fluffything

> Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It is to me. When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed.".

That's exactly how these comments being made sound to me. Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

I have many GFX card from all vendors over the years, and I've had to send one back because the vendor wasn't honest about things like that.

Do I wish nvidia had good open source drivers? Sure. Do I blame nvidia for these not existing, not really. That would be like blaming microsoft or apple for not making all their software open source.

I do however blame vendors that do advertise good open source driver support that ends up being crap.

What does any of this have to do with nvidia buying or not buying arm ? Probably nothing.

What nvidia does with their GFX driver can be as different from what ARM does, as what Microsoft does with Windows and Github.

Intel's i860 was released in 1986, that evolved to the i740 in 1996, and later on to the KNC, KNLs, Xeon Phis, etc.

The >= KNC products have all been "one generation behind" the competition. When the Intel Xe is released, Intel will have been trying to enter this market for about 30 years.

This market is more important now than ever before. I hope that they keep pushing and do not axe the Intel Xe after the first couple of generations only to realize 10 years later that they want to try again.

In both graphics and compute ?

Its ok for nvidia to release an architecture that does compute very well, but barely improves graphics, and vice-versa.

But I don't recall any compute generation where there was a better product from the competition.

This is so wrong.

We are discussing a topic, and people throwed multiple arguments that do not make sense.

You are claiming that I should just shut up and respect their feelings, but that is worthless.

Two examples:

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Somebody's argument was: "Linus doesn't like them, therefore I don't like them".

The reason these are called logical fallacies is because these arguments are illogical. I told them that this was a logical fallacy (argument of authority - just because someone with authority makes an argument does not mean they are right), and ask them _why_, what is it that linus and you do not like.

I am happy I did that, because many of them have raised multiple actually-valuable arguments in response. For example, because nvidia's hardware throttles down if the driver firmware is not signed, and this makes the open source drivers slower for no reason.

That's a valid and valuable argument. Linus doesn't like them is worthless.

The person who raised this argument learned something from somebody else which knew what Linus did not like, and so did I.

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The same happened when I called out the entitled choosing beggars. "Why are you angry at nvidia for not providing an open source driver ? You knew before buying their product that only the binary driver was supported."

Read the responses. The reason they are angry, is because they don't have a choice but to use nvidia, because the competition products (AMD in those cases) are much worse. AMD does have open source drivers, but they are crap, and they don't support many of AMD's products, at least for compute, which is something that many (including myself) use for work.

These people have picked a platform that values open source code, but due to their job requiring them to actually get some work done, they must use nvidia for that, and they don't like having to compromise on a proprietary driver.

Honestly, I think this is still entitlement, but I definitely sympathize with the frustration of having to make compromises one does not like.

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From the point of view of whether nvidia buying ARM is good or bad. I still have no idea. ARM does _a lot_ of open source work, its major market are Android and Linux communities.

I understand that people are afraid that Nvidia will turn ARM into a bad open source player. It can happen. But without Android, iOS, and Linux, ARM is worthless. So a different outcome of this could be that NVIDIA buying ARM ends up making NVIDIA more open source friendly, since at least the Linux market is important for nvidia as well (~50% of their revenue).

It definitely makes sense for regulatory authorities to only allow somebody to buy ARM that will preserve ARM deals with current vendors (apple, google, samsung, etc.), and that also will preserve ARM open platform efforts.

If nvidia does not agree to that, they should not be allowed to buy arm.

> Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully

Canonical, which ships nvidia's proprietary driver with Ubuntu, is another quite major OS vendor that collaborates with nvidia successfully. Recently, Ubuntu's wayland-based desktop environment was also the first to work with nvidia's driver (the results of this work are open source).

This is not true anymore. Apple funded a significant part of LLVM/Clang work in the 2010s, and then again with the aarch64 backend, but nowadays Google and Intel contribute much more to LLVM than Apple.

Yep. I didn't meant that Apple created LLVM, only that Apple contributes _a lot_ to the open source LLVM project.

Only for their own hardware (RAPIDS, all the cuda libraries, etc.), which other companies like AMD have just forked and modified to work on their hardware keeping the algorithms intact.

NVIDIA contributes mostly to existing open source projects (LLVM, Linux kernel, Spark, etc.), see https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source

Wow, that does suck. Imagine them doing the same thing with ARM.

> This persistent bit of FUD really needs to die. [...] I'm sure there are some grey ares that haven't been worked out

Way to contradict yourself.

> but avoiding those is fairly simple.

[Citation needed].

> As much as the Linux kernel's pragmatic approach toward licensing helps make it easier on some hardware manufacturers, sometimes I wish they'd take a hard line and refuse to carve out exceptions for binary drivers, inasmuch as those can sometimes/always be considered derived works.

Maybe this is what needs to happen to force companies to change their mindset, but where I work, lawyers tell us to (1) never contribute to any GPL'ed based code, (2) never distribute GPL'ed code to anybody (e.g. not even a docker container), etc.

