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New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDNet)
ZDNet revisits
the proprietary driver debate. "For Nvidia, intellectual
property is a secondary issue. 'It's so hard to write a graphics driver
that open-sourcing it would not help,' said Andrew Fear, Nvidia's software
product manager. In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source
drivers, he said."
(Log in to post comments)
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 14:00 UTC (Tue) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] The age old answer:If you care about it, just stop buying their cards.
The open r300 (for ati radeon) driver, though unstable and feature incomplete for some cards, is the fastest open 3d solution atm.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 15:31 UTC (Tue) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] You just hit the nail on the head. The reason customers aren't asking for open source drivers is because people who care about open source drivers DON'T BUY NVIDIA CARDS, so they don't become nVidia customers. I know that I for one have consciously avoided nVidia video cards for exactly this reason.It would be nice if the product manager could have figured this out logically instead of sticking his head in the sand.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 16:01 UTC (Tue) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link] Well I care and I still have a NVIDIA card. Why then you ask well since the only reason to buy a new card is gaming and you need a new card to play new games there really are no alternative.
If you do not play games buy a computer with Intel graphics onboard to get an open platform. I don't think it's even necessary to register to download the documentation for intel chips.
But I really like to know how to make my whish for documentation for nvidia in a way that they understand.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 17:13 UTC (Tue) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] By the way... Do you mean "Hear hear"?
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 18:02 UTC (Tue) by rdorsch (subscriber, #5833) [Link] Does anybody know, which is the latest graphics card with a stable opensource driver? I always try hard to get hardware whose drivers are available under an open source license, because - good chances that it works out of the box in Debian - higher stability (I learned my lesson, interestingly from an AVM Fritzcard DSL. AVM is the company which is very unhappy about the open source requirement in the USB code of the kernel) - easier upgradability (I learned my lesson here as well, after an upgrade I could not configure my telephone system (Auerswald COMpact 2104) any more. The vendor provides a java application which has trouble with the serial interface after the upgrade) I also don't care if I need to pay significantly more for hardware with open sourced drivers. It saves me a lot of time and trouble and that counts higher for me.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 21:13 UTC (Tue) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] Matrox g400 / Radeon r200 (Ati 8500-9250) have been solid for years.3d opengl performance is ok to play quake3 or ET (~72 fps sustained for a radeon 9000)
Or r300 (still shaping up, is reported to work even on some X600 and X800 models, and can run stuff like Doom3)
here's an overview:
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 22:03 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Intel has had their onboard stuff have good support.
Their GMA cards (Graphics Media Accelerator) are much much much better then their old 'Extreme Blaster 2' stuff. They are feature complete and offer modest performance. (enough to play Quake3 and such).
They claim comparable performance to a ATI 9800, but I doubt it. I figure they are a bit faster then the r200 stuff.. Although I don't know about how wonderfull the drivers are, I don't own one.
The main problem with them is that they are onboard and do shared memory sceme. I think that they are probably fairly crippled by this.
If they were on seperate cards with dedicated RAM I think that they would have a lot more potential. I know I'd by one.
Personally I am tempted to switch from AMD to Intel specificly because of this. Always used AMD, but...
You take a Intel 920 dual-core CPU with a Asus P5LD2-VM motherboard that uses the 945G chipset it should make a kick-ass little Linux workstation. Drivers supported nearly out of the box, nice compact SMP configuration. DDR2 memory isn't something that I am excited about though.
But the best thing is that according to the Xen Wiki http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/IntelVT both that motherboard and the proccessor should support the Intel VT extensions allowing you to run Linux along side FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, and whatnot in a Xen environment. So that would be fun to have.
I am very tempted.
Hot stuff Posted Apr 18, 2006 22:57 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Sure, why not. Just be sure to have a mighty power supply and some serious cooling; according to gamepc they still run too hot. The 920 system is eating like 40 to 50 Watt more than the comparable 3800+ X2 from AMD. Not that I'm worried about ecologism; but power translates to money and noise, and noise translates to headaches and aspirin in the long run.Meanwhile, I have found elsewhere that Intel Core Duos run quite cool; but unluckily they don't support those VT extensions, or 64 bit. When they do they will be interesting.
