I can't afford a new gpu, and only buy stuff used by trusted people (windows user who have nvidia at the moment).
What will happen to me? will i have to keep a windows partition to play now that proton is there and i could delete it?

Am I condemned? am I f****d up?
Will I have to reuse my ati x1800xt?

It's nothing whatsoever to do with gaming.

Nvidia should stop fooling around. Time to support Nouveau for them. Their dinosaur blob approach is really getting out of place. Good to see kernel developers being strict about it.

Last edited by Shmerl on 16 August 2020 at 7:03 am UTC

Quoting: Liam DaweIt's nothing whatsoever to do with gaming.

That remains to be seen.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: sub

Quoting: Liam DaweIt's nothing whatsoever to do with gaming.

That remains to be seen.

Not really, see here for a good summary of why this came about:
https://lwn.net/Articles/827596/

Thanks, mirv!

While not an expert here, I'm aware this came to life due to this cheeky netgpu pull request by an fb employee.

Yet, as far as I got it, they found a loophole with the GPL_* exports and the patch taking countermeasures has been pulled by Linux recently.

I couldn't find any resource of someone trying to compile the Nvidia driver with this recent patch,
but here is a tweet and what Dave Airlie responds.

https://twitter.com/pdp7/status/1294445830871683072

*Maybe* we have fun times ahead.

Quoting: subAccording to the linux graphics stack devs this now will cause a real issue for NVIDIA's proprietary driver beyond just marking it "tainted".

I fail to see how this will cause any inconvenience to nVidia.
What this "patch" does is checks on whether the presumably GPL'ed module imports "symbols" (subroutine names as I understand it) from a proprietary module or not, and if it catches the module in the process of "committing the crime", it bans said "GPL'ed" module from access to kernel functions (alternatively, if the module in question did not import any "infidel symbols" yet, the patch prevents it from ever doing so).

The patch is aimed to eliminate the "GPL-condom" modules that try to mask some proprietary interfaces behind their wrappings.

nVidia does not have the urge to proclaim its shim as "GPL'ed" (trying to avoid "tainting"), so it is "business as usual" for it.

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: subAccording to the linux graphics stack devs this now will cause a real issue for NVIDIA's proprietary driver beyond just marking it "tainted".

I fail to see how this will cause any inconvenience to nVidia.
What this "patch" does is checks on whether the presumably GPL'ed module imports "symbols" (subroutine names as I understand it) from a proprietary module or not, and if it catches the module in the process of "committing the crime", it bans said "GPL'ed" module from access to kernel functions (alternatively, if the module in question did not import any "infidel symbols" yet, the patch prevents it from ever doing so).

The patch is aimed to eliminate the "GPL-condom" modules that try to mask some proprietary interfaces behind their wrappings.

nVidia does not have the urge to proclaim its shim as "GPL'ed" (trying to avoid "tainting"), so it is "business as usual" for it.

Probably you're correct.
Tbh, I fail to see all implications of this.
Thanks for your input.

Quoting: subThanks for your input.

No problem.

To be honest, reading all this "devtalk" is tiresome for me (as a non-native English speaker), so I might have missed something.

But it would appear this caused the "Oracle vs. Google" discussion of whether to treat interfaces (read: "*.h" files) as copyrightable. The court (as we know) took the side of Google, stating that using interfaces from proprietary products in your product wil not automatically make it a derivative of the used API (how a game using DirectX API is not automatically a DirectX derivative), so some say shims are OK, but the kernel developers want to protect the mainline kernel from (potentially thousands) of attempts to sneak-in some API's from proprietary products.

Yeah, it's a rabbit hole. :D