Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Posted Feb 19, 2008 0:04 UTC (Tue) by airlied (subscriber, #9104)
Parent article: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

So this article is missing some info...

1. Intel does get community development on its driver. Red Hat have done a lot of work on the
Intel driver to bring up new X features. Having an open source driver means we can develop new
core X features and things like kernel modesetting. Before I joined Red Hat I wrote a lot of
the kernel modesetting driver for Intel hardware, I also wrote some support for driving the
external chips on those machines. DRI2/modesetting/TTM is all happening on Intel hardware
primarily.

2. AMD have employed Alex Deucher to work on their open drivers, I also contribute code and we
also get major contributions from the community (rs690 support for 3D was a contributor we
have never seen before). They are also paying SuSE to work on radeonhd. However I'm not sure
how much community contribution radeonhd gets. So I don't think AMD have a major advantage
over Intel in this area, they had more community contributors since they stopped helping the
open source community, but they had no real support model for their cards for their enterprise
distros except fglrx. So currently the AMD area is still in major flux and cannot be used as
an example of a stable situation.

3. NVIDIA only care about money. The reasons for Intel/AMD to open up their drivers won't work
on NVIDIA, NVIDIA don't have major money to lose in other areas due to not having open source
GPU products, Intel and AMD do. The biggest problem NVIDIA will have will when the community
developed driver starts being shipped in enterprise distros their enterprise customers will
start to push back on them to support it instead of supporting the nv driver. This happened
before with network drivers. How this will work out is unknown at present, but I think
developing the nouveau driver is not in any way helping NVIDIA, their customers are not you
and me, they are Dell and HP, until they put pressure on them anything the community does is
irrelevant.

It's all about Ubuntu

Posted Feb 19, 2008 1:44 UTC (Tue) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]

very good comment; I totally agree that only HP/Dell/IBM/etc can make nvidia change their
mind.

However I suspect it's all about Ubuntu. 3D cards ship primarily on non-server machines (just
to avoid the word "desktop":), and that's the domain ruled by Ubuntu (and Red Flag in PRC). So
it's waiting until Ubuntu changes to nouveau to see any kind of traction.

I hope nouveau gets to a level soon where distros can default to it.
That doesn't mean it needs to have full complete super duper fast 3D; it means it needs to
have everything for a good destop (xrandr, composite etc) and maybe some basic 3D to make some
of the compiz fancy stuff work

Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Posted Feb 28, 2008 19:43 UTC (Thu) by m94mni (guest, #50822) [Link]

There you have it, I agree completely that a likely scenario is that the nouveau driver gets
popular, and NVIDIA is compelled into supporting it or open sourcing their own.

As have been stated my many posters, people buy NVIDIA to get superior hardware. When the
built-in driver (nouvaeu in the future) starts to be *almost* all what people need, I believe
many customers (individuals and companies/organizations) *will* start complaining about it.

To save face, NVIDIA might need to make sure the driver works better.