Tuesday, June 19th 2012
NVIDIA Responds to Questions About Consistency of Features Across Platforms
NVIDIA posted a statement following last week's interactive session lead by Linus Torvalds, at a Finnish University, which didn't end too well for NVIDIA. The audience complained to Torvalds about lack of consistency between features available to Windows and Linux, and NVIDIA's stubbornness to help the community come up with alternative solutions to get the advertised features (such as Optimus) to work. NVIDIA's statement focuses on exactly that, consistency of features across platforms, and states that it is one of NVIDIA's priorities.
The statement by NVIDIA doesn't refute any of what a member of the audience complained about. There is still no proper Optimus feature made available by NVIDIA to Linux users, but a reminder that NVIDIA recently made changes to its drivers that makes interface with an alternative system software made by various open-source communities, the Bumblebee Project, easier. Said the statement "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system."
The statement follows:
Source:
Phoronix
The statement by NVIDIA doesn't refute any of what a member of the audience complained about. There is still no proper Optimus feature made available by NVIDIA to Linux users, but a reminder that NVIDIA recently made changes to its drivers that makes interface with an alternative system software made by various open-source communities, the Bumblebee Project, easier. Said the statement "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system."
The statement follows:
Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience.
Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project (http://bumblebee-project.org/). And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier.
While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.
As a result:At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.
- Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.
- We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.
- We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel - the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions - NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.
18 Comments on NVIDIA Responds to Questions About Consistency of Features Across Platforms
Most of the complaints come from kernel developer and end user.
Kernel/driver developers want their distro to support as many features as possible (e.g : Optimus) and better support for as many game titles as possible to avoid complaints from end user.
Torvalds could jury rig a solution if NVIDA's (or anyone's) GPU switching capabilties were standardized in the hardware as opposed to implemented in the drivers.
Batteries aren't improving fast enough so the only way to get better battery life is to cut consumption everywhere possible.
In other words, Unix is phasing out, and linux is growing and catching up to Windows at a steady pace.
It seems people forget that nVidia is a SOFTWARE COMPANY that sells some hardware too, and as such, software design and patenting is a huge part of the equity they carry. They are in the business, not of providing software for free, but in selling it...and not to the end user, but to those that provide content to the end user(which is what Torvalds provides for free).
Torvalds' complaints are 100% legit, unfortunately, but he's balking at the very reason nVidia exists, which is foolish. As and Open-Source developer, his focus is providing software for free, so truly, nVidia and Torvalds are anathema of each other. They will never work well together, and are very likely to never agree, too. What exactly is the big deal here?
I just see you minimizing Torvalds' position, even though his postition about this subject is dead-on, and denying such denies that nVidia is what they are...a software company. Frankly, I'm even surprised this whole thing is even getting as much attention as it is right now. This is truly nothing new.
The fact that nVidia felt they must respond about such things, and publically so soon, says far more than I'd rather comment on, really. Must be some new staff.:shadedshu They's just gone and validated Torvalds' postition here. Sometimes it is best to STFU.