[blelbach]

> I get the impression nvidia puts out a lot of their hardware supporting software themselves because they are hostile to open source community collaboration in general. This could be because nvidia is a big fan of vendor lock in.

It's not hostility, it's about agility. More so than other hardware vendors, we rely on really tight integration between hardware and software.

In some situations, we find a hardware bug that would require another manufacturer to do a "respin" (e.g. restart the manufacturing process with a new, fixed design). Because we have tight control over the software stack, we can workaround that bug. It's faster for us to do this when we have full control. Also, sometimes these bugs have security implications, etc.

That said, we've been moving in the direction of open source for a long time.

> It's not(https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/)

The other fellow was suggesting we should write no software at all. Nouveau's struggles is an excellent example of how difficult it is to write software for hardware without the engagement and interaction of the manufacturer of that hardware.

TL;DR you're talking about whether our software should open source versus closed source; the other fellow was suggesting we shouldn't have software at all.

[mambru]

I think Nouveau would be in better shape with a bit of collaboration from NVIDIA.

About libcu++, you guys would not be doing it if it weren't a differentiator thanks to Universal Memory. All that is OK until GPUs become a strategic topic for governments, then you may be regarded as monopolistic.

Painting it as 'OSS frienly' or 'open' or 'standards compliant', when code written like that is likely to remain NVIDIA-only for many years seems intentionally deceiving.

Also, there is an industry standard that uses standard C++ (Sycl), that you refuse to participate in or implement.

[jameshilliard]

> In some situations, we find a hardware bug that would require another manufacturer to do a "respin" (e.g. restart the manufacturing process with a new, fixed design).

Sure, but I think that's got less to do with the tight hardware/software integration and more to do with they type of bug and the skills of the engineers tasked with finding workarounds. When you can make changes to the entire OS by working with the community you can often workaround more severe bugs than would otherwise be possible.

> More so than other hardware vendors, we rely on really tight integration between hardware and software.

Which is fine when the software is reasonably open, plenty of software is tightly coupled to specialized hardware, but when a hardware manufacturer like Nvidia with a significant market-share does everything their own way and effectively refuses to work with the community in sufficient capacity when it comes to open source integration you end up with a situation where others are having to put in extra effort to make things work. This is a major reason why a lot of people are freaking out when it comes to Nvidia buying ARM, Nvidia has a pretty bad reputation among the open source community when it comes to these issues.

> Because we have tight control over the software stack, we can workaround that bug.

I really don't see why that tight control is necessary, Nvidia isn't all that unique here either, many vendors have hardware bugs that are ultimately worked around in the mainline Linux kernel for example.

> It's faster for us to do this when we have full control.

Participating in community/open development processes doesn't preclude Nvidia from directly distributing hot-fixes or even make distributing hot-fixes more difficult in any meaningful way. Mainlining proper Linux drivers can also make distribution of hot-fixes easier as they would get included in distro packaging systems and update cycles effectively automatically. One thing to keep in mind is that if Nvidia were to step up and dedicate a properly sized team to mainline open source driver development Nvidia would have a lot more control over the direction of the open source driver development for Nvidia hardware.

> Nouveau's struggles is an excellent example of how difficult it is to write software for hardware without the engagement and interaction of the manufacturer of that hardware.

Of course, that's really the big issue, Nvidia refuses to properly engage in community driver development, this lack of engagement is the source of a lot of animosity from developers. In general reverse engineered drivers like Nouveau are a last resort option usually only done when a vendor refuses to properly engage with the open source communities for development. Since graphics drivers are probably the most complex kernel drivers out there this is especially problematic for hardware like Nvidia GPU's.

> That said, we've been moving in the direction of open source for a long time.

Hopefully that is true, but it's something we've heard before, and to be fair things did look like they were on the right track for improvement but that seems to have stalled somewhat back in 2017 when Alexandre Courbot left Nvidia as he seemed to be the main developer who was spearheading engagement with the Nouveau project. A company of Nvidia's size can easily afford to dedicate a full time development team to open driver development, it would be great if Nvidia would step up to the plate and put in the resources to maintain the mainline kernel drivers for Nvidia hardware.