Their argument is: a single slip could require us to publish all of your code, and make all of our IP open, and to make sure this doesn't happen, an army of lawyers and software engineers and managers would need to review every single code contribution that has something to do with the GPL. So the risks are very high, the cost of doing this right is very high as well, and the reward is... what exactly ? So in practice this means that we can't touch GPL'ed code with a 10 foot pole, it is not worth the hassle. If I were to ask my manager, it will tell me that it is not worth it. If they ask their manager, they will tell them the same. Etc.

BSD code ? No problem, we contribute to hundreds of BSD, MIT, Apache, ... licensed open source projects. Management tells us to just focus on those.

Softbank is selling ARM because they are broke.

The Softbank guy invested a ton of money on WeWork. Tried to sell WeWork for 60 billion, but before that happen WeWork valuation dropped out to 2-5 billion (huge loss). That was in 2019. Afterwards, Softbank invested another 10 billions to try to save it. WeWork owns and also pays rent or hundreds of office buildings in the most expensive zones of all the major capitals in the world. 2020 COVID now means these super expensive offices are now empty, since WeWork customers pay a premium to be able to cancel their leases in <1 week. So essentially, WeWork is broke, worth 0, and Softbank has lost dozens of billions on it.

On top, Softbank owns a huge chunk of Uber, which is also worth close to zero now that people are not travelling due to COVID...

So... yeah... Softbank is selling ARM because they must. They are super broke, and investors are going to pull the money that remains out. Selling ARM and giving investors a tiny benefit so that they keep their money is better than them taking a huge loss this year.

> I don't have so much of a problem with CUDA staying closed, but rather Nvidia sabotaging Nouveau through signed firmware which they don't release (and obfuscate in their blob)

Do you have more info on this ? There is a big difference between not supporting open source, and actively sabotaging it. What are they doing, exactly ?

Take any AMD 5000 series card. I had a top of the line 5700.

Still no driver for compute 1 year later. I'm so happy i decided to return it and switch to intel instead of waiting for AMD or some random joe on their free time to add support for it to their open source driver.

So yeah. I'd take a working proprietary driver over no driver any day.

Yeah... I learned this the hard way.

I thought AMD had great Linux driver support, and open source drivers.

Turns out AMD only has the open source driver part of the things, and this driver does not support a large chunk of their products.

I'd take a binary driver over no driver any day (and in fact, I returned the amd card and am using intel now, which works great).

> then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box.

I have an Intel GFX card. Had an AMD 5700. Linux support sucked, switched back to intel.

So AFAICT, only intel and nvidia have good Linux driver support, and only intel has good open source linux driver support.

> We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices.

We still are. I asked about "which specific business practices are these", and was only pointed out to ad hominems, entitlement, and one sided arguments.

Feel free to continue discussing that on the different parent thread. I'm interested on multiple views on this.

> You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices

No. I couldn't care less about nvidia, but when somebody acts like an entitled choosing beggar, I point that out. And there is a lot of entitlement in the arguments that people are making about why nvidia is bad at working with others.

Nvidia has some of the best drivers for Linux there are. This driver is not open source and distributed as a binary blob. Nvidia is very clear that this is the only driver that they support on Linux, and if you are not fine with that, they are fine with you not buying their products. This driver supports all of their products very well (as opposed to AMD's, for example), its development is made by people being paid full time to do it (as opposed to most of their competitors which also have people helping on their drivers on their free time - this is not necessarily bad, but it is what it is), and some of their developments are contributed back to open source, for free.

People are angry about this. Why? The only thing that comes to mind is entitlement. Somebody wants to use an nvidia card on Linux without using their proprietary driver. They know this is not supported. Yet they buy the card anyways, and then they complain. They do not only complain about nvidia. They also complain about, e.g., nouveau being bad, the Linux kernel being bad, and many other things. As if nvidia, or as if the people working on nouveau or the Linux kernel for free on their free time owes them anything.

I respect people not wanting to use closed source software. Don't use windows, don't use macosx, use alternatives. Want to use linux? don't use nvidia if you don't want to.

> Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]:

Is this an Ad Hominem ? Linus does not mention there a single thing that they are actually doing wrong.

> Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]:

Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME. Drew just does not want to support the nvidia-wy in wl-roots, which is a super super niche WM toolkit whose "major" user is sway, another super super niche WM.

Drew is angry for two reasons. First, sway users complain to them that sway does not work with nvidia hardware, which as a user of a WM is a rightful thing to complain about. Second, Drew does not want to support the nvidia-way, and it is angry and nvidia because they do not support the way that wl-roots has chosen.

It is 100% ok for Drew to say that they don't want to maintain 2 code-paths, and wl-roots and sway do not support nvidia. It is also 100% ok for nvidia to consider wl-roots to niche to be worth the effort.

What's IMO not ok is for Drew to feel entitled about getting nvidia to support wl-roots. Nvidia does not owe wl-roots anything.

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IMO when it comes to drivers and open-source, a lot of the anger and conflict seems to steem from a sentiment of entitlement.

I read online comments _every day_ of people that have bought some hardware that's advertised as "does not support Linux" (or Macos, or whatever) being angry at the hardware manufacturer (why doesn't your hardware support the platform that says it does not support? I'm entitled to support!!!), the dozens of volunteers that reverse engineer and develop open source drivers for free (why doesn't the open source driver that you develop in your free time work correctly? I'm entitled to you working for free for me so that I can watch netflix!), etc. etc. etc.

