This is what’s wrong in so many countries.

Neither is having your copyright infringed. Neither is wasting volunteer manpower playing a technical game of cat and mouse

deleted by creator

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.

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.

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.

we rely on software that doesn’t work on AMD

Which software?

I did not “support” Red Hat but I was pretty vocally in opposition to most of the reaction to it. I found the willful inaccuracy and even flagrant dishonestly from the “community” close to disgusting at times. So, you may be including people like me in your comment.

In this case, it seems very straight-forward that NVIDIA is in the wrong. Not just ethically but legally as well.

My own read is that some of the people slamming Red Hat are defending NVIDIA now. Coming away from that experience, I the over-arching principle that many adhere to most is simply whatever is best for them. Red Hat was wrong because people felt entitled to something. The kernel devs are wrong ( and NVIDIA right ) because people feel entitled to something.

Wouldn’t that automatically make their code GPL?

I don’t see how the copyright mechanism works here. The GPL has rules about linking to GPL code, enforced by the notion that the linked binary is a protected derivative work. Going and finding out where in memory some functions are and jumping to them is not going to create a derivative work.

The Linux devs just have a rule about who they want to call these symbols and are trying to enforce it themselves.

Which they technically didn’t. I’m sure Nvidia has a legal team that vetted their solution, they certainly have the money for it. At this point the “protection” against the proprietary driver is just anti-consumer.

To expand a bit:

The GPL-only symbols restriction is there for the benefit of proprietary developers. It ensures that their work doesn’t become a “derivative work” of the kernel’s internals, by sticking to using only the published and documented interfaces. Using published APIs doesn’t make your work a legally derivative work of the system behind those APIs (i.e. the kernel).

If your code needs to mess around in the kernel internals, it is very likely a derivative work of the kernel; which means you need the permission of the kernel authors if you want to publish that code legally.

The only terms under which the kernel authors grant that permission are the terms of the GPL.

By circumventing the GPL-only symbols restriction, Nvidia is demonstrating that their driver code needs to mess with kernel internals, not just the published APIs. And that means that it probably is a derivative work of the kernel. Which, in turn, means that those drivers must be published under the GPL in order to avoid violating the kernel copyrights.

Basically: Linus drew a line in the sand and said “As long as you don’t step over this line, you’re not pirating the kernel by releasing proprietary drivers.” And Nvidia stepped over that line.

And it’s a good thing. Fuck proprietary software 😎

We’ll be down voted, but agreed.

Well then don’t! Revenge code which makes it worse for people who actually use Linux isn’t a way to do this.

So intentionally harmful to user experience. As usual.

That’s a fair point, I’m not super familiar with how the Linux dev cycle works beyond “I download Mint or Ubuntu because I don’t feel like shelling out for Windows 10”.

They don’t have to do it well, just enough to satisfy the lawyers.

AMD isn’t, and they used to be significantly worse than Nvidia about proprietary drivers.

Sure but why open their code without getting the integration benefits?

So we can add “use an older kernel” and “use a modified kernel with that protection removed” to the list of options.

And the relation between graphical drivers and ML is?..

Sure but they don’t play 3d video games do they?

And how many of those plans use GPU rendering?

Come on…

There’s obviously use cases for Nvidia on Linux but Linux desktop gamers aren’t even a blip on the radar. The reason Nvidia bothers to release free Linux drivers is for public beta testing not for the revenue.

They don’t have to offer Linux drivers for free to the general public though. Ask yourself why they do that.

That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest

Oh those times were truly horrible.

I have an RDNA3 card (upgraded from a 1080) and am running a multi-boot triple-head setup with mixed refresh rates (60, 144).

Pros: most things work and work well. Installation of the physical card went without a hitch and it was relatively simple to install the drivers. No issues with web video, streaming, video encoding, or standard use.

Cons: mesa, amdgpu, and Windows drivers are all lacking significant features - I am still unable to reliably control fan curves/speeds, clock speeds, etc. FreeSync is unusable as well. I have also been experiencing regular crashes on certain games (BG3, Apex Legends, etc.) and support has been nonexistent, despite similar complaints from other users. When the card does crash, it usually results in a ring timeout and an accompanied total session crash. AMD does not seem to be responsive to these issues in either their official forum or any other space where people are lodging complaints.

The hardware seems fine; the drivers are the main issue. If I had to do it over again, I’d hold my nose and buy NVIDIA.

EDIT: regarding the cursor issue, I’ve had to switch to a software cursor on Linux. The hardware cursor wasn’t showing up at all.

Regarding game-specific issues, it seems a lot of problems stem from either a greedy low power mode or DirectX issues. I’ve had to set udev rules to alleviate some of my issues, but it hasn’t solved everything.

EDIT 2: For anyone who comes across this post, it seems like the vast majority of the crashes on linux have been resolved as of kernel 6.7. Still lacking fine-grained control over fans/clocks, but stability seems much improved.

I had an rx480 that worked fantasic until a firmware update made it start freezing my pc in games after suspend, solution was to rollback that package to an older one or never use suspend. I currently have a 6650xt and that just crashes whenever it wants to sometimes, works fine for a few months then decides to freeze my whole pc, playing bg3 atm it froze on me like 3 times already

So the cursor really was darker! It seemed that way after switching to a new laptop, but I wasn’t sure.

I’ve had lost of issues with SteamVR too but not with anything else. I suspect those issues are actually SteamVR’s fault tho because it’s pretty buggy on Linux in general.

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux’s kernel internals.