Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he's now resigning from maintaining the driver.
This is a personal decision that I've been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.
I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I've been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I'll be poking my nose in every so often :)
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out considering Ben has been the number one contributor to the Nouveau kernel driver for years while at Red Hat.
Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver development evolves from this unexpected move.
The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Did he resign from the position, or from Red Hat entirely?
Both. Ben's taking off for personal reasons (it's literally written in his email, but people will still try to pretend it's related to the recent kerfuffles with Red Hat)
You shouldn't burn bridges when leaving even the shittiest employer. So personal reasons it is. We will never know what the truth is ;)
Redhat dose some questionable stuff, especially all that union busting bs but it's far from the worse employer and if you love foss you probably do something you love there.
I agree, I am certain that there are thousands of great and passionate about FOSS people there. I'm just not that certain about IBM ;) It's still probably better place to work at than most.
All in all, I am only saying that the fact that somebody cites "personal reasons" doesn't mean there are no other factors at play.
From RH, it's in the (short) article.
That is a good question. Got me thinking too. That title is rather ambiguous.
"I have resigned, and will no longer be taking as active a role in nouveau development."
So what does this mean? He was the main contributer. Is Nouveau the only open source driver Nvidia cards can use on Linux?
I believe so, yes. Other than that there's the official closed driver. Nvidia also "open-sourced" their driver for the RTX 20 series and up, which you could technically run, but I didn't hear much good from it.
I've heard that it's not fully open source. Some components of it are still closed source.
And the parts that are open source are basically just a code dump. No commit history, so no comments explaining things in commits. That's worse than some source code leaks.
Times like these make me really miss Omega Drivers. :(
Why go for third party drivers if you can go for AMD?
Some people might have gotten their computers before using Linux, and the GPUs are either too hard to swap (in some prebuilts and most laptops), or new ones are too expensive.
That's the situation I'm in. 12 year old me did not know the problems Nvidia had with Linux, especially Wayland. My server on Ubuntu did not have problems with the GT 210 after all - which was to be expected considering it was headless and just used Nouveau.
For it to be very hard if not impossible to swap in Laptops I agree, that's true. For desktops it should be a drop-in replacement tho, considering the equivalents of AMD to Nvidia all need the same, if not less, requirements (Power, Other components, Plugs). Selling my 1070 I would get ~100€, which is the price of a used RX Vega 56, the AMD equivalent of my card. Considering I want to upgrade in the near future that would be pretty pointless however.
That's also the situation I'm in, I was also 12 when I got my PC XD
But now that I got my RTX 3080 working with NixOS, I don't think I'll swap it.
Because AMD GPUs don't have proper ray tracing support. Hell, they can't even do frame generation.
Believe me, I'd love nothing more than to own an all-AMD PC, but until their GPUs are as good as their CPUs, I'm stuck with a hybrid machine.
The article answers your question
Read the article and was confused. Good thing there's a comment section to ask questions.
Cool can't wait to never play starfield on arch endeavour os
You wouldn't play anything with Nouveau anyway
Well, the other thing Ben just posted before leaving is the initial support for GSP in nouveau (now continued by someone else in his team), which means we can finally start doing things like reclocking. With this and other cool stuff like nvk coming up, we finally have a way forward to have a good upstream experience.
Godspeed to him
And also: fuck you, Nvidia!
Poor burnt out guy
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he's now resigning from maintaining the driver.
This is a personal decision that I've been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.
I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I've been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I'll be poking my nose in every so often :)
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out considering Ben has been the number one contributor to the Nouveau kernel driver for years while at Red Hat.
Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver development evolves from this unexpected move.
The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Did he resign from the position, or from Red Hat entirely?
Both. Ben's taking off for personal reasons (it's literally written in his email, but people will still try to pretend it's related to the recent kerfuffles with Red Hat)
You shouldn't burn bridges when leaving even the shittiest employer. So personal reasons it is. We will never know what the truth is ;)
Redhat dose some questionable stuff, especially all that union busting bs but it's far from the worse employer and if you love foss you probably do something you love there.
I agree, I am certain that there are thousands of great and passionate about FOSS people there. I'm just not that certain about IBM ;) It's still probably better place to work at than most.
All in all, I am only saying that the fact that somebody cites "personal reasons" doesn't mean there are no other factors at play.
From RH, it's in the (short) article.
That is a good question. Got me thinking too. That title is rather ambiguous.
From the article.
So what does this mean? He was the main contributer. Is Nouveau the only open source driver Nvidia cards can use on Linux?
I believe so, yes. Other than that there's the official closed driver. Nvidia also "open-sourced" their driver for the RTX 20 series and up, which you could technically run, but I didn't hear much good from it.
I've heard that it's not fully open source. Some components of it are still closed source.
And the parts that are open source are basically just a code dump. No commit history, so no comments explaining things in commits. That's worse than some source code leaks.
Times like these make me really miss Omega Drivers. :(
Why go for third party drivers if you can go for AMD?
Some people might have gotten their computers before using Linux, and the GPUs are either too hard to swap (in some prebuilts and most laptops), or new ones are too expensive.
That's the situation I'm in. 12 year old me did not know the problems Nvidia had with Linux, especially Wayland. My server on Ubuntu did not have problems with the GT 210 after all - which was to be expected considering it was headless and just used Nouveau.
For it to be very hard if not impossible to swap in Laptops I agree, that's true. For desktops it should be a drop-in replacement tho, considering the equivalents of AMD to Nvidia all need the same, if not less, requirements (Power, Other components, Plugs). Selling my 1070 I would get ~100€, which is the price of a used RX Vega 56, the AMD equivalent of my card. Considering I want to upgrade in the near future that would be pretty pointless however.
That's also the situation I'm in, I was also 12 when I got my PC XD
But now that I got my RTX 3080 working with NixOS, I don't think I'll swap it.
Because AMD GPUs don't have proper ray tracing support. Hell, they can't even do frame generation.
Believe me, I'd love nothing more than to own an all-AMD PC, but until their GPUs are as good as their CPUs, I'm stuck with a hybrid machine.
The article answers your question
Read the article and was confused. Good thing there's a comment section to ask questions.
Cool can't wait to never play starfield on arch endeavour os
You wouldn't play anything with Nouveau anyway
Well, the other thing Ben just posted before leaving is the initial support for GSP in nouveau (now continued by someone else in his team), which means we can finally start doing things like reclocking. With this and other cool stuff like nvk coming up, we finally have a way forward to have a good upstream experience.
You could buy a GPU made by a company that actually supports Linux and its users.
Not if you want compute for rendering or training.
Next one will be, bought a 4080....