The truth of the matter is, that for people using nvidia hardware on linux for Machine Learning, CAD, rendering, visualization, games, etc. their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support.

The only complaints I hear is people buying nvidia to do something that they know is not supported and then lashing out at everybody else due to entitlement.

Hardware undefined behavior. The hardware can do anything.

That includes trapping on an illegal instruction or something, but there is no guarantee that some CPU that was designed and built before SSE4 existed will do anything meaningful when fed with machine code that it was never intended to see.

You are basically hopping for the instruction decoder to be "really good", and not "really fast". Eg. suppose that there is only one instruction in SSE3 which has the 7th bit set. A fast instruction decoder tests that bit, and if its true, it knows exactly what instruction that is. Years later, SSE4 is designed and implemented, and it adds another instruction that also has that bit set. You are required to check whether the CPU supports SSE4, and the SSE3-only CPU will tell you that it does not. If you then go ahead and feed it a SSE4 instruction, the CPU can do really anything, including executing some other completely different instruction.

> You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work.

You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card.

You are not entitled to it either. People developing nouveau on their free time don't owe you anything, and nvidia does not owe you an open source driver either.

I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

I don't use nvidia GFX cards on linux anymore (intel suffices for my needs), but when I did, I was happy to have a working driver at all. That was a huge upgrade from my previous ATI card, which had no driver at all. Hell, I even tried using AMD's ROCm recently on Linux with a 5700 card, and it wasn't supported at all... I would have been very happy to hear that AMD had a binary driver that made it work, but unfortunately it doesn't.

And that was very disappointing because I thought AMD had good open source driver support. At least when buying Nvidia for Linux, you know beforehand that you are going to have to use a proprietary driver, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can buy just something else.

RAM, manufacturing, storage, cooling, power supply, ... depends on how far you want to vertically integrate everything.

It's a tough spot to be in. AMD and Intel split the largest chunk of the cake because their products are cheap, so they make money in volume.

The only reason nvidia has 20% of the GPU market at all is because their products are better, but without volume, there is very little separating you from losing the market.

If NVIDIA slips over AMD and Intel perf wise during one generation, the competition will have cheaper and better products, so it's pretty much game over.

> There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing

I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.

Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.

You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.

For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.

The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:

- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards

- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology

- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully

- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it

- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...

The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...

I mean, this is not nvidia specific.

You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).

I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I'm pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.

Thanks, this is an interesting discussion. I thought the arms would be much more expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/olkb/comments/6wt6mi/evaluating_mcu...

I think OP meant "Why does this keyboard need so much computing power". Most keyboards you can program use an AVR chip, which is more than enough, and you can also program that from Rust.

The jump from that to this ARMv5 CPU is similar to that from this ARMv5 to an Intel Xeon. And sure enough, if someone were to build a keyboard with an Intel Xeon, you could also program that from Rust. But the question still remains: why would anybody do that ?

FWIW, the keyboard is 360$, not 250$.

> What’s the strategy for operating systems, compilers, and/or language runtimes to figure out what a RISC-V chip supports?

Same as for x86, Power, ARM, MIPS, systemz, sparc, ... ISAs: there is a flag register that the OS can query to test whether the hardware supports something.

I only know one ISA that works in a completely different way (WebAssembly), by requiring the user to attempt to perform an operation, and if that faults, then the operation is not supported. The reason WASM can do this is because it is a virtual ISA. This approach does not work well for real hardware because it makes instruction decoders larger and slower, since it prevents them from assuming that they will only be fed instructions they do know.

In fact, the RISC-V V (Vector) extension supports vector "shapes", so you can take a f32x16 vector and make it a f32x4x4 4x4 matrix, and then multiplying it with another f32x4x4 vector will do a 4x4 * 4x4 matrix multiplication, in hardware. IIUC this shapes generalize to tensors, so you can use this hardware units to, e.g., implement DNNs, similar to nvidia's tensor cores.

I worked on Gene - a gyrokinetics app used to study fusion reactors - and I fondly recall helping a colleague debug one of their simulations in which they set a boundary condition incorrectly; that simulation ran for two weeks before the mistake was found. We estimated this mistake to have costed the tax-payer multiple millions of dollars _in electricity costs_ (just from the core's that were used, their wattage, and the time duration; which is a fraction of the cost of acquiring and operating a super-computer).

All our fusion models that correctly predict all the results produced by all the fusion reactors that have been built to date predict that ITER will work.

I have no idea whether these models predict that these other reactor designs will also work. What I do know is that one needs _many_ simulations to study that, and the costs of doing that feels absurdly out-of-reach for any startup. One does not only need to "verify" a design, but come up with it, optimize it, etc. as well as gaining access to the supercomputing resources or buying and maintaining their own supercomputer. That puts the initial investment already in the millions.

OTOH, a startup that checks a design that has been created, optimized, and verified in academia and whose goal is "only" to build it, would require a smaller investment, but no idea how big this investment ought to be.

> TSMC fabs can't possibly supply all demand.

Yet.