LWN: Comments on "The abrupt merging of Nouveau"

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

personman — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:29:38 +0000

In my opinion, open source is anarchist, and anarchism is properly understood as a decentralized, cooperative, collectivist, libertarian-socialism.

Decision making is largely done collectively and cooperatively, in a participatory fashion, rather than a central authority atop a hierarchy.

Socialism only requires a centralized authority if you are referring to authoritarian socialism. Libertarian-socialism (anarchism) is a different deal. My two cents...

-Andy
AnarchismToday.org

Typo fixed

speculatrix — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:45:57 +0000

are you simply waiting for someone to merge the "submit typo" patches upstream, and if so is it merely an excuse

:-D

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

rahulsundaram — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:47:06 +0000

Apple is not shipping a GPL'ed kernel.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

foom — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:02:12 +0000

I suspect Nvidia would be perfectly happy to help RedHat debug and support the drivers, perhaps dependent upon some payment being made, and probably requiring an NDA. Apple seems to have no trouble shipping binary nvidia drivers that work (I bet they either actually have the source code to the driver available in house or at least work very closely with the nvidia developers to ensure it functions properly).

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

robert_s — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:04:23 +0000

"In short, Redhat makes the choice to not ship fully functioning drivers for Nvidia hardware. Since other OS vendors are able to do so it would seem the problem resides within Redhat not Nvidia."

Ah, so you're suggesting Redhat should ship operating systems they are unable to debug and properly support.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

giraffedata — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:21:26 +0000

Socialism is a mixture of capitalism and communism (Marx thought it was a stepping stone on the way to communism). So for open source to be socialist, it would still need a central authority to direct some resources. And I don't see one.

Neither socialism, communism, nor capitalism imply that government employees take stuff that rightfully belongs to others or that rich people get stuff that rightfully belongs to non-rich people, so whether that's in fact what happens when societies attempt to set up these economic systems, it really isn't relevant to the question of whether the existing open source economy is socialist, capitalist, or whatever.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Wol — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:15:06 +0000

That's not socialism, that's communism ...

Actually, it's probably better described as Stalinism - where the government takes everything in the name of the people and then the elite use it as their own personal property.

Just like fascism, in fact.

In fact, also pretty much like the current "capitalist" setup - where the government and their cronies are walking off with all our money TODAY. What are the recent boom and current bust iof not yet another means for the already-rich to get even richer?

Cheers,
Wol

(nt)?

Wol — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:56:28 +0000

Especially used when the comment is rejected if it has no text (hence n/t - a no-text comment!)

Cheers,
Wol

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

glup — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:28:06 +0000

That is dangerous comment because it might be history today already.

Catalyst is improving fast and AMD is clearly seeing the linux market as something that they should invest to. Too bad Catalyst development model is a lot slower than what nvidia appears to have. It loosk a lot like nvdia is using better version control system for parallel development. :)

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

hammers — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:43:58 +0000

"Intel has little say on whether Imagination Technologies release their drivers, although they have been trying to pressure them"

Really ? You used to work for IMG ? And you come out with a comment like that ?

Really ??

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Kamilion — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:38:27 +0000

Just so nobody gets swallowed in awe over pie-charts -- don't forget that all the 'benchmarkers' out there tend to bench on windows because that's where the tools are.

As a hardware geek, I can tell you, I've crashed the nvidia driver hundreds of times in a *DAY* just trying to find a stabilized overclock -- and considering nVidia has classically been the Chip of The Overclocker, it does not surprise me in the least to see nVidia as the leading cause of vista crashes when the G80 was released.

... What scares me more than pie charts is that Microsoft has automated collection of millions of machines, all dumping into these huge QA databases, and NOBODY seems to stop and think, "Hey, Quickbooks just crashed and Windows wants to send a partial memory dump to Microsoft's QA database..."

Someday, some sneak's going to mine that DB for all it's worth. That'll be one interesting day. There could be just about anything in there, considering the general quality of the 3rd party code in that ecosystem.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

ceplm — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:58:21 +0000

Just that you won't get swallowed in awe over nVidia drivers, let me remind you of http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capabl...

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

rahulsundaram — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:13:07 +0000

Intel's failure is primarily in branding. I used to be able to point to Intel as the brand you can trust and buy to be working out of the box with free and open source drivers in all Linux distributions. That's not the case anymore.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

johnflux — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:27:45 +0000

How is that a fail? Intel does support of their chipset, but the graphics chip you linked to is done by Imagination Technologies. Intel has little say on whether Imagination Technologies release their drivers, although they have been trying to pressure them. (I used to work for Imagination Technologies)

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

jmm82 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:21:03 +0000

Corperations do not hire subsystem maintainers as good philantropists.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

giraffedata — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:08:42 +0000

I don't see where socialism enters into the open source situation.

