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Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?Posted Feb 18, 2008 23:15 UTC (Mon) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)Parent article: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?
Frankly, the lack of open-source driver development going on in the ATI and Intel camps are their problem, maybe even their own fault. I'm not sure how depriving NVidia of open-source drivers helps this situation. NVidia has put in considerable effort not only to produce good video hardware, but also good video driver software, on Linux and on other platforms. From Matrox, NVidia, ATI, Intel, and S3, NVidia is the only one I know of that has interesting performance combined with drivers that actually work on Linux and other platforms. NVidia have decoupled their video drivers from the kernel interfaces, and provided a sophisticated installer that downloads and compiles the kernel interface, the Xorg interface, and the video hardware driver for the specific circumstances of the end user. This is a big deal--just about every other out-of-tree device driver I've seen on Linux requires upgrading the hardware-specific code at the same time as the kernel interface code, which means kernel upgrades imply device-specific hardware driver upgrades at the same time, which provides an extra and often unnecessary source of regressions and bugs. NVidia has solved this problem, and even provided a mechanism for updating the kernel interface layer over the network at install time. About the only thing wrong with the NVidia drivers is the license and lack of source code--in every other respect, they are a model for how out-of-tree drivers should work on Linux. If open source developers are going to create an open-source video driver, it only makes sense to choose the most popular chipset as the target. The only thing that would change this choice is the pre-existence of high-quality open-source drivers for the target, which of course is not the case for NVidia. Intel and ATI keep alleging that they are developing or have released open-source drivers, while NVidia has consistently asserted that there will be no open-source drivers for their chipsets. Why should the community bother reinventing the wheel when there's a signficant chipset in the field with no open source drivers at all, not even on the horizon? Vaporware FUD is a double-edged sword (even if the wares are not really vapor, and the FUD isn't intentional). If you're going to go through the effort of contributing driver code for a chipset, you want the chipset to still be around when you're done. Also, you need a large pool of people to choose developers and testers from, so the biggest existing population of users is a good place to start. Certainly I hope no one is proposing that people should refrain altogether from developing open-source video drivers; however, suggesting that people develop open-source video drivers for an obscure niche market chipset, or a chipset vendor who might leave the market in the near future, is the same as suggesting they don't work on a video driver at all.
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Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? Posted Feb 18, 2008 23:23 UTC (Mon) by robertknight (subscriber, #42536) [Link] > About the only thing wrong with the NVidia drivers is the license > and lack of source code--in every other respect, they are a model > for how out-of-tree drivers should work on Linux. That is like giving a restaurant a great review and commenting that the only bad things were the food, the ambiance and the price.
Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? Posted Feb 18, 2008 23:33 UTC (Mon) by notamisfit (subscriber, #40886) [Link] Ambiance and price I can possibly see, but food? The whole point behind 3D video drivers, proprietary or not, is to drive applications that use 3D, and NVIDIA's drivers are quite effective in that regard.
Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? Posted Feb 18, 2008 23:33 UTC (Mon) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] > > About the only thing wrong with the NVidia drivers is the license > > and lack of source code--in every other respect, they are a model > > for how out-of-tree drivers should work on Linux. > That is like giving a restaurant a great review and commenting that the only bad things were the food, the ambiance and the price. Not really - the food and ambience would be akin to the performance and the quality of the display, which are both great. The price would be akin to, well, the price - also very competitive. Perhaps a better analogy for the less than ideal licence, and the closed source blob would be e.g. the inconvenient location of the restauraunt, and the too-short hours of operation. These are real issues, but let's give credit where credit is due - Ristorante Nvidia features excellent food, charming ambiance and competitive pricing, but with the downsides of an inconvenient location with insufficient parking and restrictive hours of operation (4 to 7 pm, Tuesday-Thursday-Sunday)
Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? Posted Feb 19, 2008 1:07 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] If you want accuracy... How about in order to eat at the Nvidia resturant they have to pass government laws requiring you to be blindfolded, drugged, drove around the countryside until your completely disoriented. Then when you got to the resturant you are force-fed a certain amount of food of a certain type.. becuase that is what will make the resturant seem most impressive. Then to give your review you are forced to sign a EULA were you can't realy tell anybody about what sort of food is at the place, or what you ate, or what you didn't and did like... but you can happily talk about future products that they decide to allow you to and you can make graphs comparing the food you ate to other food you've eaten and how fast the stuff passes through your digestive track. This is all to protect that resturant from other competition.. they don't want anybody leaking anything about their recipes.. even though that has very little to do with the actual act of eating and enjoying the food.
Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? Posted Feb 19, 2008 2:41 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link] How about you all stop stretching an analogy well beyond its original context? :)
Read the EULA, please Posted Feb 19, 2008 8:42 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Then come back and say it again. EULA (which you are supposedly agreed with but looks like in reality to not even read) forbids a lot of stuff and there were a lot cheating embedded in nVidia drivers (in extreme cases drivers just ignore shader code totally and are using totally different hand-crafted shaders which don't even look like original). Sorry but this analogy is closer to the reality then what you are implying...
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