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 MaxoYour tax dollars at work.Premium,VIP
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL | smspillaz on the benefits of open source video drivers. smspillaz, the author of compiz, relates his experiences on programming against Noveau versus the binary nVidia driver.
said by »smspillaz.wordpress.com/2012/06/···drivers/ :That being said, I believe the continued use of both the NVIDIA and FGLRX drivers within the Linux Desktop community is now considered harmful for a number of reasons. And now that we have realistic free software drivers to replace them such as nouveau and radeon, the free software community needs to reconsider its position in its support for these drivers.
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The existence of different and proprietary implementations of OpenGL promote a culture whereby we don’t engage with problems directly, but we corner case particular drivers, hack around others and create a sub-par system for everyone.
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Writing against proprietary drivers requires writing hacks, simply because there is a point where you can research no further into what the problem really is. For example, in one graphics driver, we found that changing the name of the program was necessary to ensure the driver used direct rendering. On other drivers, I’ve found that all future texture binding will fail silently if you release a pixmap on the server before releasing a texture on the driver and flushing the pipeline. Or on some drivers, if you don’t re-bind an offscreen pixmap before binding it to a texture unit, the driver will never flush changes to that pixmap. Or on some drivers if you resume from suspend, you lose framebuffer object contents. Or on other drivers, if you use glPushAttrib with GL_CURRENT_BIT, the previous values on the attributes stack don’t get carried over.
That isn’t even an exhaustive list, and they’ve all been the result of lots of engineer time wasted over hunting down bugs they’re not allowed to see and trying to guess what’s going on so that workarounds or fixes can be applied.
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The free software drivers on the other hand, share the same libGL. The paradigm shift here is huge. Instead of make a libGL that works on Windows for our driver and invest a bit of time making it work on Linux and Mac OS, it is make a libGL for Linux and make it provide a sensible abstraction layer to use many different kinds of hardware. And the results pay off. When I write code that works on nouveau, I can be damn sure it will also work on intel and radeon too, because the OpenGL implementation isthe same. And when it doesn’t work, we know that the problem isn’t in the OpenGL implementation, and we can drill right down into that driver and fix it in the right place.
In the future, when we move past X11 into a model where the drivers use provide the same direct rendering APIs from the kernel to userspace, this is going to become even more important. Already we see that NVIDIA and FGLRX are not going to support EGL, KMS or Wayland.
I think its now time we ask ourselves this question: Do we want to, in the name of short term gains in performance and higher level OpenGL support, lower levels of the free software world, which have the biggest advances to make, back in order to support proprietary drivers, or do we want to eliminate our dependence on them and set ourselves free. I think that it is now becoming clearer that the latter is more and more important to the community. As such, I believe that as a community, we need to be taking greater steps to supporting free software drivers, as they are the future.
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 firephotoFacts hurtPremium
join:2003-03-18
Brewster, WA | The biggest thing here not said seems to be that they are coding to be compatible with a library instead of coding to be compatible with the OpenGL spec itself. There's also the possibility that they might just be unwilling to work with Nvidia when problems arise. KDE has exposed bugs in the Nvidia drivers in the past, worked with the Nvidia developers and the results was better drivers for Nvidia and the expected experience for the users of KDE.
This is also the same BS where some bits of the stack would claim to support a specific OpenGL feature and a desktop like KDE which can and does use that specific feature would fall in it's face because in reality the feature was NOT supported to the extent the libraries were advertising themselves as being able to support.
Nvidia on Linux is excellent, and even well liked by those who can and do work with Nvidia to develop everything that makes it so excellent. Marketing and blog campaigns will not change that, excellent quality video drivers and opengl implementations that maximize the capabilities of the hardware will. AMD had the chance to change all that with the opening of their drivers but years pass and the results aren't much better for full hardware utilization.
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KearnstdElf WizardPremium
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ | reply to Maxo
how does linux and video drivers work?
What I mean is that afaik in Windows for example no programs talk to the video card to they? they all talk to the correct parts of the Directx API(graphics to Direct3D I think).
Is this also how OpenGL is supposed to work? where a program never actually needs to talk to the video driver, just the API for video?
