dslreports logo
 
    All Forums Hot Topics Gallery
spc
Search similar:


uniqs
2953

FF4m3
@verizon.net

FF4m3

Anon

Linus Torvalds Flips The Bird To NVIDIA

Watch Linus Torvalds Flip The Bird And Say ‘F**k You’ To NVIDIA:

A few days ago, Linux creator Linus Torvalds talked in front of students at the Aalto University Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland. The chat and its Q&A session was around an hour long and while the bulk of it is probably quite interesting, the best bit — by far — occurs at the 49-minute mark when Torvalds delivers his very frank opinion of NVIDIA and its support for Linux.


firephoto
Truth and reality matters
Premium Member
join:2003-03-18
Brewster, WA

firephoto

Premium Member

»www.youtube.com/watch?fe ··· #t=2980s

That link goes to the point in the video where he talks about android and nvidia.

Ryan
Premium Member
join:2001-03-03
Boston, MA

Ryan to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3
Nvidia? Seriously? Never had an issue with an nvidia card under linux yet my ATI 5850 performed worse then a built in intel video card on my laptop. As far as I know ati is still terrible under linux to this day, why is he pissed at nvidia?

Snakeoil
Ignore Button. The coward's feature.
Premium Member
join:2000-08-05
united state

Snakeoil

Premium Member

Agreed. I never has trouble getting my Nvidia cards to work with linux, one reason why I'm a fan/customer of theirs.

graysonf
MVM
join:1999-07-16
Fort Lauderdale, FL

graysonf

MVM

There's a lot more to Nvidia than just video cards.

They also do PC chipsets, and I suspect this is where the problem lies.

reub2000
Premium Member
join:2001-12-28
Evanston, IL

reub2000 to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3
Didn't watch the whole thing, but I'm thinking this is about their SoC and android, not their X11 drivers.
grunze510
join:2009-02-14
Cote Saint-Luc, QC

grunze510

Member

said by reub2000:

Didn't watch the whole thing, but I'm thinking this is about their SoC and android, not their X11 drivers.

I didn't watch the whole thing either. I only watched the minute or so where he was talking about NVIDIA (at around 49:15) and he was talking about Android.

JohnInSJ
Premium Member
join:2003-09-22
Aptos, CA

JohnInSJ to firephoto

Premium Member

to firephoto
said by firephoto:

»www.youtube.com/watch?fe ··· #t=2980s

That link goes to the point in the video where he talks about android and nvidia.

Nvidia has horribly fsked up tegra2/android/linux kernel driver access for those wishing to roll their own updates to orphaned hardware, for example.

He may be talking about that.

FF4m3
@verizon.net

FF4m3 to FF4m3

Anon

to FF4m3
The full video is worth a watch.

Torvalds discusses his technical background, C language programming, why Linux hasn't overtaken the desktop, Google, Android, Apple, the GPL, [re: kernels] he calls Microsoft liars and says that they're full of s**t (to audience applause), Linux commercialization, many interesting audience questions, startups & open source, gaming platforms, entrepreneurship, being offensive, open source organization and development models, his dislike of Stallman, inspiration, passion, childhood education & Raspberry PI and more, all with a bit of humor.

firephoto
Truth and reality matters
Premium Member
join:2003-03-18
Brewster, WA

firephoto to JohnInSJ

Premium Member

to JohnInSJ
said by JohnInSJ:

Nvidia has horribly fsked up tegra2/android/linux kernel driver access for those wishing to roll their own updates to orphaned hardware, for example.

He may be talking about that.

That's my thought, the question was Optimus related but he started talking about android.

Nvidia has great hardware with their ARM setups but you're kind of stuck with what you're given on the software side it seems by all the intarweb grumbling one can read about.

TuxRaiderPen2
Make America Great Again
join:2009-09-19

TuxRaiderPen2 to FF4m3

Member

to FF4m3
said by FF4m3 :
quote:
occurs at the 49-minute mark when Torvalds delivers his very frank opinion of NVIDIA and its support for Linux.

Well my opinion is the SAME VERY FRANK one to you Linus and your kernel Illumanti.

Get it through thick skulls nVidia is NOT GOING:

1) open source - they said this flat out

2) support - KMS - they have said ths flat out, and I don't want it or need and if it fubar's up waycrap, GOOD! no GREAT, NO !*$&!(*&! FANTASTIC!

