Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

[WorBlux]

what i don't understand is how it comes to that radeon and noveau drivers are on par (at least from my point of view) why isn't radeon driver much better than noveau?

They both are running instructions dispatched from mesa, which may be part of the problem. I'm sure the proprietary drivers are very aggressive with optimization, whereas mesa has to worry about a lot more than dispatching instruction to on type of card.

[D0pamine]

It amazes me that Windows and OS X are able to make these proprietary drivers work without a hitch.

The way people talk here, it's simply an impossibly horrible way of doing things.

some people choose a gnu/linux system because of the freedom it offers - a big nasty blob that replaces half of X flies in the face of this

[Kano]

Well maybe understand that this driver only works well with desktop systems and a very small part of laptops where you can disable other gfx chips completely. Then it comes to Optimus support then nvidia is really VERY bad. It is impossible to recommend that hardware and say it will 100% work. There are hacks like bumblebee but thats not an official solution. I do not consider amds dual gfx solution so much better however, so you should go for intel only hardware in case of laptops. In theory the systems with amd apu might work as well, but there the binary driver has got a much worse video accelleration and faces often problems with new xservers/kernels. The oss driver stack does not work good for those systems as well. I also remember a curious reboot instead of shutdown problem with such kind of hardware - but that looks more like a bios problem.

[Wilfred]

It amazes me that Windows and OS X are able to make these proprietary drivers work without a hitch.

The way people talk here, it's simply an impossibly horrible way of doing things.

Haha, the nvidia driver was also the main cause of crashes of ms windows systems a few years ago. Nowadays 64 bit ms windows 7 only loads drivers signed by microsoft. And Microsoft tests the hell out of those drivers which takes quite some time. Or I.O.W. Microsoft and Nvidia spend an enormous amount of money, time and people to make it so. I'm guessing that the nouveau developers are way way more efficient. Don't know about Apple, but I'm guessing the same.

[edmon]

For their IP yes, for the IP that they license they do not.

Hm, did they still pays to 3dfx ?? ))))

[Paradox Uncreated]

What he calls organic, is ofcourse what the religious calls metaphysical. Let natural roles form around a project. Which is also religiously surrender to natural behaviour and Gods will.

Praised Be God.
Peace Be With You.

[AnonymousCoward]

Can anyone comment about how big/invasive the Nvidia graphics driver is to the rest of the stack? Last time I used an Nvidia card (about 4 years ago) the Nvidia blob replaced a large amount of Mesa/X and the rest of the system, which is why eg. RandR support took so long to be implemented.

If it's still being maintained that way then Nvidia definitely is being hostile to Linux development, it's taking the "we can't support a tainted kernel" argument and extending it to say "you're not actually running Linux any more once you install the Nvidia blob" - all for a graphics/parallel compute device

well nvidia blob replace libGL.so from mesa and few other files. it makes backup thouth. but you cant update mesa/kernel otherwise you end up with broken driver. catalyst have IMHO better integration as it let you build deb/rpm package and doesn't overwrite any files. it keeps own libGL.so in /usr/lib/fglrx and point at it with entry in /etc/ld.conf.d

[TobiSGD]

Haha, the nvidia driver was also the main cause of crashes of ms windows systems a few years ago. Nowadays 64 bit ms windows 7 only loads drivers signed by microsoft. And Microsoft tests the hell out of those drivers which takes quite some time. Or I.O.W. Microsoft and Nvidia spend an enormous amount of money, time and people to make it so. I'm guessing that the nouveau developers are way way more efficient. Don't know about Apple, but I'm guessing the same.

Every driver from AMD/Nvidia for Windows is signed. Even the betas. The signing has nothing to do with stability, it is a security function.

[uid313]

Every driver from AMD/Nvidia for Windows is signed. Even the betas. The signing has nothing to do with stability, it is a security function.

But I think device drivers go through WHQL Testing (Windows Hardware Quality Labs).

Also, Windows Vista introduced Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) which I think made device drivers more stable or something.

[DeepDayze]

I remember in the early days of Linux that many hardware manufacturers were not helpful and had refused to provide documentation for their hardware. Diamond and Neomagic come to mind as those examples, but as time went on these companies eventually did provide at least some documentation for their graphics hardware and in the end Linux users bought such hardware..thus those companies had sales to some extent.

I'm sure at some point, with the right persuasion and pressure nVidia could provide some documentation where they legally can in the same vein as what AMD did to vet their code and sanitize it to be *legally* releasable. Devs can then write code to replace any missing pieces that could not be released.

Linus's bashing of nVidia (directly or indirectly) might not even help the cause at all in my opinion.