Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA’s default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author’s intent.
Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.
Riddle me this, why is there such a thing as proprietary drivers for anything? Especially consumer facing products like this?
Don’t you want anyone and anything using your product in any situation? Help me understand NVIDIA’s bit with this?
They don’t want you to see the “if benchmark_xyz { do less work }” blocks of code.
Likely a combination of 4 things:
-
They have third party firmware in their blobs that they are under NDA regarding the source code.
-
They believe in the source code is a large part of their success and don’t want to reveal it.
-
They believe giving out the source code will allow many inferior variants of the software, impacting their brand.
-
Control; the more source code they have in mesa the more of their code can be rejected by mesa. Keeping their stuff as blobs allows them to put in whatever hacks they want.
-
They can open their code without merging into mesa
-
They don’t want you to use “old” GPUs
Sure but why open their code without getting the integration benefits?
- Getting to use GPL-only symbols
- Still much easier for distros
- Example of drivers
And again we are talling about code not being rejected as main goal.
-
-
I assume nVidia have licensed other code that they don’t have the rights to distribute the source code for.
I get what the GPL fans want here, but it’s just going to lead to a gimped driver, no driver, or an even larger shim between the open and closed source bits. The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.
With GPUs being used for AI stuff and all sane people using Linux for servers, no, Linux market isn’t small at all for Nvidia.
The Linux market is massive for Nvidia. Nobody is using Windows for ML and everybody is using Nvidia for ML.
And the relation between graphical drivers and ML is?..
Life’s too short to do ML on a CPU. In some cases literally. You can’t do any reasonable ML without a GPU. And you need drivers for that.
GPUs are the primary hardware used for ML workloads…
Yes, but you don’t need graphical drivers to do ML on a GPU, you just need the part of the drivers that lets you do ML. Accelerated graphics are almost completely unrelated. Nvidia can stop offering graphics drivers while still ofering ML drivers and still make a very good living.
Even if they continue offering graphics drivers they don’t have to offer them for free. Their main clients are people who do professional graphical and video editing, who can drop hefty sums on driver licensing because they already pay a lot for the hardware and support. Gamers are a tiny amount of their revenue, and over 90% of that tiny revenue is Windows anyway.
At this point Nvidia can snap their fingers and discontinue all their support for the consumer market just like that and won’t even feel it. The only reason they bother with free Windows graphics is that Windows gamers still generate a non-negligible amount of revenue by buying the overpriced desktop cards, and the only reason they bother with Linux graphics drivers is because it’s free beta testing. The Linux desktop market is a ridiculously tiny population in terms of gamers, but it’s a sizable population in terms of QA.
Yes but this article is talking about the entire nvidia kernel driver… Why are you assuming this doesn’t apply to the parts necessary for ML?
The top level comment in this thread is talking about “consumer facing products”. ML is not a mainstream consumer use of Nvidia drivers. Most of the people who got a bee in their bonnet about Nvidia drivers not being open source are desktop users interested in the graphics drivers.
Either way, I don’t understand the issue. If people don’t like the fact Nvidia has proprietary drivers they can choose not to buy their hardware. To buy their hardware and then be upset about it makes no sense.
Same for the kernel developers, they either want proprietary drivers to work with Linux or not. If they don’t they can give Nvidia the finger outright instead of pussyfooting around – but Nvidia is not the only one with proprietary drivers and I think we all know how quickly Linux would go the way of the dodo if it didn’t support proprietary stuff.
This whole topic has always been rife with posturing, entitlement and hypocrisy. People love to enjoy all the benefits from Nvidia hardware while bitching about the drivers. You can’t force a company to use open source. Take it or leave it.
It also a red herring. People love to point to AMD as a counter-example, but are AMD drivers so much better? They’re open source but you can’t write AMD’s drivers for them, and AMD’s people are slow to release them and to fix bugs so at the end of the day it’s the exact same thing as far as I am concerned as a user.
Cheap vector operations.
The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.
The Linux gaming market is too small for Nvidia to care, but the GPU computing market isn’t.
So we can add “use an older kernel” and “use a modified kernel with that protection removed” to the list of options.
As long as they get support for it. Big corps don’t buy anything without 7 layers of scapegoats to point at.
Using an older kernel isn’t a long-term solution. And according to the kernel devs, either using and older kernel in that way or modifying the kernel to remove these protections still violates the license even if it bypasses the technical protections.
(I’m guessing Nvidia will keep shimming and rely on either not being sued or winning the lawsuit.)
deleted by creator
That’s all I see happening too. The Nvidia Linux drivers will just get worse and not solve anything.