3) Optimus - YOU, LINUS And KERNEL Illumanti ARE THE PROBLEM! They asked for a change to help resolve this abomination (optimus) and you pulled out your Standard 1A jerk attitude! And your the ones calling them names! PUHLEASE! yes, I am aware of the GPL issues in re this... but IF THEY REALLY WANTED TO SOLVE this they would do whats needed on this front. No they INTENTIONALLY ARE BLOCKING this... because of #1... FUGHETABOUT IT! ITS NOT HAPPENING! Get over it! Be !@*(&$!()*! glad they support Linux as well as they do!

Optimus be crApTI, nVidia , craptel or what ever combonation of this crap laptop makers are producing is just assinine. No you need not trot out the power saving, yadda yadda, yadda. Then use a PROPER CHIP SET, one that has the power saving you want for the laptop, not mix and match chipsets and hope and pray it works. That I put at the feet of laptop OEM/ODM's. They created this mess, not fix it! Get a proper chip set from the vendor!

I ONLY use nVidia for graphics, and the OEM driver.

I ONLY use AMD processors. I didn't care for the purchase of crapti by AMD when they did it, and I still don't. (Not that they really give two !@()*$!()* about my opinion.)

I DO NOT USE crapti graphics or intel processors or chipsets, unless forced to by no other options by vendors. Vendors who get an earful about lack of AMD, nVidia options.

This is HOW NOT TO SUPPORT AN OEM ON LINUX, Period!

Bad Linus! NO Rönttönen for you!

JohnInSJ
Premium Member
join:2003-09-22
Aptos, CA

JohnInSJ to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3
said by FF4m3 :

he calls Microsoft liars and says that they're full of s**t (to audience applause)

Always the class act

FF4m3
@verizon.net

FF4m3

Anon

said by JohnInSJ:

said by FF4m3 :

he calls Microsoft liars and says that they're full of s**t (to audience applause)

Always the class act

Not always, he states. Torvalds also says that he expresses himself honestly. It's all in the vid.
Expand your moderator at work

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3

Re: Linus Torvalds Flips The Bird To NVIDIA

Linux has its place and I use it daily, but Nvidia isn't missing anything. Where Linux matters is in the enterprise, where we don't care about the GUI. Server management is done by CLI, and even when a GUI is required just the basics is all that's needed. No one cares about FPS, and hence video drivers, and no servers are running Nvidia chipsets.

The only people that care about the latest drivers is on the desktop, and the Linux desktop userbase is less than 2%. If I were Nvidia I wouldn't devote many resources to that market either.

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

leibold

MVM

said by Wily_One:

No one cares about FPS, and hence video drivers, and no servers are running Nvidia chipsets.

I'm not going to check each server to get an exact count but I estimate that about 40 servers I'm responsible for have motherboards based on nVIDIA MCP55 Pro chipsets.

These aren't video/graphics chips, they are server chipsets including network interfaces, PCI-X and PCIe bus drivers, SATA disk controllers and more.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

Which manufacturer made these servers?

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA

leibold

MVM

Almost all of the ones with nVIDIA chipsets are Supermicro. The Dell servers are all based on Intel chipsets and the IBM servers seem to have a different chipset vendor for every model (Broadcom, Intel, ...).

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

1 edit

1 recommendation

Wily_One

Premium Member

Well I guess you can call anything you want a server, but you won't find Supermicro in any enterprise data center I've ever seen.

And let's back up a bit - so you have some boxes with Nvidia chipset. So what? Nvidia exited the chipset market a couple of years ago. Whatever Linux drivers you have for it would have been out by now, so by this point it either works or it doesn't. What does Linus expect from them? I think this goes to my initial impression is that Linus is referring to GPU drivers and not chipset drivers.

FF4m3
@bhn.net

FF4m3

Anon

said by Wily_One:

Well I guess you can call anything you want a server, but you won't find Supermicro in any enterprise data center I've ever seen.

FYI:
said by Supermicro :

Super Micro Computer, Inc. or Supermicro, a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and innovation is a premier provider of end-to-end green computing solutions for Enterprise IT, Datacenter, Cloud Computing, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro's advanced server Building Block Solutions offers a vast array of modular, interoperable components for building energy-efficient, application-optimized, computing solutions. This broad line of products includes servers, blades, GPU systems, workstations, motherboards, chassis, power supplies, storage technologies, networking solutions and SuperRack cabinets/accessories. Architecture innovations include Twin Architecture, SuperServer, SuperBlade, MicroCloud, Super Storage Bridge Bay (SBB), Double-Sided Storage, Universal I/O (UIO) and WIO expansion technology all of which deliver unrivaled performance and value.

