Pointless ideology? [LWN.net]

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 4:32 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052)
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

I think this is a concise and, for the most part, realistic discussion of
the issues. There is one glaring exception to the general trend of
reliability in open source vs proprietary drivers though - the canonical
exception to the rule if you will:

Nvidia - their video drivers are absolutely the best available for linux -

I have had severe problems with crashes/lockups using ATI cards and the
open source DRI drivers, to the point that Linux + ATI was an unusable
combination for accelerated 3D - I've seen this severe ATI stability
problem beginning in 2001 with 3D accelerated FPS games on redhat 7.x, on
up to a few months ago, when fedora core 1 would lock up if you dared to
run an opengl screensaver with an ATI card. In all cases, the same systems
that were locking up with the ATI cards have been rock solid with Nvidia
cards and their opengl drivers.

As far as performance, Nvidia is the best bang for the buck by far for
linux. One indication is that with Nvidia cards, the linux opengl
performance tends to be every bit as good as on ms windows.

As fas as being linux-savvy, Nvidia, while not perfect, is miles ahead of
any other vendor. Nvidia are very responsive to the linux community, and
their drivers are well maintained and kept up to date, to the minute. When
installing suse 9.1, I had only to check the box that says "install nvidia
gl drivers" and it was done - no editing of config files, just working
accelerated 3D next time X was started.

So when we discuss these issues, let's give credit where credit is due, as
Nvidia works damn hard to be the vendor of choice - and they've earned my
business.

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Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 4:47 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

When last I checked, the closed nvidia driver for AMD64 did not provide 32-bit emulation, as the entire rest of the kernel interface did. Previously, a trivial problem with setting the card's gamma remained unfixed for years, seriously inconveniencing many filmmakers.

The folks who really depend on these drivers, the visual effects industry, have to walk on eggs around nVidia and ask very politely for support, because they can't get it elsewhere and their market isn't so important to nVidia.

We really need to fix that.

Bruce

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 9, 2004 12:48 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

The current nVidia driver for AMD64 does support 32 bit emulation. It
wasn't in there right from start, but they figured it out.

For a closed source driver, nVidia is almost as good as it can get. The
point that an open sourced nVidia driver would be much better is
undisputed.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 5:43 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

I had exactly the opposite experience with NVidia and their support, which was as responsive as /dev/null after a kernel crash (which happened twice a day). After a month of pointless struggle, I swapped the card for an ATI one, supported by X.org out of the box and has been happy since then. Your luck with NVidia is explained by a relative popularity of Linux/i386. My box is amd64 and they obviously didn't care much about it.

Please note that this post is not about which vendor is better (ATI hasn't released a 64bit driver at all); it's about the inherent devil of non-free drivers and software in general.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 8:41 UTC (Thu) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link]

Nvidia is a very good example of the problem with linux drivers.The driver only works on x86 hardware no driver for powerpc exist. Had the driver been open it would work on any platform.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 12:45 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Yep - no drivers for ARM either, which severely limits the use of these cards on that platform. I am hopeful that the increasing diversity of architectures in popular use will reduce the incidence of binary modules, but it looks like it'll be a while yet in video-card land which seems particularly badly afflicted for some reason.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 16:24 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Nvidia - their video drivers are absolutely the best available for linux

No they're not, even if you confine your comparison to drivers for nVidia cards (vs the universe of Linux drivers or even video drivers).

No, the nVidia drivers are a prime example of the insidious nature of captive binary-only drivers. You think you've gotten a great deal. Just wait until nVidia decides your card is no longer worth their time to support, or you want to move it to a different architecture machine.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 18:34 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

They don't work worth a damn, for example, on Linux-PPC. And as Bruce points out above, their AMD64 drivers don't work well either. And lord help you (because nVidia won't) if you want to run one of their older PCI cards (Riva, TNT, etc) under Linux even on an x86 box, let alone PPC or SPARC or MIPS.

You and others have a point about non-x86 platforms. For ppc et al, nvidia is not a good choice now - but that could change, especially if "friends" like IBM were to lobby on our behalf for better ppc linux driver support.

However you are dead wrong about nvidia support for older cards - one nvidia driver supports all nvidia cards - from the lowly vanta to the newest high end card.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 21:52 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

For ppc et al, nvidia is not a good choice now

Yet several models of PowerMac ship with nVidia cards (the high end ships ATI). Guess I'm out of luck if I want to try Linux on them.

one nvidia driver supports all nvidia cards [on x86]

You may be right about Quadro, GeForce and TNT2 cards -- although I can't comment on the quality of the drivers.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 22:11 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

But for Riva and TNT (not TNT2) cards, see http://www.nvidia.com/object/riva_drivers and note that only old versions of Windows, BeOS, and OS/2 are supported. (The OS/2 driver also supports Vanta and TNT2.)

Ah, so the most ancient nvidia cards are not covered by their unified driver? my mistake, I thought that was the case, but apparently the tnt 2 are the oldest supported cards. Then again, don't the riva and tnt cards work in 2D?

If I were looking for 3D support on linux, I wouldn't start with an ancient riva or tnt - tnt 2s are available online for $16, or if you want a good older 3D card with open source drivers, voodoo 3s are still available quite cheaply if you know where to look.