Hot stuff Posted Apr 18, 2006 23:49 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Oh ya they do run hot, but that's normal for Pentium 4 type proccessors.
But it's not that horrible. Not like the 8xx series were. Nothing that the 'scythe ninja' can't take care of.
Combine that with a high quality heatsink, a spacious case with 12cm rear fan, and maybe a little creative ductwork then I bet I can get that sucker to run quiet.
Also they are very reasonably priced. 240 bucks for the 920 versus closer to 300 dollars for the X2 stuff. Even though the X2 is going to be a bit faster in most stuff.
Then on top of that I would go for the onboard video so the power requirements, I expect, would actually be less then a AMD system with a semi-modern ATI or Nvidia video card. No crappy video card fan, no small motherboard fan.
Dammit.. now I am convinced.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 19, 2006 9:25 UTC (Wed) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] About onboard stuff, I have an Ati Xpress 200 (r400) northbridge for intel cpu on this cheap ($50) Asus P4RD1MX motherboard and there's no decent support for its pcie / onboard mem yet because Ati hasnt released specs to the dri folks for shared memory initialisation.It's a nice PCIE entry board otherwise and cheap but good quality.
With proprietary drivers X200's 3D performs a little less than my AGP 9000, and is unstable, 2d is stable. And may be a good alternative to the Intel you mentioned.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 20, 2006 19:17 UTC (Thu) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] So far the best I know of is the ATI Radeon series. Which is why I'm still using it. I'd love to use more powerful video cards in my systems, but without free drivers that's just not going to happen.
I hate to buy the ATI cards, because the company is being so unreasonable these days, so if anyone can point me to a comparable solution from another company please do.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 14:16 UTC (Tue) by hathawsh (guest, #11289) [Link] Nvidia is apparently unaware of the problems people are experiencing with their driver. Versions after 1.0.7676 have a problem with OpenGL vsync that messes up MythTV. Later versions are a better fit for more recent kernels, but they also seem to be slower. I choose NVidia only because it's less broken than the ATI drivers.
Where do I register my support for an open source driver? I have several NVidia cards, but I'll replace them all if ATI releases a complete, functioning, GPL driver. I think many others will also.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 14:30 UTC (Tue) by tredman (guest, #37203) [Link] My biggest concern when it comes to open-source support of drivers is the policy many companies have when it comes to legacy hardware.
I have two video cards (Diamond Stealth 2001TV and Riva TNT2) that both manufacturers no longer support new driver development for, yet both manufacturers refuse to open their APIs to open source developers. My Diamond card was made before they started to use the BT8x8 chips. At one point, there was no access to the programming interfaces for the card without an NDA and first born. Now I don't even think there's that. The TNT2's haven't been supported by Nvidia's unified driver since somewhere around v7167.
Both of these two cards are still useful for the applications I have for them, and I hate the idea of scrapping good hardware just because the companies that make them are being twits about their hallowed "intellectual property"; especially when both companies admit that the cards I mentioned aren't even "state of the art" anymore, and haven't been for several years.
I'm a father of three on a shoestring budget. I can't afford to go buying new gear on a regular basis. It's the primary reason I ditched Windows in the first place.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 14:49 UTC (Tue) by lolando (subscriber, #7139) [Link] > In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source drivers, he said.
Uh, yes we are. We most emphatically are asking for open-source (Free, even) drivers.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 15:06 UTC (Tue) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] Here, here. Don't take requests, and then you can say, "Nobody has requested this."
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 15:54 UTC (Tue) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] One more vote here!
Please! PLEASE!!! Release documentation!!!!! Better yet - make OSS drivers by yourself. But we do not ask that much. Just give us the damm docs - so we could do the drivers on our own.
Signed, TNT2 & GeForce 7800GT owner.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 17:01 UTC (Tue) by tredman (guest, #37203) [Link] Obviously, this talking head has never looked at the nVidia Linux forums (which their own developers participate in, by the way), which are rife with talk about and requests for open source drivers.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 22:42 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] You have to know what Nvidia considures 'customers'.
Both ATI and Nvidia developed their drivers to suite high-end customers. Movie people, government visualization labs, and stuff like that.