Products are sold through major distribution channels including VARs, SIs and OEMs worldwide, as well as through its direct sales force. Operations centers are located in Silicon Valley, the Netherlands, and a new 1 million+ square foot Science & Technology Park and advanced integration facility in Taiwan.

Supermicro's server solutions include many design innovations to optimize power consumption and manage heat dissipation.

With supercomputer-level performance scaling to 2 TFLOPS in 1U and 4 TFLOPS in 4U, these hybrid CPU + GPU supercomputing solutions are ideal for scientific computing, CAD/CAM, oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, and other computationally-intensive applications.

Supermicro products incorporate the latest advancements in technology to meet demands of tomorrow's data-driven business world.


markofmayhem
Why not now?
Premium Member
join:2004-04-08
Pittsburgh, PA

markofmayhem to Wily_One

Premium Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

Well I guess you can call anything you want a server,

Indeed. From closets of 1's and 0's to computational work horses.

»www.nvidia.com/object/te ··· ers.html

Nvidia on Linux is very important to big money, real big money, and is in mainstream servers as well.

Both Dell's PowerEdge and HP's ProLiant utilize Tesla GPU computing. This isn't for a desktop or to watch movies, it is for parallel computations which are very superior on a GPU instead of a CPU.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

said by markofmayhem:

Both Dell's PowerEdge and HP's ProLiant utilize Tesla GPU computing. This isn't for a desktop or to watch movies, it is for parallel computations which are very superior on a GPU instead of a CPU.

And? Are you saying Nvidia isn't supporting CUDA on Linux? Sure looks like the same damn version is available on either platform:
»developer.nvidia.com/cud ··· ownloads

leibold
MVM
join:2002-07-09
Sunnyvale, CA
Netgear CG3000DCR
ZyXEL P-663HN-51

leibold to FF4m3

MVM

to FF4m3
In defense of Wily_One See Profile, it is quite possible to stand next to a rack of Supermicro servers in a data center and not be aware off it. I think only one or two of the more then 40 Supermicro servers in our two locations actually have a Supermicro label on them. Most are branded with the names of the system integrators that did the custom configuration for us.

Another recent quote (April 2012) that shows that Supermicro can indeed be found in enterprise data centers:
said by Marketwatch - Business Wire :

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, and Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology innovation and green computing, today announced that a major Asian cloud provider selected Supermicro servers and Mellanox's Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) solution to form one of the world's largest cloud solutions.

It is always nice to hear when a local company does well (Supermicro is located in Wily_One See Profile's home town San Jose).

This is getting quite off topic however since Supermicro isn't the only server manufacturer that used the nVIDIA MCP55 Pro chipset in their products.

markofmayhem
Why not now?
Premium Member
join:2004-04-08
Pittsburgh, PA

markofmayhem to Wily_One

Premium Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

said by markofmayhem:

Both Dell's PowerEdge and HP's ProLiant utilize Tesla GPU computing. This isn't for a desktop or to watch movies, it is for parallel computations which are very superior on a GPU instead of a CPU.

And? Are you saying Nvidia isn't supporting CUDA on Linux? Sure looks like the same damn version is available on either platform:
»developer.nvidia.com/cud ··· ownloads

I am saying CUDA is supported on Linux, never said anything else... ever. It is the 'same damn version', I am happy you were suddenly able to comprehend English again. Damn, I agree with this guy and he argues with the agreement...

Did anyone watch the video? The look on Linus' face when the guy stated he was an Nvidia employee was priceless. Reminded me of a 4 year old with a hand in a candy bowl after being told no candy allowed. I remember when Linus used to come off confident. What was the point of this? He looks simply unhinged, not in an effort to accomplish something. Is there more background to this story that explains the NVidia insulting? Or is it still related to Optimus (Bumble Bee) and the request to utilize the GPL Kernel license to include code within the proprietary NVidia driver?

