Binary Driver Blobs Aren't Yet Ready For Wayland

[johnc]

So.. what are you proposing?

I propose we not slough off something mature like X. It doesn't make sense to foist an entire upheaval of the graphics stack for very little (if any) added value, all because of one guy's pet project.

This has the potential to be more disruptive than the transition to PulseAudio, except without the nominal features that PA brought... and at a time when such a disruption would be very unfortunate. (I.e., while trying to launch a serious gaming effort on Linux.)

[timofonic]

But then Linux would have been relegated to web servers and TV remotes, yielding the entire smartphone industry to Apple and Windows. There goes a great plan.

You talk like the typical GPU/SoC maker moron

What's Nouveau then? And without resources form Novidia

[asdx]

I propose we not slough off something mature like X. It doesn't make sense to foist an entire upheaval of the graphics stack for very little (if any) added value, all because of one guy's pet project.

This has the potential to be more disruptive than the transition to PulseAudio, except without the nominal features that PA brought... and at a time when such a disruption would be very unfortunate. (I.e., while trying to launch a serious gaming effort on Linux.)

Please don't talk about things you clearly understand nothing about. You saying that Wayland doesn't have any value just shows how ignorant you are in the subject.

Wayland will succeed, you want it or not.

Also, Wayland will add a lot of value for the game developers you also care so much about, they will probably find it a lot easier to work with Linux once X goes away (with all the crap it carries), and once Wayland gets adopted.

[Vadi]

I'm not going to be happy if my 560 suddenly stopped being working for all it's power. I in fact did buy it to enjoy modern high-end games (natively and via wine), which it does very well at in 1080p.

[johnc]

You talk like the typical GPU/SoC maker moron

What's Nouveau then? And without resources form Novidia

I don't know of too many successful Linux-based consumer products that ship free of binary drivers. Can you list them for me?

[asdx]

I'm not going to be happy if my 560 suddenly stopped being working for all it's power. I in fact did buy it to enjoy modern high-end games (natively and via wine), which it does very well at in 1080p.

I hope they stop working, blame yourself for getting shitty nvidia.

[johnc]

I hope they stop working, blame yourself for getting shitty nvidia.

All it will do is push more people away from Linux, which I believe is your goal anyway.

[asdx]

All it will do is push more people away from Linux, which I believe is your goal anyway.

That's not my goal.

My goal is that we get rid of the nvidia blob and all blobs.

Blobs hinder development, why is that so hard to understand?

Blobs stop developers from being free to make decisions and move development forward. This is bad when we have a system such as X11 that carries a lot of garbage, it's bad for you, developers and everyone.

We need specifications and we need to focus in making the free drivers better. This is my only goal. We need to demand specifications from hardware vendors.

Imagine if we had a free and open system but 90% of our drivers were blobs, can you imagine how bad this would be?

Please don't support blobs, please demand hardware specs from your vendors. Support the vendors that support us, and not those who are against us.

[ninez]

What's Nouveau then? And without resources form Novidia

Nouveau's exiestence has been entirely dependent on the existence of Nvidia's blob in the first place. After all, nouveau is largely just reverse-engineered - and while i personally do not use Nouveau (because it is garbage compared to the blob). You may remember (?) a tool called 'REnouveau' - a tool written by nouveau developers to help them reverse engineer the blob. Nouveau has been very dependent on Nvidia's driver, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (like every time Nvidia releases new hardware).

Fuck you nvidia!
Fuck you, binary driver blobs!

Binary driver blobs should have never been possible on Linux, they are a cancer to the FOSS community.

Why care about them when they MUST me destroyed FOREVER?

You do realize there are industries where linux dominates (such as the movie industry), never would have even been possible without Nvidia/AMD providing very performant / up-to-spec (openGL) drivers, right? How about HPC? without having drivers to power/utilize the GPU linux' usage in HPC and workstation-class machines would have been a no-go :\ For the server market it largely doesn't matter (or has little impact) but for those industries outside of that, the binary drivers helped with Linux adoption in a big way. So i 100% disagree that they shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, because if they had not - the OSS drivers probably would have never been written, and linux wouldn't have the widespread adoption that is currently has.

that being said, obviously blobs are a serious problem, in particular - when it comes to development, debugging, etc. But to claim they all should be destroyed when the OSS drivers are NOT a good replacement - because in general, they aren't performant and are missing many features, right down to basic stuff like proper power-management :\ I won't even consider using Wayland on a day to day basis, even if a couple distro's adopt it until Nvidia supports it. - there is absolutely no point. Nouveau isn't an (good) alternative, going and buying a modern AMD GPU - to use radeon, while much better than nouveau as a choice - is still quite laughable compared to the blobs. Intel may not be the worst choice, but i am not going out and buying a new Intel CPU - just to run sub-standard GFX. ~ what a joke.

[enrico.tagliavini]

I've got two reasons:

1) My work machine has dual 1080p monitors attached to a Radeon 5450 in Ubuntu x64 (currently 12.04, previously 11.10). Using Catalyst/fglrx, I could never get X to recognize the second monitor correctly. I switched to the OSS radeon driver and immediately the second monitor became usable.

2) I hate Unity, but my work machine had Ubuntu installed by the IT people at my request (I was using it at home at the time I was hired... I've since switched to Mint at home). I knew that Gnome Shell worked for me, and so I figured I'd switch to that as my window manager. Catalyst always gave me corruption/stability issues in GS (maybe they've fixed that by now, but they sure are/were taking their time). The Radeon driver works without corruption, and is rock solid for stability.

1) True fglrx is quite a mess there, but for me it worked after 2 reboots playing with amdcccle. My HDMI full HD second monitor just works with it.

2) I use KDE and fglrx just works with it

And be aware you are talking about bad issue, but not as critical as missing powersave from the radeon driver in my opinion. I have literally burned a laptop (not a fault of radeon that time to be clear), so I'm very critical about powersave.

I agree fglrx is not the best solution, of course it is not! Damn the intel driver is a paradise compared to it. I sold every AMD/NVIDIA machine I had to switch to intel. But still fglrx, even it is an half pile of bugged crap, is usefull to someone. Burning it is not a good solution.