, don't expect good Optimus support on Linux until nVidia gets their Optimus act together on Windows.

Nvidia PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

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