Linux en Casa
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2025
0:47 · 59K views · Nov 7, 2021
A short clip of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger and telling the company off over its Linux support. It is the well-known soundbite from a Q&A.
Cited whenever Nvidia's Linux driver behavior comes up, as the famous example of the kernel community's frustration.
4 comments from Hacker News
Buy AMD or Intel. Not Nvidia. Rationale: Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3] to support Wayland for a long time. Blaming that implicit sync was a disadvantage for Nvidia is not appropriate. They could've participated a long time ago and either adapt to implicit sync or help adding explicit sync years ago. Furthermore: * AMD gave us Vulkan as standard, which builds upon AMD's Mantle. * AMD gave us FreeSync i.e. VRR, which is usable by others. * AMD gave us FSR, which is usable by others. What did Nvidia? * High prices. * Proprietary and expensive GSYNC. * Refused to publish documentation and open-source drivers for many years. * Own video-decoding libraries. It is the documentation, drivers and Wayland. But the complete track record of Nvidia is bad. Their only argument are some benchmarks wins and press-coverage. The most important feature to all users is, reliability. And, Linus Torvalds[4] said everything. If Nvidia has changed its company politics and proofs that over years through good work it is maybe possible the reevaluate this. I don't see this within the next years. [1] Well. Decades? [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] this video
That's 100% intentional. In any case, non-GPL modules cannot be upstreamed (except with a license that is compatible with the GPL, e.g. BSD is okay), and cannot touch a lot of parts of the kernel. Also, loading a non-GPL module "taints" your kernel (this cannot be undone except through reboot) and tells everyone on the support mailinglists that you've loaded proprietary code. [LINK] And there is much hating on Nvidia, for using a "workaround". Including, famously: this video Also famously, this is the reason ZFS is not in the linux kernel.
If Linus is happy to literally give NVIDIA the finger [1], then maybe he/Linux Foundation would be willing to give NVIDIA the legal spanking they deserve (IMO)? We can only dream :) [1]: this video
> Nvidia and their amazing software stack and support for their hardware. Linus seems to disagree this video