Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
phoronix.com
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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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.
And I’d like hardware that works, and proprietary drivers are really the only way that happens
AMD and Intel both have fully featured, full performance open source graphics drivers.
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
Depends on your distro. Fedora and Manjaro removed it.
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?
I take advantage of hardware video encoding on linux with amd's open source drivers almost every day.
I probably sbould've specified H.264/H.265, unless I'm missing something?
h264 and h265 work- check the va-api table to see what's supported: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
Ehm, not at all??
There's so much hardware with non-proprietary drivers.
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?