Those people wanted 3d acceleration and cards that offer a very high degree of 'correctness' (vs. pure speed like on consumer cards) and are willing to pay a lots of money to have them on Linux.
Previously they'd used high end Unix systems like SGI Irix or whatnot. As PC hardware increases in speed and stability, clustering feasability increases in speed, and Linux increases in speed and capabilities, then they could save a lot of time, money, and effort by switching to Linux.
So that's were it comes from. Nvidia has it's unified driver stuff, so supporting consumer cards with these ported drivers were a bonus. Before just a while ago I doubt Nvidia could give a shit about Linux end-users. They probably do now, but not a whole lot. Not nearly as much as people think they do.
And I remember people struggling with the high-end FireGL drivers and trying to get them to work with ATI's consumer stuff. So finally giving in and porting them to consumer cards just worked out.
What ATI needs to get into their think skulls is that Linux users want GPL'd drivers. Not nessiciarly the drivers that ATI make now though!!
Help out the DRI folks with documentation and give them some love on the tricky parts of the card with code snippets and stuff. Help the Linux community make good, stable, 3d drivers.
That way ATI can keep it's full-featured propriatory drivers with their 'IP' protected and whatnot and Linux users (and FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and NetBSD, and etc etc) that want Free drivers can use those and maybe sacrifice a few features like some extra pixel shading OpenGL extensions or some performance or whatnot.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 15:05 UTC (Tue) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link] 'It's so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,'
Hmmm ... like "It's so hard to write a complete operating system from scratch that Linux has to have been stolen from somebody else's codebase?" Is it just the problem of supporting a wide range of card architectures? I doubt that's a serious problem.
They don't believe in open-source development models, or they'd understand that we can help them. They just know that supporting Linux kernels gives them a customer base broader than merely supporting Windows. Someone coded this stuff once, and if it weren't for the trade-secrets involved, someone else could look at the specs and code it again.
Maybe I've just been reading a little too much ESR.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 16:11 UTC (Tue) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] The nVidia guy is from PR. He seems to know only how to sell. It's his job to tell how complicated everything is - so he can try to charge more for it.
As system programmer/driver developer, I have to fight such attitude more or less on daily basis. The only "complicated" thing - is to accept. There is no "complicated technology" - there is only "rigid mind", refusing to accept something new.
As driver developer, I have only one thing to say. Developing complicated drivers is ...FUN! =) Seriously. The most of the drivers degraded this days anyway and used solely to tunnel the jobs flying between CPU and HW over a bus. The tunneling could be tricky - but that's okay. CPU part could be also tricky. HW part is tricky sometimes too. Anything can be tricky. But that's okay. This is why that called a 'job'.
P.S. Thou honestly, I'd rather leave nVidia alone handling LONG list of errata for their boards. You can't expect such complicated device be clean. From my rather short experience, such pieces of hardware can have errata lists running into hundreds items. And handling all erratas would be one hell of a job.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 17:17 UTC (Tue) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] ***NOTE TO LWN STAFF***
When I hit the button to "reply to this message" it always uses the same message, which the vast majority of the time, is therefore wrong!
Reply problems Posted Apr 18, 2006 17:55 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] There is no "reply to this message" button on LWN, and, in any case, your report is vague enough to be impossible to act on. That said, it resembles one other report we have seen. Could you please describe, in detail, the problem you are seeing? Include information on the browser you are using, please. If you could send the result to lwn@lwn.net, we would appreciate it.
Reply problems Posted Apr 18, 2006 18:01 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Never mind - I found a recently-introduced HTML error in the comment code. Firefox just papered over it, and the HTML validator missed it, but Opera (and maybe others) is not so tolerant...
How hardware vendors can plug into the Linux market Posted Apr 18, 2006 18:42 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] Actually, in a Linux Journal survey, 80% of respondents said that they consider the license status of the Linux driver when selecting hardware, and 20% will never use a proprietary driver under Linux at all.As soon as one contender in a market gets free/open source driver support, the Linux market moves that way. Systems integrators and embedded hardware designers even use the kernel source as a "buyers guide" for hardware that is likely to be easy to integrate. Getting drivers in the tree sells hardware. If T.J. Rodgers put his driver source out under GPL, you can too. So if you work at a hardware vendor and your driver support isn't where it needs to be to plug into the Linux market seamlessly, get your boss to send you to FreedomHEC. It's right after WinHEC, within walking distance, so you don't need approval for an extra trip, just stay over after your already-planned WinHEC trip.
