I know it stinks for the people who are acustom to Nvidia's workflow, but it is quite hard to feel bad for Nvidia. A bigger fish is doing to them what they do to smaller players.
I agree, you can't blame users for it, but you can totally tell them to try to switch. DE and Wayland compositor developers can't spend resources cleaning up the mess that Nvidia created by refusing to upstream their driver and preventing Nouveau from working properly as well.
full disclosure that I work for nvidia, but not on drivers. many driver devs internally do actually contribute to nouveau as well. please don't make baseless claims simply because you're angry.
I've got nothing against nvidia at all. I just don't like running proprietary software on my computer. Looks like they're finally improving and I'm definitely happy about that. However, the driver has not been upstreamed yet.
I just wish they'd let the nouveau developers do their thing.
Nouveau is a highly capable open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs based on reverse-engineering.
For some older card generations (e.g. GTX 600 series) it was competitive with the official driver. But in every hardware generation since then, the GPU requires signed firmware in order to run at any decent clock speed.
The necessary signed firmware is present inside the proprietary driver, but nouveau can't load it because it's against the ToS to redistribute it.
Most GPU features are available but run at 0.1x speed or slower because of this single reason. Nvidia could absolutely fix this "tomorrow" if they were motivated.
A coworker of mine formerly worked on Nvidia's proprietary drivers. They remarked at just how wrong the Nouveau driver was about certain things, including the functionality and reasons for certain registers.
The nouveau is buggy and has poor performance, sometimes getting blacklisted by various software as well because of this (Example: Chromium - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18834715). It doesn't help that NVIDIA is basically doing nothing to help the nouveau team to do a better job, and that their own driver is also buggy and has poor performance.
I thought the main issue with nouveau at this point was that Nvidia is locking the open drivers out switching the GPU into the performance power states? No amount of optimization is going to be able to get around that.
Yepper. Nvidia continues to cripple their hardware for anyone bereft of their firmware signing key. All re-clocking and power management is locked behind API's and hardware that will only accept calls from Nvidia signed firmware.
Nouveau is pretty much dead in the water due to it. It's why I'm seriously considering not buying another Nvidia card if AMD's GPU compute frameworks can manage to mature a bit more.
No, it is NVIDIA who is joke, Nouveau doesn't support these cards just because of NVIDIA policy and management. And they are the only who deserve the blame in this case, not Nouveau or Google.
They've been called 'the worst company to work with' by the Linux kernel devs and are locking their GPUs down with signed firmware. Nouveau driver development is no longer possible for GM20x and newer GPUs because of this.
What's embarrassing, is Nvidia's inability to provide upstream driver themselves, or to allow nouveau which already exists, use all their hardware features[1]. Linux kernel has quality rules, and if Nvidia can't follow them, it's their problem. It should not be in the interest of Linux maintainers to accept any junk upstream.
The bugginess of the nouveau driver has been an accepted fact since time immemorial. Hence the reason for Torvalds' middle finger on the subject. Nvidia is slowly coming around but the arc of history isn't treating it well.
This is what caused me to totally dump nvidia. Their new cards require signed drivers to enable boosting behaviour, and they are unwilling to build and sign the nouveau driver. It's not like it's hard to set up a buildbot...
Nvidia blocks the Nouveau drivers from working properly on Maxwell2 or newer cards: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
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