[SkyMarshal]

TLDR: Linus at a Q&A, a woman asks why Nvidia still isn't providing any support for Optimus on Linux, Linus responds that Nvidia is being really difficult about that without good reason and "Fuck You Nvidia!" (flicks off the camera).

Her question actually starts a minute earlier than the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=48m14s

PS - Bravo Linus. This is issue is a real PITA, and a bit incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux.

[alecco]

That doesn't reflect his opinion. First, Linus states Nvidia is an exception, one of the worst trouble spots. And he is also very upset because Nvidia at the same time tries to sell a lot of chips into the Android market, a Linux based system. Very ungrateful of Nvidia. I agree, fuck Nvidia.

[forrestthewoods]

Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan? I don't know why Linus would expect a corporation to devote significant resources to an endeavor out of kindness. Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Edit: I expected downvotes and I'll gladly take them if someone can explain to me how Nvidia is being unreasonable.

[tikhonj]

Linus actually talks about this later on. He lists off some reasons for a company to be difficult and then basically says that there is nothing he can do but be sad about it. He then wishes that everybody could be as nice as him. In short, tautologically, it would be nice for Nvidia to be nice.

Nvidia is being unreasonable in the same general way as Apple is unreasonable with its walled garden and other companies are unreasonable with pollution and poor working conditions. Just because you can get away with something and it makes economic sense does not justify it and does not make it reasonable!

I really don't think we should accept every company's actions just because they make business sense. We, as consumers (and as developers) should promote altruism and good behavior. Being a corporation is no more a license to be a jerk than being a normal person--it's legal in both cases, and we should not condone it in either.

Good communities have their own standards above and beyond the law. In the academic community, plagiarism is not tolerated even if it does not infringe on copyright. The open source community should similarly not tolerate companies and individuals who use the open source software and then refuse to cooperate. And this is all that's needed: cooperation. I don't think anybody even expects Nvidia to write open source drivers; all they want is enough information to not waste time reverse engineering each chip.

In short, Nvidia is unreasonable because it is acting like a jerk. Being legal and making business sense should not justify being a jerk, and we should disparage and avoid companies that act like jerks. So yeah, fuck Nvidia.

[lsc]

>Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan?

If you depend on free software to sell your hardware, it is probably in your interest to see to it that the people that write the software that is required to sell your hardware don't hate you.

[nitrogen]

As an example of this, kernel developers have in the past responded to NVidia by marking kernel symbols used by the nvidia kernel module as GPL-only.

[twelvechairs]

> Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Not to disagree with your point (which is right), but It becomes in NVidia's financial interests when they have negative press coverage because someone like Linus says bad things about them.

I hope you understand what I am saying. Linus isn't just talking in an abstract-intellectual environment, his voice is strongly publicised and is here he is using it as an activist, to force NVidia into action. Its all part of the game...

[batista]

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all).

It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

[danmaz74]

A bad hit to your image among opinion leaders in your field might not hurt your sales right away, but it can hurt them in the long run if this creates a negative image for your brand.

[exDM69]

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

[batista]

All 10 of them?

Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one?

I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to corroborate that.

[alecco]

Linus rightfully singled them out. Are you saying the others are stupid?! Nvidia has the behaviour of a sociopath.

[forrestthewoods]

The video in question (including the woman's question) require a lot of outside knowledge to understand. Maybe I'm missing critical information? Right now Nvidia Optimus technology work only on Windows 7. It doesn't even work for Windows Vista or Windows XP.

Why should Nvidia devote resources, potentially a significant amount, to make Optimus work on Linux? I do not buy the argument that they should do so out of gratefulness that the Linux based Android OS let's them sell a large number of unrelated chips.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but citing a lack of "gratefulness" is not compelling.

[flabbergasted]

I think the real issue is that Nvidia is the most closed when it comes to releasing specs. With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

[psykotic]

> With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

That may be true for specific features like Optimus--I can't say. But if you're talking about writing a full 3D driver stack for a modern GPU, you're almost certainly underestimating the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. NVIDIA has hundreds of full-time software engineers working on the various parts of the GPU driver stack. Now imagine doing it without the immense institutional knowledge.

[grannyg00se]

Furthermore, the woman who posed the question indicated that she knew the Optimus drivers were going to be troublesome for linux. Why would you try to combine two technologies that you know are troublesome to get working together and then complain about it?

[marshray]

Historically, the Nvidia proprietary drivers have sucked less than ATI/AMD's. I had had a not-so-horrible experience with them on my previous laptop. To be fair, I've also had a not-awful experience with AMD's OpenGL drivers, too.