It’s already a huge pain in the ass to use the proprietary drivers, the open source ones barely work as is.
deleted by creator
The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care
I’ll fix it for you: “The Linux gaming market”
Linux AI market is their bread, butter and red caviar. Shim itself is enough proof they care.
All ml, ai, hpc is done on Linux. They are getting a lot of money because of the hype.
They need Linux drivers. No way hpc can be done on windows. But it can be done on amd
They don’t have to offer Linux drivers for free to the general public though. Ask yourself why they do that.
The problem is not mine. Is theirs. They want to use functionality written by others with certain requirements (i.e. that using that code requires disclosing the source code).
If they are not happy with that, that’s fine. They shouldn’t use those functionalities.
Problem is that they depends on Linux kernel for their biggest business (data centers). If they don’t support linux, market will shift to amd. As ML user, I am absolutely fine. I can use amd for our gpu cluster. I absolutely cannot use a non linux OS.
That’s their problem, not linux maintainers’ problem
The Linux community is literally Nvidia’s biggest market. The current Linux market share in data centers is currently estimated to be 77%.
And how many of those plans use GPU rendering?
Come on…
There’s obviously use cases for Nvidia on Linux but Linux desktop gamers aren’t even a blip on the radar. The reason Nvidia bothers to release free Linux drivers is for public beta testing not for the revenue.
Well, gaming as a whole is likely just a blip to Nvidia nowadays. It doesn’t make them money anymore like it used to, data center is where most of the money flows in. It’s just that we’ll buy anything Nvidia sells so we’re basically guinea pigs for their public beta testing.
It’s honestly amazing to me that some Linux gamers don’t understand how lucky we are and can act so… entitled I guess is the word? We live in a golden age of gaming on Linux but that age is entirely dependent on the whims of several companies. Nvidia can discontinue their free Linux driver at any time with almost zero impact to them but extremely heavy disruption to the Linux desktop, which is 80% Nvidia. Microsoft can decide to force all game developers to develop for their new API going forward and sub-sum PC gaming into their console operation, relegating Linux forever to retro boxes. Valve can turn to the dark side and sell out to any of the vultures circling it.
Yeah as if Nvidia never benefited a lot from open-source. So Vulkan isn’t open-source, who knows? Maybe go back to the days of fragmentation, kill portability.
You’re acting as if Nvidia, Microsoft, and Valve are related. Good luck to Microsoft making a new proprietary API besides DirectX, an already proprietary API. It would only show they haven’t learned anything from UWP. And Valve has always contributed to open-source because they don’t want to depend on Windows. You don’t recognize Steam Deck and SteamOS 3? You haven’t been here long enough to recognize LunarG.
If Nvidia decides to be hostile or selfish, nobody cares? Can’t we be wary of being exploited by companies?
Just say when you’re shilling, don’t spread misinformation with your own made up scenarios.
How in the hell is being a customer mistaken for entitled?
“Corps can fuck you over” - but they always do, and always will.
Fortunately they also ‘suck’ at development, since even Xbox is nowadays using same CPU architecture as desktops, so good luck locking that in. And it’s not even like we don’t emulate every other architecture that’s popular enough.
Also dunno why you left out AMD, they are doing a much better things for Linux than Nvidia.
Valve is the main one, and god knows what will happen once Gaben quits, though Valve always hated MS and tried to remove their dependency of then for years for their own benefit. But let’s not pretend Nvidia or Microsoft can just decide to remove Linux gaming at whim, as that’s just not true.
deleted by creator
Sure but they don’t play 3d video games do they?
Driver code might expose some underlying secret sauce they’re using in the hardware. That’s the justification they always used to give, at any rate. At this point, though, it’s probably some code they’ve inherited from an acquisition that has a bunch of legal encumbrance stopping it from being open sources.
If they have to rely on obscuring stuff on their user side to keep their secret sauce, I’d say they’re bad at it.
This is coming from someone who deals with APIs for living.
They don’t have to do it well, just enough to satisfy the lawyers.
deleted by creator
AMD isn’t, and they used to be significantly worse than Nvidia about proprietary drivers.
deleted by creator
People held the same opinion about them though. How is that not relevant?
deleted by creator
Whatever, dude.
I’d rather have working proprietary drivers than broken open source ones, which seem to be our only options. I find it real hard to side with Linux here as they’re going to make performance worse for a platform that already struggles.
