806
Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
806 points (98.7% liked)
Linux
48333 readers
915 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just a perspective on why people would support NVIDIA here:
They don't believe in copyright law so they don't mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.
They do care about copyright law but think having a working driver outweighs respecting them.
Not my opinion here just saying that for some people usability trumps any other aspects.
I don't believe in copyright law, but I especially don't believe in partially enforced copyright law. Nvidia doesn't get to use copyright to protect their proprietary code while infringing on the copyright of FOSS.
Good read. I think the root is simply, don’t care about the rights of others if it is going to cost them something personally.
Also, some of us are using Nvidia because we rely on software that doesn't work on AMD. I really enjoy using Linux, but if it's going to make my life difficult I'll go back to using Windows with WSL.
I agree Nvidia should resolve the licensing issues, but man GPL zealots get a such a raging hard-on for anything Nvidia related it's funny to watch.
Them becoming raging zealots is kind of the only realistic way to defend the GPL though. If they don't, it's just going to get treated like toilet paper. I'd much rather have the angry hate mob than to be disrespected by big companies who can otherwise just get away with whatever they want.
And I’d like hardware that works, and proprietary drivers are really the only way that happens
AMD and Intel both have fully featured, full performance open source graphics drivers.
Not to knock on your point but the AMD drivers on Linux don't support hardware video encoding unfortunately, so technically it's not full-featured
Depends on your distro. Fedora and Manjaro removed it.
And you can simply get it from rpm fusion on fedora, and I'd guess something similar on manjaro. It's just gone from the official fedora repositories for liability reasons. rpm fusion as a defacto standard for desktops/laptops was enabled there before that for what, like 99% of the installs?
I take advantage of hardware video encoding on linux with amd's open source drivers almost every day.
I probably sbould've specified H.264/H.265, unless I'm missing something?
I have a 6800 XT, is there something I have to enable somewhere? I could've sworn it was missing because h264/265 had licensing weirdness going on but idk
h264 and h265 work- check the va-api table to see what's supported: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
Ehm, not at all??
There's so much hardware with non-proprietary drivers.
Why do you think that? Companies can open source their drivers at will, in fact at this point NVIDIA is the only major player in GPU market who hasn't done this, what do you think makes this particular hardware so special that needs a closed source driver when every other competitor doesn't? In fact what could possibly be the reason for a driver to need to be closed source?
It's not going to effect you. No distro is going to ship a kernel that doesn't work with the Nvidia driver, besides maybe some rolling ones, in which case you can just use the LTS kernel. This is drama between Nvidia and the rest of the kernel maintainers, and Nvidia will update their driver to deal with it, as they have done in the past.
Shitting on people who care about FOSS because they don't want to see massive companies get away with blatant copyright infringement is crazy.
Or maybe we should keep companies, which rake in billions of dollars, to a much higher standard??
Nvidia could be better at open-sourcing their stuff. But they don't. Blame them, not GPL.
I mean we do, but blaming them doesn't make Linux more viable for high end GPU applications.
Linux is the gold standard in many high end GPU applications, like AI, though?
Which software?
3D rendering software using iRay. I've started trying to learn Blender, but I've still got thousands spent on assets and hardware which means I'm not going to run out tomorrow and pickup a new card. It all works fine under Wine, but the amount of Nvidia hate on here is just tiring.
So you use iRay as the rendering engine for Blender? And (I'm assuming a lot here) iRay doesn't use CUDA, OpenCL etc, but straight talks to the GPU via graphics drivers, thus having hardware depency for nvidia GPU?