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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA's default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author's intent.

Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.

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[+] -53 points 3 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
[deleted]
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  • [–] 44 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Them becoming raging zealots is kind of the only realistic way to defend the GPL though. If they don't, it's just going to get treated like toilet paper. I'd much rather have the angry hate mob than to be disrespected by big companies who can otherwise just get away with whatever they want.

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  • [+] -43 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    And I’d like hardware that works, and proprietary drivers are really the only way that happens

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    AMD and Intel both have fully featured, full performance open source graphics drivers.

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  • [+] -9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Not to knock on your point but the AMD drivers on Linux don't support hardware video encoding unfortunately, so technically it's not full-featured

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Depends on your distro. Fedora and Manjaro removed it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    And you can simply get it from rpm fusion on fedora, and I'd guess something similar on manjaro. It's just gone from the official fedora repositories for liability reasons. rpm fusion as a defacto standard for desktops/laptops was enabled there before that for what, like 99% of the installs?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I take advantage of hardware video encoding on linux with amd's open source drivers almost every day.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I probably sbould've specified H.264/H.265, unless I'm missing something?

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  • [+] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago

    Why do you think that? Companies can open source their drivers at will, in fact at this point NVIDIA is the only major player in GPU market who hasn't done this, what do you think makes this particular hardware so special that needs a closed source driver when every other competitor doesn't? In fact what could possibly be the reason for a driver to need to be closed source?

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Or maybe we should keep companies, which rake in billions of dollars, to a much higher standard??

    Nvidia could be better at open-sourcing their stuff. But they don't. Blame them, not GPL.

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  • [+] -8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I mean we do, but blaming them doesn't make Linux more viable for high end GPU applications.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 years ago

    It's not going to effect you. No distro is going to ship a kernel that doesn't work with the Nvidia driver, besides maybe some rolling ones, in which case you can just use the LTS kernel. This is drama between Nvidia and the rest of the kernel maintainers, and Nvidia will update their driver to deal with it, as they have done in the past.

    Shitting on people who care about FOSS because they don't want to see massive companies get away with blatant copyright infringement is crazy.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    we rely on software that doesn’t work on AMD

    Which software?

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