Nvidia to release documentation on Nouveau project

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html

by throwaway2048 • 13 years ago

256 92 13 years ago

lists.freedesktop.org

zurn• 13 years ago

There have been these baby steps lately, enabling the 2d support on the tegra 2 and now supporting "out of the box" functionality (i guess getting a functioning 2d desktop). I wonder what the relationship is with their stance on 3D support. These aren't really contradicting the proprietary driver monopoly on 3D acceleration that they like to keep.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

Could it be they hope to offload the basic driver support to an open source project, especially with the shift towards DRI/DRM, and they plan to move the proprietary 3d support to a blob attached at the mesa layer? I feel like this would be a positive move overall, even if it's not completely ideal.

swetland3• 13 years ago

That's the model we've ended up with with most of the mobile GPU drivers in Android -- open source kernel side managing resources and queueing and proprietary goop in a library in userspace where it can do limited harm (can't crash the kernel, clobber arbitrary memory, etc). Not as nice as a 100% open driver, but a massive improvement over proprietary binary glop in the kernel.

bostik• 13 years ago

I feel like this would be a positive move overall

There is one aspect which really could gain from this: the eventual reduction of the harm from the "3/11 rule" fallout.

If and when Nvidia's hardware works acceptably well out of the box on linux systems, there will be less need for annoyed forum postings and endless "help, please" threads. AFAIK Google weighs recently updated pages more than older ones, so the negative PR hits from badly behaving hardware should fizzle and die out in time.

From a purely personal point of view, a unified DRM/KMS access scheme will be nice with Wayland in mind.

thejosh• 13 years ago

After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.

tete2• 13 years ago

I remember, long ago when the Linux community was much smaller everyone wanted a killer feature so hardware vendors would do something like this. Never thought something like Steam could be such a killer feature.

devx3• 13 years ago

Gaming is definitely a "killer app" of any platform. Heck, there are devices out there with platforms that only do that, and they are very successful. I'm talking about consoles, obviously.

Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only). It took Google even more years after that to finally put 2 and 2 together, and realize that the reason why so many still choose iOS over Android is because of gaming.

Same goes for Facebook with Farmville, and so on. So yeah, if you want a very successful platform/OS, definitely focus on gaming as much as you can. It's what brings the "mainstream" in.

velodrome• 13 years ago

Hardcore gamers will do ANYTHING for that extra 1 fps.

Linux exposes a lot of options that Windows and OS X will not.

Imagine if these particular gamers switch to linux. They can significantly improve the platform by trying everything they can for that extra performance.

The improvements could have far reaching consequences. Improvements that could possibly help people solving hard problems (HPC). It is not out of the realm of possibility.

swetland3• 13 years ago

I'm skeptical this is related to steamos/steambox. Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache.

It's very cool that they're starting to drop docs to support the open drivers, but I suspect it's going to be a long road from these small steps to the open drivers being fully competitive with the closed ones...

jfoster2• 13 years ago

Nvidia has been good when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux, but they've never helped out with open source drivers. Then this happened on the same day as the SteamOS announcement. It's quite a massive coincidence if it is one. Nvidia's refusal to help out with open source drivers has been a controversial issue in the Linux community for at least a decade or so. I'd be very surprised if SteamOS played no role in this.

xradionut• 13 years ago

"Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache."

LOL!

Try getting Optimus working on laptop under Linux. I have a Nvidia video card in my Dell that's basically a paperweight, unless I run Windows.

exDM693• 13 years ago

After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.

For a long time, the Nvidia proprietary driver has been the best gpu driver for Linux, not that it has been super good but the competition has been really awful. Only in the recent years there has been any competition if you want a GPU with good 3d features. Intel has had decent 3d only in their latest few generations of integrated GPUs and ATI drivers have ranged from not working at all to barely usable.

