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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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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?
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.
Yes? I'm not saying Mesa as a whole is bad, but Mesa+Nouveau for Nvidia cards is terrible.
(It doesn't help that Nvidia isn't exactly cooperative when it comes to supporting open-source developers, but my point that driver development is non-trivial stands.)
Mesa+Nouveau is bad only thanks to nvidia and their signature lock implemented since the 900 series, as even stated by me before:
You've convinced me. I still think that secret optimizations are a possibility, but I must concede that there might very well be this sort of lock-in bullshit and nothing else.