Nouveau Developers Remain Frustrated By NVIDIA's Firmware Practices

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Developers Remain Frustrated By NVIDIA's Firmware Practices

Nouveau developers Samuel Pitoiset, Karol Herbst, Pierre Moreau, and Martin Peres presented their status update on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver during the second day of the XDC2016 conference. Nouveau developers had a few words for the NVIDIA developers in the room...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2016-NVIDIA

[Linuxhippy]

Bottom line: In case you care about open-source drivers, don't buy Nvidia GPUs.

Thankfully to the advancements of the open-source intel/amd drivers, proprietary Nvidia isn't the only choice enymore.

[bug77]

Bottom line: In case you care about open-source drivers, don't buy Nvidia GPUs.

The problem is not only people do NOT care about open-source drivers, they don't even (want to) know what a driver is. Have you seen a single Mac user asking this question? No, they just buy a box and go about their business.
I would love to see every driver under the Sun being open sourced (I'm a programmer, I love it when source code is available and I hate it I don't have more time to upstream patches), but in a world where people don't even know what the URL bar is for in a browser (have you ever counted how many people go to site by entering the URL in their homepage which is usually google.com?), you're never getting significant support for that push.

[joeandjoe]

one must wonder, why not drop development of open source nvidia drivers altogether?

[kyrios]

Bottom line: In case you care about open-source drivers, don't buy Nvidia GPUs.

Same if you care about Wayland in a short/medium term future : stay away from Nvidia GPUs

[bug77]

one must wonder, why not drop development of open source nvidia drivers altogether?

Who's gonna drop it? Nouveau is a community effort. As long as people will be interested in writing a GPU driver for nvidia cards, the project will live.
Also, there are open source drivers coming directly from nvidia, but (for now at least), they're about the Tegra line. So you see, it's not that nvidia hates open source, it just that maintaining their existing driver hasn't become expensive enough for them to consider rewriting it.

[M@GOid]

If they are frustrated with Nvidia, they are more than welcome to develop for AMD and Intel GPUs.

[Termy]

so all in all we can still say that linus is right regarding nvidia...

[juno]

The problem is not only people do NOT care about open-source drivers, they don't even (want to) know what a driver is. Have you seen a single Mac user asking this question? No, they just buy a box and go about their business.

1) different target audience
2) you know that only free drivers do possibly work out of the box w/ gnu/linux

[karolherbst]

If they are frustrated with Nvidia, they are more than welcome to develop for AMD and Intel GPUs.

Ain't no fun, cause you got documentation.