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- cross-posted to:
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Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has long been the primary Nouveau DRM kernel driver maintainer for keeping this open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver within the mainline kernel going… Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver. Ben Skeggs has contributed to the Nouveau project for more than one dedace – he’s earned references on Phoronix since 2008.
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Ben, thank you for your efforts.
Why NVidia?! Why do you force me to stay on Windows?! WHYYYYYYY?!
That’s what went through my head yesterday as OneDrive threw the towel (again) and borked the whole Windows Explorer (again) so any attempt to access my own files would just freeze the Explorer-Window (again) because OneDrive tried to frantically download a folder that was deleted both locally and online (again) and OneDrive got confused (again)
This is just the open source NVidia driver… there are also official ones.
That also suck. I especially need the RTX and Tensor pipelines for my 3D rendering hobby…
I think sadly you’d either way get much better performance with proprietary drivers especially if the focus is generative AI.
Yeah.
The FOSS/Hobbyist Linux community will never stop talking about how much they hate the nvidia drivers. And… even among a buddy or two who work for nVidia, we make semi-sarcastic jokes about how “Hey, nvidia only killed my linux install once in the past few months”.
But for gaming purposes? I don’t play a lot of the cutting edge games, but even going by stuff like https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-windows11-ubuntu2304 we can see that the performance is effectively parity. ~10% hit if you are going through proton but that is the kind of noise you get from having too many chrome tabs open or whatever*. If I was still a total sicko for game performance I would care more but… I am too old for that shit. I would rather still be a first class citizen than get drivers once or twice a year but… meh.
And for research/compute/data science reasons? There is absolutely zero reason to ever use the nouveau drivers for that. If you are going to buy the expensive hardware, use the expensive hardware.
*: If you DO think 10% matters when going through a translation layer? I strongly encourage watching the Gamers Nexus response/manifesto/what the fuck here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUeZQ3pky-w as it goes into just how much variance there is between tests with the exact same hardware and software AND is Tech Jesus having a blast.
Even the proprietary drivers blow chunks. Sure, gaming performance is fine, but desktop feel is just so awful compared to AMD wayland it isn’t even funny.
What’s missing with Nvidia? I’ve never tried Wayland with AMD
Some things i can think of (for Wayland)
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plymouth will either display in a very low res or not at all on nvidia systems
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no smooth dm-de transitions
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occasional graphical errors (although these barely exist on my hardware anymore)
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taints kernel by loading an out-of-tree module, which breaks some stuff
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for foss purists, oss drivers aren’t as fast as proprietary by a large margin (although nvk looks promising)
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But, did you choose nVidia?
No :(
The (amateur) software I’m using for my hobby (DAZ 3D) almost exclusively uses NVidia Iray. Besides, since it’s a ray tracing renderer, I need ray tracing performance, a discipline AMD sucked big time when I bought my 3070.SOUNDS LIKE IT’S TIME TO STOP PUTTING OFF LEARNING BLENDER
Woah there, stop yelling! I’m not going to do that because my first child is going to be born in a month or so and going into the packed monster that is blender is just not feasible time-wise anymore ;)
Bad situation :(
Yep.,. I am so done with the dumpster fire Microsoft calls “Q&A”…
Because back in the day when ATI had the worst Linux drivers, you were supposed to go with Nvidia. Now the tables have turned.
Having said what I said, I chose green too, because… old.
On my work laptop, OneDrive did randomly decide to zero out all files. Even the ones in the web interface. Even the old versions, so restoring those affected files by using older versions wasn’t working. I had to rollback my whole OneDrive to a point about 2 weeks earlier and lost everything in between… Fuck OneDrive.
Oh, are we turning this thread into a OneDrive hate thread? Because I hate OneDrive. My work computer has one folder that when I tried to delete it, entered a permanent undefined state. OneDrive claims that it’s syncing since march. It doesn’t help that Windows Explorers defaults to syncing ALL of the user folders into OneDrive and there’s nothing I can do because it’s company wide policy. I constantly have deleted files in my Downloads folder randomly popping up after deletion.
Are you on Windows 11 by chance?
Yes. Has worked perfectly in the beginning but started to fall apart when they started to fiddle with windows explorer…
The state of GPUs on Linux:
- Want to game: choose AMD,
- Want to do ML/scientific computing: choose NVIDIA,
- Want to do both: fuck you!
Or buy a motherboard with dual slots and install one of each, hopefully you’re made of money
AMD is getting better for ML/scientific computing very fast for the regular consumer GPUs. I have seen the pytorch performance more than double on my 6700xt in 6 months to the point that it has better performance than a 3060(not ti).
Great to know, but unfortunately CUDA is still too entrenched in comparison to OpenCL - hopefully there’s some way to convert from one to the other.
OpenCL is dead. Vulkan is the future.
We still need core libraries to be written as Vulkan compute shaders, similar to cuFFT and cuDNN.
There is VkFFT, but I don’t know how good it is. I don’t think anyone has written a VkDNN library.
NVIDIA has signaled that they will fully support Vulkan.
What about SYCL?
There’s also ROCm from AMD that is suppoed to be the rival of CUDA.
Gaming has been perfectly fine, just use the proprietary driver.
Congratulations you just killed 2/3 of all Linux users reading this post
I mean, I play proprietary games, no need to insist on foss drivers…
Nvidia can game just as well as it does on windows, proprietary driver inconveniences aside.
I’m doing both on AMD, while I contribute to a bunch of ROCm packages. Stable Diffusion XL and training runs great.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA’s GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 “Ada Lovelace” GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver.
This is a personal decision that I’ve been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.
I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I’ve been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I’ll be poking my nose in every so often :)
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out considering Ben has been the number one contributor to the Nouveau kernel driver for years while at Red Hat.
Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver development evolves from this unexpected move.
The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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For a second I thought this was an exercise bike
Wow I gotta stop hanging out exclusively in Rust communities. When I read the headline I was expecting much more drama.
