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what do people have against nVidia for their Linux chipset driver support
- Thread starter REMF
- Start date
Nothing at all. They choose to make drivers for another OS which the vast majority does not use. They also choose to not pass out the source to said drivers. If you think you could make better drivers, then feel free to make your own drivers. Nobody walked into your house and forced you to use Nvidia and Linux. If you dont fscking like it, then go start your own video card company, make drivers for major OS' and release the source of your Linux drivers.
My issue isn't with their closed source video drivers (since they own the copyrights to the open sourced 2d drivers I've decided to cut them some slack), it's with the closed source motherboard drivers. Why keep the NIC documentation closed? I can find OPEN SOURCE drivers for just about any ethernet card out there. 3com, intel, linksys, dlink, etc. have all opened source their *nix drivers or given documentation to developers.
What is so special about nVidia's NIC that they don't want to hook up the community with at least documentation? Fuck'em.
Nothinman
Elite Member
The fact that their competitors aren't open is irrelevant. Not disclosing the programming interfaces to their hardware is stupid because it makes it a real PITA to write drivers for them and this in turn makes them harder to use in open systems. I hate the fact that I have to download drivers seperately for my nVidia card when everything else in my boxes is supported 100% out of the box via the standard Linux kernel. And lots of the time when interfaces in the kernel change the drivers don't work for weeks or even months while we wait for nVidia to update them but if they were open they would have been updated when the kernel API changed.
I can understand why they want to keep the 3D crap closed because I believe they do a lot of the logic in software, but can you tell me what advantage nVidia could be keeping by not telling developers how to use their NIC or IDE controller?
People do make their own drivers, but it's a helluva lot more work than should have to be done. And generally when the drivers are usable they're preferred over the closed ones, like the forcedeth driver which replaced the sh!tty nVidia NIC drivers for their nForce crap. Sadly it's nearly impossible to reverse engineer the 3D aspect of the video cards, so the OSS drivers are 2D only.
And someone on lkml was contemplating starting a 3D hardware company that would release all of their specs and their drivers as OSS, but I have no idea if it'll actually happen or not.
What are you talking about? Ever tried a VIA board using Linux/*BSD? It just works. No extra drivers to download. Nothing extra to install. VIA has been very friendly to the F/OSS community (I'm pretty sure OpenBSD got docs, if not hardware from them in the past). Why use an inferior product when you can use VIA?
OK, let's clear a few things up here:
1) At least nVidia has the decency of giving excuses. Ever tried asking TI to release the documentation to their ACX-100 WiFi chipset? You'll get absolutely no response.
2) According to this page, nVidia submitted substantial patches to the reverse-engineered nForce[1-3] ethernet driver. But yes, they and everybody else who do not have open documentation are asshats.
3) There's a reason Linus does not care about breaking ABIs.
4) The project Nothinman refers to is the Open Graphics Project. It will be an openly built and documented graphics card with reprogrammable logic arrays (I think). It will implement all of OpenGL 1.3 and select portions of later revisions. And because I know somebody's going to ask, you'll be able to play games, but not any current ones at any speed and certainly not future ones---at least, that is how the plan is going last I heard; this is of course subject to change.
5) In ATI's line of cards, we have open source 3D drivers up to the Radeon 9250. Intel's and SiS's integrated graphics have some 3D support, but not as much as ATI. (Why did XFree86 have to scare everybody off?) The DRI page details everything.
1) At least nVidia has the decency of giving excuses. Ever tried asking TI to release the documentation to their ACX-100 WiFi chipset? You'll get absolutely no response.
2) According to this page, nVidia submitted substantial patches to the reverse-engineered nForce[1-3] ethernet driver. But yes, they and everybody else who do not have open documentation are asshats.
3) There's a reason Linus does not care about breaking ABIs.
4) The project Nothinman refers to is the Open Graphics Project. It will be an openly built and documented graphics card with reprogrammable logic arrays (I think). It will implement all of OpenGL 1.3 and select portions of later revisions. And because I know somebody's going to ask, you'll be able to play games, but not any current ones at any speed and certainly not future ones---at least, that is how the plan is going last I heard; this is of course subject to change.
5) In ATI's line of cards, we have open source 3D drivers up to the Radeon 9250. Intel's and SiS's integrated graphics have some 3D support, but not as much as ATI. (Why did XFree86 have to scare everybody off?) The DRI page details everything.
Nothinman
Elite Member
But they don't "just work", you still have to download extra crap and potentially compile it to make their hardware work. Other vendors (just about everyone with regards to NICs and IDE controllers) "just work" during installation because there are proper OSS drivers out there and they're usually submitted by the owning company these days.
A) that's a Gentoo page so it loses points IMO
B) It's got broken links, minus more points.
C) Nowhere on that page does it say nVidia endorsed the patches, they could have been submitted by nVidia employees on their free time.
Their NIC drivers are what irks me the most.
A NIC is such a simply thing these days, every vendor out there has open source drivers, what does nVidia think they have to hide?
Isn't their NIC basically a Realtek anyway?