And people wonder why Linux will never take off on the desktop. Stuff as basic as this will make sure anyone semi-casual about pc use will have issues with Linux.
Or maybe we shouldn’t just accept trillion dollar companies doing whatever the fuck they want?
Nvidia is clearly in the wrong here, and infringing on copyright. Do you want to set the precedent that companies can just ignore copyright? Meanwhile when we certainly can’t ignore theirs?
Maybe we should hold the companies to a higher standard. And not roll over and give in basically as soon as they do something we don’t like, compromising the foundation and good parts of what we already have, in this case Linux. Open source and GPL is the lifeblood of Linux, it’s what makes it as good and useful as it is.
Or maybe to keep doing social pressure on nvidia and make them feel guilty ,that they finally realse and did support of open version drivers not only for gtx 1650+ and fot more old cards.Because their source codes was published when hackers hacked their infrastructure and leaked source code.
Just the existence of CUDA means Linux must remain a target for Nvidia.
Also, this can be quite easily compared to Windows changing their driver’s structure and functionality. And Microsoft did it many times in the past.
It’s sad to see the 100500th confrontation between the people who have never contributed to the kernel, yet they want to deprive others of using their existing GPU with Linux and instead force them to buy a new GPU. This screams of of being elitist and haughty but I just don’t care any longer. Too tired of hatred, aggression, animosity and verbal attacks. This has really propelled Linux, oh, wait, it’s only shown what kind of people represent Open Source.
It’s kind of like using DRM to combat piracy in regards to multimedia. The Linux kernel is under a certain license and the kernel developers feel NVidia is encroaching on their IP in a way that is against the copyright. They won’t give NVidia an exemption despite their obvious importance in the hardware industry.
It may seem aggressive but look at how Nintendo, Disney, etc. regard those who break their own plans/trademarks. If you don’t take your own IP seriously, the law won’t either.
DRM is a good comparison, imagine there exists a DRM measure that doesn’t affect rightful owners in any way shape or form but prevents piracy, would you be against it?
Personally I would be 100% okay with that, the problem is that DRM usually causes issues to rightful users and doesn’t prevent piracy. This change on the Kernel seems to be that perfect DRM, it won’t affect any rightful driver but prevents companies from pirating the Linux Kernel.
Dude are you Avis from the phoronix forums¿? This comment is the exact copy of his/her comment there.
Those “haughty” “elitists” wrote your operating system and gave it to you for free. Have some gratitude, and direct your complaints to the uncooperative scoundrels in charge of NVIDIA who created this whole problem.
Will someone please think of the mega corporation. 😢
Perfect timing buying an AMD card yesterday to replace my old NVidia. Installed today, works like a champ. Issue resolved
I’ve had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that’s being charitable.
What were some of the positives and negatives? Me personally, I have an RDNA2 card and got bitten by the gamma being too dark on hardware cursors (now resolved) and memory clock stuck at 1 GHz with some refresh rates (workaround is not to use refresh above ~144 Hz).
I have an RDNA3 card (upgraded from a 1080) and am running a multi-boot triple-head setup with mixed refresh rates (60, 144).
Pros: most things work and work well. Installation of the physical card went without a hitch and it was relatively simple to install the drivers. No issues with web video, streaming, video encoding, or standard use.
Cons: mesa, amdgpu, and Windows drivers are all lacking significant features - I am still unable to reliably control fan curves/speeds, clock speeds, etc. FreeSync is unusable as well. I have also been experiencing regular crashes on certain games (BG3, Apex Legends, etc.) and support has been nonexistent, despite similar complaints from other users. When the card does crash, it usually results in a ring timeout and an accompanied total session crash. AMD does not seem to be responsive to these issues in either their official forum or any other space where people are lodging complaints.
The hardware seems fine; the drivers are the main issue. If I had to do it over again, I’d hold my nose and buy NVIDIA.
EDIT: regarding the cursor issue, I’ve had to switch to a software cursor on Linux. The hardware cursor wasn’t showing up at all.
Regarding game-specific issues, it seems a lot of problems stem from either a greedy low power mode or DirectX issues. I’ve had to set udev rules to alleviate some of my issues, but it hasn’t solved everything.
EDIT 2: For anyone who comes across this post, it seems like the vast majority of the crashes on linux have been resolved as of kernel 6.7. Still lacking fine-grained control over fans/clocks, but stability seems much improved.
So what does that mean for me on Arch, how will it affect me?
ELI5?
If they don’t fix it before 6.6 comes out on Arch, you may have to use the LTS kernel.
