Linus Torvalds drops F-bomb on NVIDIA

Aw diddums

Some people don't want to play with his toy, well tough titties Torvalds.

Here's the thing, they don't have to and you can't make them, get over it Either that or go join Apple.

Classy, Linus

This clearly shows what's wrong with Linux these days, it turned into full blown punk ideology - but strangely fuelled by big business and some advertising companies riding the misleading "open" mantra.

I'm glad I jumped out of that subculture some years back. These days I just use it and don't get personally involved. If NVIDIA doesn't want to support it it's up to them, don't buy their hardware to run Linux on - simples.

Kudos

Now can you the same to the Raspberry Pi people?

Same problem there: on one hand they ride on the Linux name for their hardware, on the other their OpenGL GPU driver is closed and a pile of shit and X doesn't have 2D acceleration.

Plus I'd love to see what PR moves the Liz & Eben couple^Wgang Would pull if Linus told them to fuck themselves.

Linus is right

I think NVidia is shooting itself in the foot by not opening up at least the kernel portion of its drivers.

I can understand why they did it. For a long time keeping the code closed helped maintain a commercial advantage. It stops rivals lifting their optimizations or finding the weaknesses / bugs to embarrass NVidia. I expect there are also contractual reasons which would make opening the code non trivial.

But by NOT opening up it finds itself forced to maintain binary blobs against a multitude of Linux distributions (and guaranteed to break when the kernel / X11 updates). It makes it harder for them to find or fix bugs (since nobody else will do it) and increases the burden of testing and development. Additionally by driving people away it increases the amount of business that rivals like AMD and Intel enjoy.

Opening the code would save them a lot of money. Distributors would take over much of the maintenance and bug fixes would be forthcoming from all directions. If they CAN'T open the old source for whatever reason they should at least throw their weight and technical assistance behind the noveau open source drivers and allow them to reach a speed and maturity that the old code can simply be mothballed. Same result in the end but it should really happen.

I also think that the above will play out in tablet land too. Some SoCs are GPL'ing their kernel drivers and if Nvidia doesn't they may find themselves losing a lot of business.

>You must be a cave man because the market has been shifting away from desktops for quite some time now. The mobile and tablet market is where the game is

Yes I keep hearing this, yet seeing absolutely none of it. Sure there are a lot of phones around, but they hardly act as a replacement for desktops & laptops. And tablets? Ha. Ha. Ha.

These "TABLITS R D FOOTUR" raving journos are little Knuts that don't realise that reality doesn't care how often you repeat drivel - it won't become any truer.

I was surprised by the focus of this too: I've always used nVidia rather than ATI in my machines because of their *better* driver support for Linux - and as others have pointed out, ATI manage to suck for drivers even on Windows. Laptop with an ATI chipset? No drivers for you! Talk to the manufacturer ... yes, they went bust months ago and never bothered providing support or drivers anyway, so you're stuffed. Thanks for buying ATI - won't be making that mistake again, will you?

The Optimus thing is interesting: it seems nVidia needed access to the DMA-BUF buffering stuff, but some developers were objecting because their driver is partly closed-source.

I can understand the desire for GPLed drivers from nVidia, but wearing an end-user hat this does look very much like "users screwed by ideology". ATI don't seem any better in this respect - at least, their Linux drivers are also proprietary and will hit exactly this issue too - it's just nVidia were actively involved in Linux kernel development and seem to have hit it first. Maybe if Intel manage to produce competitive graphics cards with open-source drivers, it'll force nVidia and ATI to re-think - but for now, taking users hostage and obstructing nVidia supporting them better is hardly helpful.

The closer GPUs resemble programmable logic

...the more secrets you reveal to the competition by publishing the documentation.

The the closer to the edge of the envelope the chips run, the less foolproof they become. Poking a wrong value into a register here or switching on this circuit here before that one could so easily result in a cooked chip, and support and warranties quickly become impossible. I can absolutely see why it's in Nvidia's and ATI's interest to obfuscate and safeguard their technology as much as they possibly can and take the flak. Just look at the extraordinary lengths Altera and Xilinx go to with their software to protect themselves from each other and their users.

It would be in everyone's interest to have a 3D API that is more pervasive and keeps up with DirectX. Perhaps provide a virtual machine sandbox specifically for the closed source drivers to run on. These things would make supporting a range of OSs less of a headache for the hardware vendors.

Can somebody explain why Linux support for Intel GMA is so lame?

To all those saying that Android runs Linux and hence NVIDIA should open source their drivers: your comments are irrelevant because there are no mobile GPU makers which fully open source their GPU drivers (although some will give you the source code if you sign a commercial agreement with them).

Graphics drivers are just too fundamental to the system to risk some open source hack-monkey fucking them up.

nVidia has more important things to do

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/18033970

Sorry FOSS folks, but I doubt you can match the spending power of the US government.

What!? No “Figure 1„ or “digitus impudicus" references? Opportunities like that are not to be wasted, you know.