That being said, this is a very welcome change and will hopefully make the nouveau drivers better in the long run. In particular, this is good news for the common linux graphics architecture (dri/drm, etc) and Wayland.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Yes

nVidia would be the way to go on professional application on Linux (think 3D Modelling and such)

Also stuff like this http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/gelato.html

zokier• 13 years ago

I would be quite surprised if Steam{OS,Box} wouldn't strongly prefer proprietary nVidia drivers, considering the history of co-operation between Valve and nVidia on this front.

tete2• 13 years ago

This is amazing. Well, not really as amazing anymore from a technical perspective, but the Nouveau-Project, which had a really hard road came into existence because such a move seemed to be impossible, back then.

devx3• 13 years ago

Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware?

Especially after the NSA scandal, we should really demand open source firmware from hardware manufacturers with every chance we get.

swetland3• 13 years ago

Proprietary drivers and firmware are really two separate issues.

Proprietary drivers usually are the result of licensed code that can't be open sourced or IP concerns (giving away the "secret sauce", patent worries, etc).

Provided it can't be updated behind your back, I don't see proprietary firmware as particularly harmful unto itself -- it'd be nice if it were open and make the device less of a black box, but from the POV of the driver or user, there's not really much difference between a device with an embedded CPU running some firmware and a device implementing the same functionality in the asic.

exDM693• 13 years ago

Other than inertia, and an overrated idea that proprietary drivers give you a "competitive advantage" over your competitors' very different hardware, why aren't more manufacturers making open source firmware for their hardware?

While this is arguably true for most hardware, GPUs are different from mundane hardware like ethernet adapters. The driver source code will reveal secrets about the hardware architecture, and the architecture changes in every generation. The advantage is not in the software itself, it is not showing the cards you are playing with.

In theory, it would be possible to give out the source code to the video drivers but it would not make sense to give out the source for chips in development. At best, you could get source code dumps after a new chip has rolled out. This is not really open source.

Yes, I want quality open source video drivers but on the other hand I want bleeding edge hardware and competition that drives hardware development.

Disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living and I'm an open source enthusiast.

RamiK2• 13 years ago

I don't see why nVidia can't release a semi open-source driver. For previous generations they can open up everything while the latest generation would come with an pre-compiled blob that can be disabled with a simple compile flag for the purists.

This will allow them to play nice with the kernel, support previous products while taking bug reports and patches, and help game engine designers target 90% of nVidia's user base without signing an NDA.

devx3• 13 years ago

I'm fine with them releasing the source after the chip is out (why would I need the driver before the chip is out?!) - just not 3 years later, like they're basically doing with Tegra 2 drivers now.

shmerl• 13 years ago

At last. This is great news.

mortdeus• 13 years ago

I just hope nvidia builds wayland support into their proprietary drivers. I mean if nvidia chooses not to support nouveau as their main DRI drivers, thats fine. However the least they can do is make sure they do as much as they can to invest in Linux moving forward and not force users (and app developers) to make painful decisions regarding whether they should use the proprietary drivers or nouveau.

For example if nvidia decides to focus and invest all their effort solely into mir and unity support for their closed drivers, thus giving everybody who backs wayland the shaft in the process, its going to end up being a major problem for developers like myself. Philosophically and pragmatically.

zanny3• 13 years ago

Well, as someone who should understand the value of free software, it is kind of your fault for buying a part from a company who has never supported foss before, and this move is quite a change of pace from them.

If they pull an AMD, except they do it right (ie, just depreciate the proprietary driver for enterprise compute usage and focus entirely on making gallium great) they have my business forever.

I'm thinking of getting a tegra note next month, on the pretense that at least Nvidia provides open source Tegra drivers through a 3rd party so that the platform is hackable. The new Nexus 7 is a disgrace since smart people have to waste their time reverse engineering the gpu in the Snapdragon because Qualcomm is being a dick.

jrockway• 13 years ago

I think the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX, and the kind of people nVidia wants to hire don't want to contribute proprietary blobs to Linux when they can just work for the competition on open-source stuff. Thus, nVidia is kind of forced by the market to let the engineers make at least token contributions to Linux.