I don’t use arch but I would guess you should avoid kernel 6.6 if you are using an nvidia card until we get more info about that.
a) Good for them
b) How long before NVIDIA throws up their hands at the whole thing and does their own Linux distro + pushes all their cloud AI customers to use it? (it doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to be shamed / coerced into actually open-sourcing their driver)
B) can’t happen because of gpl. Even if it could, not many customers will move to an nvidia distro. ML people need good distros and good drivers.
If a hypothetical nvidia distro would speed up training by 10% but cause drop of productivity of humans of as small as 5%, no many will “buy” it. We can throw more hardware, people are the bottleneck nowadays
There’s an interesting discussion about the whole topic on the Phoronix forums about this. Some people claim that removing them and Nvidia’s current behavior is a DMCA violation:
- The kernel includes IP only licensed under GPLv2.
- While a module linked against the kernel isn’t necessarily a derived work which in turn would need to be licensed GPLv2 as well, there are specific interfaces that are meant for internal use and by their very nature would make your work derived if using them. These are the interfaces marked EXPORT_GPL_ONLY.
- Using these interfaces with a module not licensed GPLv2, you taint the kernel and violate the licensing.
- Removing the check, you aren’t necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you’re removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.
It also raises the question why you’d remove checks that only prevent a possible GPLv2 violation if you’re not violating GPLv2 anyways as Nvidia claims.
you aren’t necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you’re removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.
Isn’t overcoming a technical limit a violation itself? That’s what made DeCSS illegal. They didn’t have to prove anyone was actually copying DVDs with it, just that DeCSS could allow you to copy a DVD
Yes, even if it’s a dialog box with only a “No” button, despite how easy it would be to get it to return a different value.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL, this is not legal advice.
Not to be contrarian, but b) could well be a full decade of work and numerous individual projects
Would having their own distro even help? It seems like working around this would require forking from Linux at a lower level, and even that would only circumvent technical (rather than copyright) barriers.
They can probably just drop some kernel packages in their driver PPAs or whatever. You don’t need to fork the whole distro to customize the kernel. But it will still be a huge pain.
They can beef of linux support of freebsd a little and do some other help to the desktop experience there. Freebsd has always been more pragmatic, and for most uses of an os you can’t tell a real world difference. (pkg instead of apt, and other such differences are minor)
The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.
deleted by creator
They already provide custom images for their Jetson modules, I think more NVIDIA distros are likely to happen one way or another.
I use Nvidia’s proprietary driver because the open-source Nouveau driver won’t work with my display. Will this update break the driver, or just make it slower?
I’d love to stop using Nvidia, but I don’t have much choice about using their proprietary driver until I get my next video card, or Nouveau starts working for me.
It probably means it’ll take longer for Nvidia to release a driver for Linux 6.6 and might stop them from doing so. They’ll probably find a way to circumvent this and continue to violate the GPLv2 the kernel is licensed under.
If your on a distro which gets a new kernel quickly it might be a good idea to pin Linux 6.5 so the system doesn’t update to a kernel which the driver doesn’t support. But whether that’s necessary woll probably be talked about more once 6.6 actually releases.
PS: If your on a 2000 series or later GPU you might actually be able to use nouveau at some point, since there’s ongoing work on an open source Vulkan driver with actually useable performance. Thanks to Nvidia it definitely won’t work on Pascal and earlier.
It probably means it’ll take longer for Nvidia to release a driver for Linux 6.6 and might stop them from doing so.
This does not sound reasonable to me. Cloud AI is really strongly dependent on both Nvidia and Linux. In the building across from my office is an AI research lab with about $2M worth of Nvidia cards and using Linux is 100% non-negotiable. And that lab is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Think about all the data centres and research labs out there that are completely dependent on both Nvidia and Linux. I don’t think Nvidia would so flippantly say “welp, the kernel developers are being mean, so we’re going to stop participating in the cloud computing and research market”.
This is twisting the screws on their revenue stream in a significant way. I don’t know what they’ll do: comply, get more sneaky, try to sue. But I don’t think they’ll just give up.
I get why the Linux folks are doing this, but I don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux (which is a lot of people). I’m sure that my employer will choose up-to-date Nvidia drivers over up-to-date versions of the kernel, at least in the short term. In the long term it probably won’t be an issue since Nvidia will figure something out, but if it did become an issue then ultimately Nvidia driver support is non-negotiable for the company where I work.
(No one cares what a small tech company does, but the big guys need Nvidia too so it should be possible to piggyback on whatever they do.)
