Someone check the weather in hell, as NVIDIA seem to be opening themselves up a bit more with the release of some additional GPU documentation.
Phoronix writes that NVIDIA notified them about the documentation now being available on GitHub along with it under an MIT license, which should hopefully help the Nouveau open source Linux driver. It was previously available here on their own website, although they stopped updating that in May. So not only is this more up to date with new and updated files, it's also far easier to look through.
The documentation covers all sorts of things like the BIOS, their custom "Falcon" architecture for security, memory tweaking and so on. This isn't just desktop GPU docs either, having a look over it myself there's information for notebook products as well.
According to what NVIDIA said, it's a work in progress and not everything is up yet. This has apparently been a "multi-year undertaking", which isn't really surprising given how it would all have to be run through different people to sign off on it. The legal spaghetti surrounding things like this is probably quite messy.
Pretty big surprise, nice to see NVIDIA make some more open steps. It's still nothing compared to the levels of AMD and Intel, since they have proper open source drivers but it's a good step in a nice direction for sure. You can find it all here on GitHub.
Hey NVIDIA, if you're reading—get in touch!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: ElectricPrismI can compile the kernel in minuets
Now that would be interesting to see.
Quoting: HoriIf not for the greed with the pricing of the 20xx series, Nvidia would have been an ok company in my book.
Greed is not really the thing at work here. The 2080 Ti (and to 2080 to a lesser extent) is the one with the really excessive price and there is absolutely no competition for that card to drive the price down. So they only really compete with themselves. I suspect the production capacity of these high end models is not that big, so they have reason at all to lower the price. It would be nice if AMD entered that segment, but I don't think they're exactly in a hurry to do so.
wvstolzing Aug 8, 2019
Quoting: bingusQuoting: ElectricPrismI can compile the kernel in minuets
Now that would be interesting to see.
'see'? No, hear! A minuet is for the ears; e.g., this one.
Quoting: wvstolzingA minuet is composed for and named after a type of dance. :)Quoting: bingusQuoting: ElectricPrismI can compile the kernel in minuets
Now that would be interesting to see.
'see'? No, hear! A minuet is for the ears; e.g., this one.
wvstolzing Aug 8, 2019
Quoting: tuubiQuoting: wvstolzingA minuet is composed for and named after a type of dance. :)Quoting: bingusQuoting: ElectricPrismI can compile the kernel in minuets
Now that would be interesting to see.
'see'? No, hear! A minuet is for the ears; e.g., this one.
Yeah but a dance isn't just for the eyes, is it? Err... (Yeah a silly oversight; especially considering that I've written a few minuets myself, aeons ago.)
As long as I'm on Linux, I just don't see me ever installing an nvidia GPU again.
Quoting: TheRiddickHopefully AMD's open-source vulkan drivers can pull ahead and make some real impressive wins against NVIDIA's closed drivers in the future, that would really put the pressure on, we have seen what open-source opengl drivers have done for AMD, quite impressive.
Actually I doubt that this will happen. One of the reasons that the binary drivers are faster is that they add tons of per game optimizations and that is something that Mesa frowns upon big time so we will probably not see such work in the open drivers.
Quoting: ElectricPrismQuoteSomeone check the weather in hell, as NVIDIA seem to be opening themselves up a bit more with the release of some GPU documentation.
Indeed.
I used to be a full nvidia customer for at least 10+ years.
Then AMD did such an amazing job with their Open Source MESA Linux Driver. I switched. AMD earned my loyalty and in exchange I have built at least 6+ full AMD rigs in the last 2 years alone. Now I am looking to exclusively do AMD in laptops too because the Linux Drivers are so much better than Nvidia and more performant than Intel.
As it stands currently, AMD is a superior experience on Linux because the open source driver makes everything stable as software marches forward.
NVIDIA -- you are late to the race, AMD and Intel have already finished the open-source race. You have a lot of work to do before we are swayed to even consider your products again.
Edit:
QuoteIt goes back to at least 2012 when they said they would release more docs while now it appears they are living up to that promise for helping Nouveau. -- Phoronix
Jesus Christ! Am I to understand it took 7 years for them to even begin to deliver progress on this task? They're going to have to do better than that! I want to see current-gen documentation delivered in this Fiscal Quarter. Unacceptable, at this speed I will sooner see them dethroned.
7 years is nothing for huge corporations to do stuff. In a previous workplace we had to negotiate for 10 years in order to be able to redistribute Reuters Financal News (now Refinitiv) in our system and terminal, only for them to 2 years later decide that they no longer wanted to do it.
Last edited by F.Ultra on 8 August 2019 at 2:15 pm UTC
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