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MaxoYour tax dollars at work.Premium,VIP
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL | said by Kearnstd:how does linux and video drivers work?
What I mean is that afaik in Windows for example no programs talk to the video card to they? they all talk to the correct parts of the Directx API(graphics to Direct3D I think).
Is this also how OpenGL is supposed to work? where a program never actually needs to talk to the video driver, just the API for video?
I don't think it is much different, than on Windows. However, I think Compiz is a little more low-level and does more bare-metal talks with the hardware than a video game which relies on higher-level abstraction.
I've never done anything graphical beyond HTML or using libraries like GTK, which provide very high level abstraction, so I can only speak to what I've read about.
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"Padre, nobody said war was fun now bowl!" - Sherman T Potter
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MaxoYour tax dollars at work.Premium,VIP
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL | reply to firephoto
I don't think smspillaz was at all saying that the nVidia drivers are necessarily sub-par. It seems he is saying that the OpenGL implementations in the open source drivers are implemented consistently such that code written against one open-source driver is more likely to behave the same as another open-source driver for another card. If there is a bug in the implementation of an open-source driver that doesn't provide the same functionality or broken functionality, then the community can resolve the issue. With the proprietary drivers, different behaviors are usually intentional by the card manufacturer and they aren't going to change. If a bug is discovered then the community is at the whim of the manufacturer for if they care to fix it or not.
I see this as similar to the browser paradigm. HTML that works in Firefox has a pretty good tendency to work the same in Chrome, but even in the latest versions of IE, there is still a lot of hacking around necessary to get it running.
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"Padre, nobody said war was fun now bowl!" - Sherman T Potter
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| reply to Maxo
said by Maxo:
smspillaz, the author of compiz, relates his experiences on programming against Noveau versus the binary nVidia driver.
said by »smspillaz.wordpress.com/2012/06/···drivers/ :
That being said, I believe the continued use of both the NVIDIA and FGLRX drivers within the Linux Desktop community is now considered harmful for a number of reasons. And now that we have realistic free software drivers to replace them such as nouveau and radeon, the free software community needs to reconsider its position in its support for these drivers....... As such, I believe that as a community, we need to be taking greater steps to supporting free software drivers, as they are the future.
well thats one reason I am glad I don't use that pile of cruft!
And based on this you can gurantee I won't ever use it.
"realistic free drivers" OH PUHLEASE! ! What drivers are you using? ! Seriously, nouveau is the biggest pile of feces around!
Oh, now I know your deal.. "past X11..." Dude, X11 has been around probably longer than you been alive, and you can spout off about how wunderbar waycrap is, but your blowing it out your rear!
With the movement BACK to thin computing or "cloud" for you whippersnappers! Thats right we've been here before! You just were not around for it the first time! X11's network based options are an ABSOLUTE MUST. I can be any where and SSH back to my box(s) and run stuff just like I was sitting at that PC. If you don't understand how that fits into your oh so precious cloud, maybe your cloud is a little to high and the lack of oxygen is effectin you. And no I don't need to run X11 on top of another layer of crap to do it!
He's part of the problem which causes so many issues with OEM's be it nVidia or some one else in another area printers, scanners etc.. Yes open source has benefits when OEM's refuse to support things on Linux ie: c2esp that got Kodak printers to print in Linux, when the perfectly working drivers Kodak developed they refused to release to Linux, yet would offer it on macrud. (Yes I am aware there was specific macrud binary blob involved!) Kodaks own implosion had alot to do with this. Many tried to get them to come to the community.
Working WITH the OEM's not coming in with this demand to open source everything, which most who are at the level of involvement here can not get past. So we have a huge amount of acrimony between the commuinty and OEM's. Which if the commuinty went about it differently would go away and benefit Linux as a whole.
compiz... Penguinista BANNED! | |
 timcuthBraves FanPremium
join:2000-09-18
Pelham, AL
 ·AT&T Southeast
| reply to Maxo
This weekend, I switched my Arch Linux from open source radeon to the proprietary fglrx driver. My video card temperatures went from 63-67C to 45-50C. The fan is running slower, too, so the proprietary driver seems to be both more capable and more efficient.
I prefer open source in principle, but I do not want to burn up my card for a principle.
Tim
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