Socialism requires a central government to determine what each person's contribution to society should be (and enforce it). There isn't anything like that in open source.

I do see a social responsibility or altruism angle, where someone voluntarily contributes code or licenses with GPL in order to bring about a better world for everyone, but that's basically welfare, which goes hand in hand with capitalism, not socialism.

Typos as comments

giraffedata — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 03:44:17 +0000

I set out to post (as I have before) that I don't understand how adding a line of instruction to the comment editor page could be so hard that it's even worth talking about (as opposed to doing) for three years.

But here in the comment editor I see the line is now there!

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

anton — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:25:30 +0000

Actually ATI released 3D programming information for the r100 and r200 families of graphics chips (powering the graphics cards up to the Radeon 9250) a long time ago, and we have had 3D drivers for these cards for a very long time. Then they changed their policy, and did not release information for their later cards until they were bought by AMD. The r100 and r200 information reportedly helped in reverse engineering the r300/r400 and so we have enjoyed free drivers for these cards with 3D acceleration after a while.

Why did ATI change their policy in the unwelcome direction? Maybe the market force of the free software users is not big enough (or at least ATI management thought so); many Linux users obviously care little for free software and bought Nvidia based on the availability of their proprietary driver.

Why did AMD change the policy in the welcome direction? Apparently the market force of the free software users is big enough for AMD to care, even if ATI didn't.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

farnz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:41:08 +0000

Are you aware that distributions where someone has bothered to translate packages from English to another language are also distributions where you can interact with speakers of that language on the distribution bugtracker? What's more, the people you interact with, in your language, are generally helpful in getting your bug report into shape, then translating it and funnelling information between your language and the developer's preferred language.

Seriously, I've seen bug reports handled and fixed from distributions I didn't even know existed, precisely because I don't even know the writing system used by the distro's native language, let alone the language. But, someone who spoke the right language took a report from their bug tracker, did some basic triage, determined it was a genuine bug, and sent the report upstream, with a note explaining that it was all machine translated, and apologising for the poor English. A back and forth ensued, getting technical data from the bug reporter, and the bug got fixed.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

marcH — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:23:12 +0000

> So let's get this straight: the average Joe doesn't speak English, yet is able to (somehow) navigate an English-only driver download site,

Are you aware that some Linux distributions ship binary drivers, or make their installation just a few native language clicks away?

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

farnz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:39:22 +0000

So let's get this straight: the average Joe doesn't speak English, yet is able to (somehow) navigate an English-only driver download site, and follow binary driver install instructions, that only come in English? Yet, they're incapable of finding enough help with English to file useful bug reports?

I've done my share of helping non-English speakers work through a non-technical friend who speaks both (usually very bad) English and their language file decent bug reports. Generally, it's not too difficult - Google Translate and similar software tools work well in finding the words needed to describe symptoms, and the technical information is cut-and-paste only anyway, and usually incomprehensible to English speakers, too. Heck, I've even had the fun of working entirely through Google Translate to find a bug; IME, open source driver developers are quite happy to work with you over a language barrier, so long as you're happy to try and make things work.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

marcH — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:29:39 +0000

> That's not my direct experience.

Did it cross your mind that the average Joe does not even speak English?

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

farnz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:15:51 +0000

That's not my direct experience. If I (as an individual user) interact nicely with the Open Source maintainers - i.e. get the information they ask for as fast as I can, describe the bug not my idea of the fix, and generally follow Simon Tatham's guide to bug reporting - I get solutions to my problems. This is far better than I ever got from a company issuing binary drivers.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

bojan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:52:06 +0000

> If you are an average Joe then you will never get help, open-source or not.

Bullshit.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

louai — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:12:00 +0000

Unfortunately Ati's drivers are nowhere close to Nvidia's in terms of performance, functionality, or stability. In a production environment the proprietary Nvidia driver has been the only workable one for me for a rather long time.

The abrupt merging of...

mjg59 — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:49:57 +0000

In S3, the processor has no stored state. "Resume" is equivalent to the machine being turned on
from scratch as far as it's concerned. It's up to the BIOS to check a flag to determine whether it's a
cold power on or a resume.

Performing a full resume cycle is hard. You need to reprogram the memory controller, bring the
embedded controller up, dump values back into the thermal monitoring hardware and any number
of low-level initialisations. Only once that's been done does control get passed back to the OS,
which has absolutely no idea how any of that hardware works.

