> Modern GPU drivers are a nightmare for open source.
Modern NVIDIA drviers. Let me fix that for you.
Intel and AMD has their full stack in mainline already, and AMD made great effort to enable their cards fully under open source drivers, as their agreements and law allows. You can even use HDCP without exposing sensitive parts, if you want.
Intel also works completely fine.
However, NVIDIA's shenanigans and HDMI forum's v2.1 protectionism is something else completely.
Well, they might work, but they are far from OK.
- An open source kernel module which talks with the card.
- A set of closed source GLX libraries for acceleration support.
- A signed and encrypted firmware which only works with this closed source driver package to enable the card.
Nothing is OK about that.
I have used fglrx for a very long time, and have some adventures with it. I even knew people from the development team, actually.
Well, having a driver agnostic closed source firmware is pretty different from an end-to-end closed chain with a driver-authenticating firmware.
Also, while fglrx had some serious problems, they didn't wait two years to fix DVI DPMS issues like the green company.
Yes, neither are open hardware at the end of the day, but we have almost infinite number of colors and infinite shades of gray. Like everything else, this is a spectrum.
As I aforementioned, I'd love to have completely free hardware, but the world's reality works differently for many right and many wrong reasons. I'd prefer to use most open one I can get, in this case.
I agree with you on principle.
But at the same time (adding more shades of color), part of the reason why Nvidia remained closed source for longer was precisely because they were supporting all the same features on both windows and Linux, while amd's Linux was (is?) always lagging behind. For ML use cases basically the only choice was Nvidia.
(Nonetheless, I was very happy with my amd card, and now I'm very happy with a semi-modern Nvidia card)
Yes, that's a problem if you want a fully free-software powered system. However, considering how we had firmware since forever, this is a compromise I can personally accept, for now.
Having a completely Free Software firmware would be great, but I'm not sure barrier to this is as low as Free Software since there's involvement of IP blocks, regulation, misuse of general purpose hardware (like radios) and whatnot.
I really support an end-to-end Free Software system, but we have some road to go, and not all problems are technical in that regard.
I went with AMD for compatibility playing games, but AFAICT AMD ROCm is not in a great state for computation. Why can't I have both?
That's something like what they're describing as "a nightmare," isn't it? "As agreements and law allows," is part of the nightmare. Under a modern OS, it should not be difficult to have the full capability of the hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of hardware you paid for.
Modern NVIDIA drivers for their more recent cards are actually okay, again.