(This is also why DRM never works; the type of person that could implement it correctly wouldn't want to implement it correctly.)

telephonetemp2• 13 years ago

the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX

I agree with you about Windows but note that outside of the U.S. very few software engineers ever even get to work with OS X.

jon-wood• 13 years ago

Really? Every developer I know in the UK who doesn't develop for an MS stack is running either Linux or OS X, and that's been the case for the last ten years.

timruffles• 13 years ago

Have you been to a software conference outside of the US? Certainly in Europe it's Mac dominated.

arkx• 13 years ago

Not the case at all. Travel to Europe and see for yourself. :)

kjjw• 13 years ago

Untrue.

conductor3• 13 years ago

Writing code that goes into proprietary software is like writing a book which can read only your editor. Programming (at least in some areas) is like art, you want the world to see your code, what you've done there. Give me a name of one famous programmer. I bet he is writing free and open source software.

thisishugo• 13 years ago

Rich Hickey[0], in addition to making open source software[1], also produces closed source software[2]. Similarly, Joel Spolsky[3] is involved in a fairly high profile[4] closed source project. That's just off the top of my head.

[0] https://github.com/richhickey

[1] http://clojure.org

[2] http://www.datomic.com

[3] http://www.joelonsoftware.com

[4] http://stackoverflow.com

tinco• 13 years ago

Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg.

stephencanon• 13 years ago

"famous" != "great". For every famous programmer who cares about recognition and does open-source stuff to get her name out there, there's a great programmer who cares more about getting paid to do awesome things, and isn't particularly concerned with public recognition. There are thousands of astoundingly good programmers who you have never heard of, and many of them are working on closed-source projects.

vilya• 13 years ago

I think that's more to do with closed source software usually being published under the name of a company, rather than the individuals behind it; so there's less opportunity for a closed-source developer to become famous.

gnarbarian• 13 years ago

John Carmack and Michael Abrash.

lawnchair_larry• 13 years ago

This demonstrates complete ignorance of modern DRM and who has worked on it. You could not be more wrong. One word: Tarnovsky

Also, nobody really cares if they work on proprietary code. Such developers are rare.

gioele2• 13 years ago

What I have noticed is that once smart people are exposed to open source programming they have big problems going back to the modus operandi of closed source.

A good middle-ground seems to be doing like github: you keep working on your closed projects using open-source technologies and methodologies.

Arnt• 13 years ago

BTDT, signed the NDA, and the DRM I know is as good as it realistically can become.

mdellabitta• 13 years ago

I would say this is either driven by Gabe Newell or Linus Torvalds's middle finger.

tankenmate2• 13 years ago

Grenades sometimes hit their targets, flowers never miss.

blinkingled• 13 years ago

This, again, doesn't really mean anything. Nvidia did the 2D only nv driver for the same reasons - to make their GPUs usable out of the box on Linux. Now instead they are doing documenation that someday will help do the same but using nouveau driver and the community's efforts.

The key areas where the documentation will be needed and have impact - power management and clocking, 3D stuff etc. - Nvidia isn't promising anything on that. If they hired a bunch of OSS developers and promised to release all docs eventually like AMD that would be news.

So no Nvidia - I am still not buying anything you sell.

RamiK2• 13 years ago

Check out the base directory: ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/

That Thumbs.db pretty much says it all :)

surrealize• 13 years ago

After the "Linus flipping off Nvidia" thing, one of the Nvidia people asked what they could do better on a linux mailing list. Matthew Garrett responded, "Move your 3D driver to userspace and use nouveau for command submission." [1] I thought that would be a marked improvement over the status quo; keeping the proprietary stuff out of kernel-space would make things so much easier.

I hadn't seen any possibly-relevant follow-ups until now though. Here's hoping!

[1] http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2012-dis...

drill_sarge• 13 years ago

So Nvidia is now doing what AMD is doing with their engagement on freedesktop and kernel recently? Good step but it's not the "breakthrough" like all the news sites are trying to make this up.

Finster• 13 years ago

This isn't in reaction to Valve's SteamOS announcement, is it?

Nvidia to release documentation on Nouveau project

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