Maxo
Your tax dollars at work.
Premium Member
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL

Maxo to Wily_One

Premium Member

to Wily_One
said by Wily_One:

Linux has its place and I use it daily, but Nvidia isn't missing anything. Where Linux matters is in the enterprise, where we don't care about the GUI. Server management is done by CLI, and even when a GUI is required just the basics is all that's needed. No one cares about FPS, and hence video drivers, and no servers are running Nvidia chipsets.

The only people that care about the latest drivers is on the desktop, and the Linux desktop userbase is less than 2%. If I were Nvidia I wouldn't devote many resources to that market either.

You are forgetting a big market where Linux is very important, and that is smart phones and tablet devices. Linus mentions this in his rant against nVidia.
Android devices are big money, and for it performance, FPS, and power usage are very important. So nVidia graphics drivers on Linux of a big deal in a way that affects average people running popular off-the-shelf devices.

markofmayhem
Why not now?
Premium Member
join:2004-04-08
Pittsburgh, PA

1 recommendation

markofmayhem

Premium Member

But Android is on Tegra devices...

I'm really confused, what has NVidia done to Linux badly?

Desktop: supported, driver is updated and functional
Enterprise: supported, HPC solutions (CUDA) are updated and functional
Mobile: supported, developer kit and products released with Android OS

Maxo
Your tax dollars at work.
Premium Member
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL

Maxo

Premium Member

said by markofmayhem:

I'm really confused, what has NVidia done to Linux badly?

I too am curious about what Linus has ran into with nVidia the has made him so upset.

FF4m3
@verizon.net

FF4m3 to FF4m3

Anon

to FF4m3
NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words:

NVIDIA's PR department has issued a statement following the harsh comments by Linus Torvalds last week where he referred to the graphics company as the single worst company they have ever dealt with, called them out on not supporting Optimus, and other issues.

If you missed it, see the aforelinked article that provides a video of what he said about NVIDIA along with flicking off NVIDIA and ending with "NVIDIA: FUCK YOU!" NVIDIA's PR department came out last night to comment on the matter.

Basically they said they're committed to Linux using their (proprietary) driver that is largely common across platforms and this allows for same-day Linux support, etc. They also promote how they're active in ARM Linux for Tegra, support a wide-range of hardware under Linux, etc. However, they haven't made any commitment to better support Optimus under Linux nor provide any level of open-source / technical support to the Nouveau community.

Below is the NVIDIA PR response.

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 »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:

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.

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.


firephoto
Truth and reality matters
Premium Member
join:2003-03-18
Brewster, WA

firephoto to markofmayhem

Premium Member

to markofmayhem
said by markofmayhem:

I'm really confused, what has NVidia done to Linux badly?

It's made devs rant daily about their inability to tinker with nvidia drivers and Linus reads this and likely fuels a bad mood in him so rather than rocking the boat he can just unload on Nvidia while knowing it does no harm.

Personally I get tired of all the whining from people that want Nvidia to fall off a cliff because their needs are so basic they could do what they do with 100% software rendering and they equate that to how good AMD/ATI is for their needs while ignoring the fact that the closed driver runs circles around the free and open ones.

There's also likely a bigger story never spoken by those who are most vocal that involves money. If you can't tinker with the drivers and you make your money from writing code then there are few opportunities involving massive deployments of the hardware so it can be easy to talk trash about these kind of things. It's actually the likely mentality when you see all the Linux experts who don't even run a Linux desktop, the desktop isn't making them money so they have little interest in it.

FF4m3
@verizon.net

FF4m3 to FF4m3

Anon

to FF4m3
A good overview -

Linus Torvalds' Obscene Rant Highlights Linux’s Hardware Woes:

Nvidia’s reputation within the Linux community has never been well-regarded.

Linux has always had problems with getting hardware vendors to provide proper - or sometimes any - driver support for their hardware, which Torvalds went on to detail after dinging Nvidia...

In the case of Nvidia, the company does provide Linux drivers, but they are often maligned as broken. Emphasizing intellectual property and contractual concerns, Nvidia has released only the binary executable versions of these drivers, which makes it much harder to solve compatibility issues between driver and operating system.

This rankles Linux developers, who would prefer the actual driver source code in order to design better interfaces between OS and hardware.

From Engadget:

[Torvalds] was particularly irritated with the fact that the chipmaker's own Tegra range were faring so well on the wave of Android devices currently hitting stores, as Google's mobile OS itself came from a strong Linux background.