The abrupt merging of...

mjthayer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:39:39 +0000

> Suspending the CPU means that when power is reapplied it'll jump to its default start address.
> The kernel can't put code there, so performing suspend to RAM on commodity x86 without
> firmware assistance is impossible.
Is there really no known way to do this without assistance from the ACPI BIOS? I'm no expert, but
my understanding was that DOS extenders did this all the time to switch from protected back to
real mode at a time when there was no ACPI.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

marcH — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:29:45 +0000

> When you get help with you closed source driver from _one_ kernel developer, please let me know.

If you are an average Joe then you will never get help, open-source or not.

If you are a big company willing to pay then you can get help sometimes, open-source or not.

Of course open-source is much much better for all types of consumers *in the long term*. But when you have a piece of hardware to get working *right now* it does not really matter.

(nt)?

TRS-80 — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:03:20 +0000

The other usage I've seen is to put a $ at the end of the subject to indicate that's the end of the message.

Typo fixed

daniels — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:23:10 +0000

'Please send typos directory to lwn@lwn.net'? Oh, the irony. :)

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Anssi — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:04:51 +0000

> For whatever reason, pointers to "elsewhere" are hard to find, but your
> editor happens to know that the firmware can be found in the Nouveau git
> tree. Simply grabbing the right version and placing it in the local
> firmware directory should be sufficient.

There's a link to a firmware tarball at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallDRM

If you grab the firmware from the git tree instead, you also need to convert the files to binary format, e.g.
"objcopy -Iihex -Obinary filename.ctxprog.ihex filename.ctxprog".

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

iznogood — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:35:09 +0000

Man, thanks so much.

Its really enlightening to know this kind of stuff (at least for me). Any
chance to point me at some docs of any kind for GPU internals ?

Thanks in advance

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

mikov — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:31:59 +0000

Very well said, very well!

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

bojan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:28:16 +0000

Except from kernel developers that are employed by your distro, right?*

Look, I understand that if things don't work with the current open source driver, people will run proprietary drivers. I did exactly that for many of my users (example: before nouveau, there was nv, which didn't have good support for dual head, so I _had_ to give my users Nvidia driver so that they can use the second screen).

But, but, but... If Nvidia released their driver as open source when they should have, everyone would have a better solution and it would be fully supported by kernel devs too. The only reason all this stuff had to be painfully reverse engineered is because Nvidia refuse to do the right thing. So, yeah, of course it's not as good as Nvidia stuff (yet). The guys working on nouveau are doing heroic work, IMHO.

*) You can look at kernel bugzilla and verify that many people running Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora etc. kernels _do_ get their problems heard and resolved. You can also verify that in e.g. Red Hat bugzilla, indeed, kernel developers employed by Red Hat help users regularly. The patches usually end up being applied upstream.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

airlied — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:25:33 +0000

This isn't the shader engine or anything like it, its a simple processor that just copies data from processor registers to VRAM and vice-versa, its like a really simple offload engine.

So its a fairly simple processor and working out its opcodes once you know what its copying and to where wasn't that hard, the simpler opcode were okay, the problem at least with G80 opcodes is the non-trivial ones (I think 2 left) are proving quite hard to figure out.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

bojan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:13:17 +0000

Absolutely! For every one person that picks Nvidia because they have the best drivers, the percentage points of market share go up exponentially. And it can go above 100%, of course :-)

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

ikm — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:37:13 +0000

Is this exponential? We could find some more followers, ya'know! :)

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

iznogood — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:29:00 +0000

OK thanks for the reply.

The main question is that i though that the firmware
runs on the GPU so you need to know some "GPU assembly language" or
something
like that. I mean just reading a few regs does not help a lot in that case.
You really need to understand the chip architecture, its not x86 or
something. And its totally undocumented. That is what i meant before and i
was wondering how they do it.

REnouveau really helps a lot if you want to know what to put in the
registers
to draw something for example, but i can not understand how it works on the
firmware case.

I though it might be some unofficial nvidia help there to get this done...
On the other hand i know nothing about that stuff so what i say might be
totally wrong

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

tseaver — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:24:38 +0000

If you aren't running the latest vanilla kernel, you can't expect to get support from kernel developers anyway. The overwhelming majority of Linux desktop users are running distro-maintained kernels, which the kernel develoeprs (rightly) don't try to support. At that point, the tradeoff is suddenly very different: I *prefer* the open driver, but I won't use it if it interferes with my use of the hardware (breaks resume, whatever).

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

bojan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:08:42 +0000

Sugar! Sorry. In latest news, Nvidia up 10 points ;-)