Now try to find a laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU that doesn't have this Optimus junk and you'll see the problem.

[g-garron]

You are right, business are business. But you do not need to be a badass. And the world changes (the ones that needs you now, will be the ones you need tomorrow), I have learned that the most grateful you are in business, the better business you do. Edited for clarity.

[chalst]

Quite. Given that the PC market, which I believe is the source of their highest margin sales, seems to be shrinking, perhaps high-handedness with potential allies is not the wisest course of action.

[ElCabron]

Do you think NVidia is not using Linux as part of their business ? If they use it or used it in the past, they could be more supportive. I wonder what will happen when Linux will be a gaming platform ?(Steam and others are going in that direction).

[dwc]

> incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux

It's not really incongruent. Nvidia has provided driver support for Linux, but that does no good for, say, FreeBSD. This driver support is in lieu of providing specs. They're keeping a lid on things and maintaining control. There are very good hackers who would make open source drivers if they had specs. Arguably less buggy drivers. Since they make sure they have control it's not surprising that they either 1) think this isn't worth their trouble, or 2) have actively decided they don't want this to happen, for whatever business reason.

[cookiecaper]

I haven't checked recently but nVidia also used to provide decent support for FreeBSD and Solaris.

[dwc]

Perhaps. Now what about OpenBSD and NetBSD, or whatever else? If they provide specs then they don't have to write drivers, but they don't get to bless or withhold their blessing.

There was a stink a while back where Adaptec had been providing drivers for FreeBSD, but then stopped. People were stuck either not upgrading their boxes (bad!) or moving off their RAID setup (painful, expensive!). It's ugly. With specs, there is not this issue.

The (pervasive) idea that vendors providing drivers for your system of choice, for the time being is being open source friendly is something the vendor promotes, but it's not actually friendly.

[fceccon]

Yes they provide drivers for FreeBSD and Solaris, unfortunately what they don't provide is CUDA for this 2 platforms.

[cookiecaper]

I've always harbored the hope that nVidia is working behind the scenes on a release that supports KMS/Wayland, and that the release of Optimus support will be released simultaneously. It makes sense when you consider that Optimus support is probably a pretty big change and putting that investment in the legacy X11 non-KMS driver would be a waste when KMS will be a requirement for all new distros in 2 years' time.

It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2. From what I understand this was also a significant change and it may bode well for future standardization improvements like KMS (moves multi-monitor management away from the proprietary TwinView driver components into standard xrandr, for instance, so that is complexity the KMS version will not have to handle).

Fingers crossed that they release this imaginary driver soon. :)

[rmk2]

> It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2

The XRandR support in the driver is not yet stable [1]. The 302.xx line is currently in beta, but will support both XRandR 1.2 & 1.3 at the same time. That part also works flawlessly, however, your mileage may vary in regards to suspend/hibernate, since both I and multiple others on the nvidia forums experience serious problems with resume from either, i.e. the computer hard locks (and doesn't even respond to ssh etc.), which requires you to powercycle it. So while the XRandR is a huge step forward, it is not without problems yet.

[1]: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/latest.txt shows you the latest stable driver, which is 295.59

[cookiecaper]

Please see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2564605&p... ; as of June 16, 302.17 is classified as a "new official release" in the "Current NVIDIA Linux graphics driver releases" thread. 295.xx is now classified the "long-lived branch release".

ArchLinux has already sent out packages for this release in its stable update channel: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/...

[rmk2]

Ah, you are of course right, I apologise. The update just hadn't been pushed to the ftp yet.

(As an aside, it still hardlocks my computer...but according to their forums, they "are working on a fix" for the soon-to-come 304.*)

[superxor]

I have a Notebook with Optimus, and watching this made me so happy. Nvidia is being an ass by not supporting Optimus.

[AlexDanger]

Later in the talk someone says they are working for nVidia and doing something with Tegra. I couldnt quite make it out, what is he saying?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=playe...

[grannyg00se]

He said they are now upstreaming tegra (super? / supra?)

I guess he's talking about pushing out some new driver support.

[zokier]

>upstreaming tegra (super? / supra?)

support

[bingbing]

Your link didn't quite work for me, starting in the 49th minute somewhere,

Using a fragment identifier to demarc the time offset works better for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=48m14s

[rsanchez1]

Even nVidia can't properly handle Optimus on Windows, so it's no surprise they aren't even trying on Linux.