Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

[0xBADCODE]

Some nvidia "fans" who were "too happy" with complete lack of divers for Nvidia Optimus for Linux have even created the following funny site to show their respect to Nvidia: http://drivers-for-optimus.enodev.org/

For those not familiar with Russian, approximate translation of (foul language!) text to English could be like that:

There are no fucking drivers!
Put this shit to garbage bin.

Though corrected nvidia logo picture is what actually delivers.
Seriously. Nvidia should change their logo! When hardware comes without drivers and documentation it's exactly like that!

[0xBADCODE]

Does Linux even have feature parity with ZFS yet? Nope.

Linux can serve most of real-world tasks, one way or another. It do not have to emulate ZFS (Solaris, BSD, ...) features exactly to do this. Linux can do volume management, raid levels and whatever. One way or another. And ZFS fans probably would find BTRFS quite cool thing at some point.

[XorEaxEax]

Even with stalled development Solaris is pretty much superior to Linux in many server scenarios. The SPARC hardware and support contracts aren't exactly cheap though and thus don't necessarily make it a smart choice for businesses.

'Big iron' is consistently losing ground to Linux and Windows in the server space so obviously what they offer in performance is found not being worth the comparative costs.

And the ZFS code is 100% open source but since the licenses are incompatible, here we are with objectively inferior file systems in Linux.

It was deliberately licenced to be incompatible with Linux (GPL) as they were competing with Linux and obviously didn't want to give away the competitive advantage ZFS offered.

Linux took off in the server space because it was free and ran on x86. That's just a fact. It had nothing to do with feature sets or FOSS principles.

The BSD's are also free and runs on x86, yet Linux dominates in the server space while the BSD's hardly register by comparison, despite your bullshit about how -'It took YEARS for many commercial entities to dip their toes into the Linux pool after being scared away by the fanatics.'.

Linux IS an extremely performant OS as proven by it being widely used in high performance computing (HPC), supercomputers/computing clusters (totally dominates here). The Linux devs take great pride in being performant as evident in this very video we are discussing were Linus goes on about an example of how Linux's pathname-lookup is faster than on anything else which was something the devs were micro-optimizing a while back to minimize cache misses while also making sure it scales perfectly.

[hoohoo]

I dunno what Linus is upset about, I have not watched the video yet. However the work I've done with OpenGL was done on Linux using NV card + NV proprietary driver and I had no problems. The work I've done with CUDA was on Linux and it worked very well indeed. I hope a pissing match does not develop between Linus and Jen Hsun, because I like NV on Linux.

[log0]

Some nvidia "fans" who were "too happy" with complete lack of divers for Nvidia Optimus for Linux have even created the following funny site to show their respect to Nvidia: http://drivers-for-optimus.enodev.org/

-> Драйверов блядь нет!

Hahaha! Almost fell off my chair!!

[float4]

"Init is too fancy, we only need a root shell"

[johnc]

The BSD's are also free and runs on x86, yet Linux dominates in the server space while the BSD's hardly register by comparison, despite your bullshit about how -'It took YEARS for many commercial entities to dip their toes into the Linux pool after being scared away by the fanatics.'.

Linux IS an extremely performant OS as proven by it being widely used in high performance computing (HPC), supercomputers/computing clusters (totally dominates here). The Linux devs take great pride in being performant as evident in this very video we are discussing were Linus goes on about an example of how Linux's pathname-lookup is faster than on anything else which was something the devs were micro-optimizing a while back to minimize cache misses while also making sure it scales perfectly.

I think Linus is over-esteeming himself though.

Ehhhh... Not sure that Linux "dominates" in the server space (assuming that "majority" doesn't translate to "dominate", and even then "majority" is questionable depending on which stats one looks at). Depends on the server type I guess. Yes, the BSDs are free and the BSDs had a large segment of the UNIX-like server market for quite awhile there, especially the web server market. But that was before the days of godaddy.com and $10/mo hosting fees. I'm not sure what that looks like now. But that wasn't the point I was making with my statement that you quoted, where I intended to point out that consumer-oriented software and hardware were, for a long time, not supported on Linux. I remember the days where "if it's not open source, GTFOff my system" were quite commonplace. I'm hoping that by now that mentality makes up a small minority of the Linux community. But it's somewhat prevalent on the forums here.

Linux does dominate the HPC sector... of which some of those systems are hooked into NVIDIA GPUs driven by those awfully horrible NVIDIA drivers.

On the desktop -- one of the biggest OS markets -- obviously Linux is practically non-existent. That's not by accident.

Within the past year Linux has taken a small majority in the smartphone market, completely driven by Android which for quite a long time was maligned in the Linux community because Google wasn't a team player. Now that Android is #1, the Linux community wants to brag about Android. Not to mention that Android's popularity would have been completely impossible if it weren't for the proprietary, closed-source binary blobs that people on this website are so frequent to deem the equivalent of Satan's spawn.

Linus was quick to brag about daily Android activations but didn't take the time to mention that driving many of those Android sales is that great Tegra SoC... made by "The Worst Company Ever".

And without Android Linux would be, again, practically non-existent in the mobile space... as it was just a short couple of years ago.

So personally I think Linus came off as a real childish turd. NVIDIA has helped and supported Linux plenty, in its own way, and much more than most companies out there have.

[smitty3268]

I dunno what Linus is upset about, I have not watched the video yet. However the work I've done with OpenGL was done on Linux using NV card + NV proprietary driver and I had no problems. The work I've done with CUDA was on Linux and it worked very well indeed. I hope a pissing match does not develop between Linus and Jen Hsun, because I like NV on Linux.

"Working with NVidia" is very different than "using NVidia's product".

Seeing if an OpenGL app works is very different than trying to maintain a kernel, making updates, debugging it, getting in contact with NVidia developers, etc.

[johnc]

NVIDIA's press release response:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show....php?p=2565191

[smitty3268]

NVIDIA's press release response:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show....php?p=2565191

Or in other words,

"Move along here, nothing to see."