If you get the network working from the start, at least this makes finding and installing the sound/gfx drivers alot easier.
A NIC is such a simply thing these days, every vendor out there has open source drivers, what does nVidia think they have to hide?
Isn't their NIC basically a Realtek anyway?
If you get the network working from the start, at least this makes finding and installing the sound/gfx drivers alot easier.
Basicly. Or at least it was at one point.
One of the huge pain-in-the-rear things that would happen,(and I noticed it happenned a couple time here with newbies, and it happenned to me (I quickly sold the nvidia board and bought 2 via boards, btw)) was that the kernel would mistake the onboard Nic in the Nvidia motherboard for a real Realtek one.
The kernel module would load correctly, and not give any indication of anything bad happenning... except that the nic wouldn't work.
So people would have their Suse OS (for example) and Yast was insisting that it had the nic running and configured, but nothing was happenning. Sucked.
And what realy pissed me off is that Realtek is actually a fairly Linux-friendly company. Most everything they make is linux compatable. Hell they are the one of the few guys that supplied the source for the Linux drivers along side the DOS and Windows 9x and NT drivers on their floppy disks back in the day.
PLUS they are dirt cheap! Now they aren't the highest quality and aren't that high performing. I wouldn't want them on a webserver, but I bought 3 of them for a 'buy 2 get one free' deal. And they were only 8 bucks.... So that's like 3 nic cards for 16 dollars. And they've always worked reliably for me on Linux. No questions asked.
I figure that Nvidia bought the logic for the card and modified to fit in their motherboard's chipset.
Same thing with sound.
People raved on quiet a bit about the "SoundStorm" setup, but Nvidia on-board sound works with the alsa intel-8x0 and has no hardware mixing capabilities, just like my old laptop (which had the worst sound quality I've ever heard and uses the snd-intel8x0 AND the same settings as the nforce stuff. I am sure that nvidia uses much higher quality D/A chips then my laptop did though.).
Nvidia has some sort of magic mojo that they use in their drivers that they've probably developed from their gforce drivers. I remember originally they had seperate drivers for each setup, and then once they released their unified driver archatecture you would install them and that alone would give you a 30% performance boost in Quake2!
That's when they realy pulled away from ATI for a long time. So I understand that they think that they have something to hide. But, damn, it doesn't mean that they have to dildos about everythng.
I've heard that they've aquired a bunch of ex-SGI graphics people a way back.
And SGI has some software magic that would interpret binary code in their drivers and optimize the instructions on the fly for their 3d accelerator video stuff, thus giving a substantial performance boost over anybody else. ER, or something like that.
So maybe that's were Nvidia gets their driver stuff from, old SGI people. Could explain why they are so apt to hide everything. I am sure that there is some nasty licensing things they would like to avoid, maybe??
(that was pure speculation)
But it still doesn't explain the in-grown-forhead syndrome they are displaying with the NIC drivers.
If they released NIC and basic chipset docs I'd be happy. I've got sound cards (you ant ISA or PCI?) and I've got video cards (ATI, Matrox, nVidia). I just want to use the onboard stuff properly. When a developer from the OS I choose says that nVidia boards are junk, I buy VIA.
lol, nVidia nForce chipsets have been head and shoulders above Via for years with the exception of the nForce3 150.
my experience with 4-1 drivers was under windows, they were rubbish. if complete and unified drivers exist for Via chipsets running linux good for them, that still leaves me the problem of windows......
my experience with 4-1 drivers was under windows, they were rubbish. if complete and unified drivers exist for Via chipsets running linux good for them, that still leaves me the problem of windows......
I think the person that did the forcedeth driver is a godsend. In this respect all of my mobo's (7 total) are all nforce chipsets ranging from Nforce1-3. I have never had any problems with using all the kernel drivers to support my nforce mobo's. I have never once needed to load any downloadable driver from nvidia except the one for the vid card.
I have tried many different distro's such as Arch, gentoo, FC1-3, Ubuntu, Slack, MDK, Crux, Jamd, smoothwall, ipcop, Onebase, and a few others wich I cannot remember right now.
If there was one distro that made it hard for me to use an nvidia chipset it was Ubuntu on my main rig. For some reason it thought my A64 was a mobile cpu and was trying to use some sort of speedstep crap on it. Making it slow down to 800mhz, and, when it would do this it would hard lock my machine.
Other than that all good experiences with nforce chipsets for me with all the hardwar supported right from the boot cd.
I have tried many different distro's such as Arch, gentoo, FC1-3, Ubuntu, Slack, MDK, Crux, Jamd, smoothwall, ipcop, Onebase, and a few others wich I cannot remember right now.
If there was one distro that made it hard for me to use an nvidia chipset it was Ubuntu on my main rig. For some reason it thought my A64 was a mobile cpu and was trying to use some sort of speedstep crap on it. Making it slow down to 800mhz, and, when it would do this it would hard lock my machine.
Other than that all good experiences with nforce chipsets for me with all the hardwar supported right from the boot cd.
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