I use Nvidia drivers on Linux and fully support it. You know what else is non-negotiable? Linux support for Nvidia. Huge chunk of their money comes from people using their GPUs on Linux for machine learning. And while they can use older kernels for now (because they’re still supported), they won’t be able to forever. And corporates will want a supported OS with their Nvidia card.
And while they can use older kernels for now (because they’re still supported), they won’t be able to forever.
It might even happen that the change gets back ported upstream; that would mean that every supported kernel has the changes in place, regardless of version.
It might, though I don’t really see it happening with this change.
I think end users wouldn’t care either, they probably wouldn’t even understand what’s actually happening, they’ll only notice performance degrading (if this is the case) and blame Linux for it.
That’s not to say this shouldn’t be done, I just wish there was better control on license violations and those doing it on purpose, like Nvidia in this case, would be seriously punished to make them think twice next time.
don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux
The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.
For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can’t replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.
If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.
Nvidia could choose to follow the law, their customers could choose to support them in that.
Part of the reason you can’t replace Nvidia, is because they get ahead by breaking the law. This makes it harder to compete with them.
Now you’re stuck with only Nvidia, and welcome to monopoly hell. A bit exaggerated I know, but it’s his it happens.
If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.
That’s a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company’s field sales operation, I’m not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That’s just how the world works.
That’s just how the world works.
And that’s kind of the discussion here.
Some people are annoyed at the Linux Devs because “fuck it, everyone breaks the law and it doesn’t matter”. Some people are annoyed at Nvidia because they’d like to uphold or social contracts.
In don’t think it’s naive to want to live in a world and support a society that supports the law. I do think we have bigger issues that people are happy with this behaviour and are actively defending it.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of “if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems”. The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.
From my closed-source corporate perspective, Nvidia is trying to improve performance and the Linux kernel maintainers are trying to stop them. I don’t see why I would be annoyed at Nvidia in these circumstances.
You can always make your own kernel and enforce whatever stupid laws you want on it then.
Nvidia is undermining patent law. That should be an issue that big corpos can understand.
Nvidia could choose to improve performance using non-illegal tactics.
They haven’t.
I’m happy to live in a society wherev we support those upholding the law.
From a corporate perspective you should be VERY worried about this, GPL is infectious, so if NVIDIA drivers are using GPL only parts of the kernel they become GPL, and because NVIDIA doesn’t offer GPL only endpoint the license applies to everything, meaning that if your company is using the NVIDIA driver in any way shape or form anything you produce becomes GPL as well. NVIDIA has enough lawyers to delay the enforcing of this, which is why they’ll never get sued, does YOUR company has enough lawyers to keep FSF at bay? If not you should be very annoyed at NVIDIA for not providing a license term for their GPL driver (and legally their driver IS GPL if it uses those endpoints).
And here’s the thing, for a home user not updating the kernel is good enough, for a company it’s not because this is a bug fix, not new implementation, NVIDIA is already in breach of license.
Via breaking the law. Which in a reasonable system would push people away from participating
I did say that I get why the Linux folks are doing this. The problem is that Nvidia drivers that obey these restrictions and as a result have significantly worse performance than Nvidia drivers on other operating systems aren’t the solution either. Anyone who does serious GPU computing will still have to switch away from Linux.
(IMO Nvidia would be insane to open-source their drivers. Like sue-corporate-officers-for-breach-of-duty level insane. So they can’t do more than what they’re already doing: coming up with workarounds.)
Would they though? They sell their hardware, not their drivers, or am I misunderstanding something about Nvidia?
Is it possible that by revealing their drivers they would also reveal something about their industry designs?
I mean, just building the hardware and letting the community do all the work on drivers for free would be better, if they don’t do it there must be a valid reason I think.
Their drivers were already leaked, any secrets they were trying to hide are out in the wild, so that point is moot.
I mean, they make money of selling the hardware from what I understand. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, and that’s the problem. Maybe they make money off the driver’s too.
Of course I can’t know for sure because the driver is closed-source, but I’d bet that a lot of what makes Nvidia hardware work fast is actually in the driver rather than the hardware itself. Plus, a proprietary driver lets them lock people in to buying their hardware. The company where I work doesn’t use Nvidia software because it buys Nvidia GPUs. It buys Nvidia GPUs because it uses Nvidia software.
Oh yes sure, the software make nvidia gpu better, something that probably most of the hundred if not thousand of contributor to the mesa driver and in the list we have amd, intel, collabora, redhat, nouveau, google, valve and many others didn’t see, they were the only one in the entire silicon valley to find this secret sauce to make gpus better with software.