How hardware vendors can plug into the Linux market Posted Apr 19, 2006 12:43 UTC (Wed) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] >Actually, in a Linux Journal survey, 80% of respondents said that they>consider the license status of the Linux driver when selecting hardware, >and 20% will never use a proprietary driver under Linux at all.
These kind of polls, like polls on most websites, are completely meaningless and useless. They *ALWAYS* exaggerate things on the proactive side; for the most part only people who feel strongly on one side or the other are going to bother responding.
For instance, I saw this particular poll and thought "This issue is really about video card support, I don't really care about the video-card-of-the-month thing." and didn't respond to the poll. If you read about polls/surveys you'll find this effect very well documented.
Polls/surveys on websites are just amusements/gimmicks/filler to be taken as seriously as your average Slashdot poll, even if worded seriously.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 18, 2006 21:56 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] This comment amuses me, since I have engineers at both nvidia and ATI in some of my circles of acquaintences and have definitely spelled out to them why their Linux support is not good enough. They listened and understood.
I said stability matters, architecture support matters (if this wasn't clear enough in the past, please review the existince of amd64) and support for legacy hardware matters, since I don't like throwing away my hardware after 3-4 years.
So certainly employees at both companies have provably heard and understood that open specifications matter to potential customers, thus making this statment flatly incorrect. But I suppose PR and Sales lie so often that this is nothing suprising.
I am running a Matrox G550. I would like an openly-specified card to upgrade to at some point.
New Linux look fuels old debate (ZDnet) Posted Apr 19, 2006 12:35 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] I'm using G550 too and bought it almost immediately after it came out.There were faster 3d cards then, but my previous Matrox card had convinced me of their 2D quality (which was more important to me than 3D) and I wanted a properly supported card. > I would like an openly-specified card to upgrade to at some point. Me too. I've postponed my computer upgrade because of this.
Bovine Excrement! Posted Apr 19, 2006 16:24 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] He's essentially saying that no one in the world is smart enough and/or dedicated enough to maintain these drivers. (He might *think* he was saying that only his existing programming staff is "good enough" --- but the myriad problems with the driver are proof enough that his existing staff isn't good enough to do the job --- no slight intended to them personally since I realize that they are probably given very little time to focus on Linux and that most of their energy is on maintaining the Windows drivers).
Obviously that's a wheelbarrow full o' bull!
As for the allegation that customers aren't requesting it ... that's a favorite excuse for anyone who doesn't really want to do something. If you close your eyes, cover your ears and loudly sing "La! Laaaaa! Laaaaa! I can't heeeearrrr youuuuuuuu!" then you can claim that "nobody is asking for it."
Naturally any of your customers who have been trying to ask for are going to feel slighted ... and some of them will no longer be your customers. A slightly more subtle point ... the customers who *are* smart enough and dedicated enough to use the sources are the same ones who will do their research in advance and NEVER BECOME YOUR CUSTOMERS!
You can always say: "Population X (our customers) isn't asking for feature Z (source code)" when you've created a product line and corporate message that's effectively pre-selected the population and you've sufficiently narrowed the definition of the feature (and the meaning of "asking").
Your customers and prospective customers *are* asking, nay demanding (voting with their wallets) support for Linux. Truly supporting Linux means releasing the sources to your drivers. Many of your customers and prospective customers don't necessarily know that releasing the sources is so important. So they're not necessarily asking in those terms. However, EVERY COMPLAINT YOU GET FROM LINUX USERS and EVERY PRODUCT RETURN (RMA) FROM A LINUX USER can be taken as an indirect request for the sources to be released.
JimD
And Posted Apr 19, 2006 20:17 UTC (Wed) by wilreichert (subscriber, #17680) [Link] If / when the Open Graphics Project ever takes off we'll have a very well supported piece of hardware. I'm guessing theres 2 camps of people A) those who favor open source on principle and B) those who just want their hardware to work well without crashing. That prolly makes a lot of people who want open source drivers.
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