Should Linux Use Proprietary Drivers?

Richard Gray writes "Should Linux accept proprietary video/graphics drivers from likes of Nvidia and ATI ? The GPL written by FSF says that the license prohibits proprietary drivers. From the article: 'To write open-source graphics drivers without help from Nvidia or ATI is tough. Efforts to reverse-engineer open-source equivalents often are months behind and produce only 'rudimentary' drivers, said Michael Larabel, founder of a high-end Linux hardware site Phoronix ... Torvalds has argued that some proprietary modules should be permissible because they're not derived from the Linux kernel, but were originally designed to work with other operating systems.' The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.' Where do you fall on this issue?"

Open Graphics Project

[Theovon]

The Open Graphics Project recently released schematics for their first product and are steadily making progress towards completing it for sale (http://kerneltrap.org/node/6262 [kerneltrap.org]). If Libre graphics drivers are REALLY important to you, you might want to consider looking them up at "www.opengraphics.org". Despite being unfunded since early 2005 (which they could use some help with), they are still managing to make some headway. Those people with technical expertise (graphics drivers, graphics hardware, PCB design, chip design) would do well to pitch in to the effort. And those with money who also complain about the lack of Libre drivers should put their money where their mouths are. Rather than sitting around and complaining about it, the founders of the OGP decided to actually DO something about it; if you want to do more than just complain, they could use your help.

Support open gpu hardware.

[AHuxley]

Help build and support a real open solution. http://opengraphics.org/ [opengraphics.org]

Or buy VIA

[metamatic]

I have an EPIA M10000. Next time I build a PC, I'll probably pick another VIA EPIA. Why? Because VIA released source code for drivers for every piece of hardware in the system, from the S3 UniChrome graphics card to the hardware MPEG decoder, from the ethernet interface (hello, nVidia) to the hardware random number generator.

It's also a nice stable silent mini board with a CPU that runs on 4W of power.

If you don't need gaming-level 3D performance or heavy number crunching power, a VIA EPIA-based system is a great option.

(And no, I have no financial ties to VIA.)

Re:Come on

[fuzzix]

The drivers are open source (just extract the block from the NVIDIA.sh); it's just that they are not free software.

There's source code for a kernel hook for the binary driver. The actual core of the driver is neither Open Source or Free Software.

Re:If you're going to be picky, hardware's not ope

[ardor]

If a manufacturer can provide a graphics card where the hardware interface is open and which supports all the things you need these days for games like Doom III, Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights (like pixel and vertex shaders), I for one am prepared to put my money where my mouth is and support them.

Only problem being that a lot of the functionality these games require is actually in the driver, which is very very likely to be closed-source forever. Its as if you want to recreate a full personal computer with a state-of-the-art OS on it, but only get the schematics of the hardware, with NO software whatsoever. This will take a while, especially since the closed-source stuff is filled with tons of functionality and is being extended at an enormous pace.

Re:Come on

[Hast]

What do you mean "massive FPGAs"? From my own experience with FPGAs and GPUs the two are not at all similar. And FPGA is just that, a "programmable gate array" where you can alter pretty much everything programmatically.

A GPU is an ASIC for obvious reasons. (Cost and performance being the major contendors I suppose.) While you may be able to do some minor adjustments as well as turning on or off different shader pipelines it has nowhere near the flexibility of a FPGA.

General Purpose GPUs has nothing to do with it. Those use the fact that a modern GPU has a shitload of processing power as each fragment (pixel) shader typically has 4 floating point ALUs which can be operated as vector processor. That is done by uploading shaders to the GPU which are then executed there.

Or do you mean that shaders are like a limited programmable array?

This is with my experience as someone who has worked with FPGAs and GPU shaders. (But nothing relating to GPU drivers.)