I don’t believe that even for a second. Software doesn’t make hardware run faster. It can certainly slow it down. But it doesn’t make it run better.
AMD’s doing pretty well with their open source drivers, I suppose its up to nvidia if they want to offer a worse product simply so they can keep as much profits as possible.
But leveraging other peoples work via open source code, to improve their product - then still not donating nor contributing back to the source? Not only illegal but scummy as hell.
We may not be as offended as the kernel devs, but theyre the ones whos work is being stolen, so I wouldn’t be so quick to tell them what to do
I wouldn’t say AMD is doing pretty well - it isn’t a serious competitor to Nvidia in the GPU computing market.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted. Outside of the increasingly small desktop gpu market AMD is completely irrelevant in professional GPU use. They’re not even remotely close to being a competitor
From a legal perspective, nvidia has been illegally bypassing a software license by exploiting a loophole. Linux devs fixed the loophole.
I don’t see why I would be annoyed at Linux devs in these circumstances.
Because they’re breaking the law while taking advantage of open source software.
And that’s why I’m happy to see that the lock on modifying the Nvidia BIOS for their old graphics cards has finally been decrypted. That means that Nouveau will have a much easier route to make their open-source drivers work properly on the 10xx and 20xx cards, so we don’t have to rely on the tainted crumbs that Nvidia offered here. (Then again, I eventually moved to a 6600 specifically to no longer have to deal with this kind of shenanigans)
Man, that would be so nice. I forgot actually for a while that I was using Nouveau after I switched cause nvidia-dkms wouldn’t let me boot (1050ti). The only thing that reminds me is game performance. Wayland is great though.
Phoronix thinks I’m using ad blocker. In fact I’m not. I don’t have any kind of adblocker on my network… *sigh*
Which browser are you using? Perhaps it has some built in blocking
Firefox 102.14.0esr.
I believe the standard amount of blocking in Firefox is:
- Social media trackers
- Cross-site cookies in all windows
- Tracking content in Private Windows
- Cryptominers
- Fingerprinters
Since the line between “ads” and “tracking everything people do on the internet” has been pretty blurred, perhaps the anti-adblock checker triggers on any of those.
Meanwhile me using ublock adblocker and flawlessly reading the content on firefox
It seems they just fixed symbol_get() so GPL-only symbols are avaliable to GPL driver
Lousy criminals. NVIDIA, I mean. If I wrote code like that, I’d be dragged in front of a judge and made to answer for breaking the DMCA. But if you’re a big, rich company, the government won’t touch you.
TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE & GPL Condom has to be intentional double entendre right?
What ever happened to the source code nvidia did release. Was it released in such a way to where it is not helpful?
I belive the NVK work is where that headed. The released code wasn’t up to snuff for true kernel intergration on it own, but offered a lot of insights for devs working on the problem.
That’s only for never generation cards, from 20xx series upwards I think.
But there’s still the proprietary driver for everything before that, including 1080 and such.They are not legally allowed to build drivers from the illegally acquired source code.
I don’t think they meant the hacked and released source code, I think they meant the kernel modules that Nvidia actually opensourced in may of '22
I have not had a look at it myself, but my understanding is, that that was/is only glue code to the closed source blob.
You are correct, it while it was technically driver for kernel, meaning it is using kernel driver api, it was not driver for graphic card. Just a bit different way to load binary blob.
couldnt they do the thing where one team analyzes the leaked code and documents functions.
and a nother, clean room team, creates independent fresh code to achieve the same results as the original?
I mean, clean room activity like that has a strong precedent, going back to EA vs Sega at least. where EA stole a sega genesis dev kit, had one team document the functions, had another team independently create code to execute those functions,and made their own dev kid and put out non-approved sega carts (which is why the EA sega carts were taller and had the yellow plastic tag)
Sega sued and EA won due the clean room engineering and sega and EA came to some kind of sweetheart deal/comrpromise/settlement.
deleted by creator
I’ve always heard cleanroom, since you keep your coders completely isolated from the investigation team so there can be no question of code pollinating across, Just documentation to be reimplemented in a unique and different way.
deleted by creator
That’s just such a great image!
Made me lol
Yeah they’d do that with a card that looks like it’s from 2003 with those classic dual DVI ports. Stole it right out of some kid’s Quake 3 box. Try that with a 4090.
Give the gigantic heatsink, that might actually work just fine. The PCI brackets are just stamped aluminium after all.
