
Nvidia  PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words - llambda
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMjk
======
ajross
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.)

~~~
freshhawk
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.

~~~
kyrra
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.

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

While that's certainly fair enough, and rational in economic terms, when a
user base reads between the lines that "you're not worth spending the money to
do things properly", I can also see it eliciting a more visceral and less
rational response such as Linus'. I think that in any case though, money isn't
the issue so much as Nvidia wanting to not share their toys.

------
tux1968
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
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?

~~~
sounds
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.

~~~
rsanchez1
That is why I sympathize with Linus here. I'm also very upset with nVidia over
Optimus, but on Windows, for reasons I've mentioned in other comments. Optimus
really just seems like an afterthought to nVidia. As long as it switches GPUs
when the PC goes into energy-conserving mode, they think it's working just
fine.

~~~
sounds
So true.

That's a typical hardware company's response - deliver only half-baked
functionality and leave the debugging to platform integrators. Nvidia reaps
the marketing bonus points. Laptop companies have to put in the time to
actually get the power savings.

Still, I don't think many people were aware that Linux wasn't (ever * ) going
to work on Optimus laptops and notebooks - and Linus' comments have helped
raise awareness of the issue.

* Until Linus and Nvidia make up.

------
robomartin
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.

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

------
blinkingled
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
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.

~~~
blinkingled
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.

------
luser001
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.

~~~
rcxdude
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.

~~~
luser001
Ok, thanks. I didn't realize people were working around limitations of the
Nvidia driver etc.

------
voidr
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
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...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMTc)

~~~
cfn
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.

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

~~~
rmk2
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...](http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=6ee372b9c782088ee2a9ae1ff59c5ac9&t=179956&page=5)

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

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

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

~~~
jfoutz
given, "a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent
or importance."

Linus is certainly temperamental, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone
he's less that a world-class developer, and critical to the linux community.

~~~
loxs
His creation is used to run half of the world's smartphones and probably 90+
percent of the world's servers. His other creation (git) is used to develop
maybe half of the world's software projects.

Having this in mind, I can't really imagine how can he have an "inflated view
of their own talent or importance". I would say he is even quite modest...

------
ineedtosleep
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.

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

~~~
JoshTriplett
I said "that they build" quite intentionally. Yes, the third-party PowerVR-
based chipsets have little to no Linux support, a problem going back to the
original GMA500 (Poulsbo) chipset, and that makes it difficult to make a
blanket statement that all Intel graphics chipsets work with Linux. I'd still
argue that Intel has the best Linux support among graphics card vendors; on
top of that, Intel drives the majority of new innovations in the X and Linux
graphics infrastructure code.

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

~~~
brettnak
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.

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

------
rsanchez1
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.

