Another reason for free drivers
Someone not so familiar yet with living in the OpenSource realms asked me why we constantly push for free drivers (graphics drivers in particular) as much as we can. Apart from “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” (famous quote from L. Torvalds) and making the user more independent from a hardware vendors fate, protection from cheating is another good reason for our attitude. In the referenced article it is demonstrated how a vendor does benchmark-specific optimizations to obtain better results in those and thus positively, but incorrectly, manipulates review-results for their product. Within the world of OpenSource Xorg/DRI-drivers this cannot happen. So to speak xorg-video-ati/intel/nouveau are more honest towards the user than fglrx and nvidia-glx (speaking in Debian/Ubuntu package-name terms here) are. In all fairness I want to mention that fglrx and nvidia-glx provide more complete and robust support for OpenGL and its extensions, when compared to the OpenSource counterparts. Still, looking at my own experience with them, I like the way xorg-video-intel and xorg-video-ati are going in recent times.
October 13th, 2009 at 1:38 am
On the other hand, some people may think that protection from cheating is a good reason not to provide open source drivers. Open source video drivers can easily be hacked to facilitate cheating in online game with wallhacks and other similar things.
Of course, in reality the closed-source drivers don’t stop people from doing it anyhow, but I can’t argue that open sourcing drivers wouldn’t make things easier for cheaters.
PS: The font size in this comment box is so small that it is close to unreadable on a 96dpi display.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Linus’s Law and the name was coined by Eric Raymond eons ago. This is not a Linus quote.
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
October 13th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Every proprietary driver cheats egregiously; it’s not just Intel. (And not just ATI/NVIDIA, either.)
October 13th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Am I missing something here? Does it really matter that Intel offloads some of the processing power to the CPU? If it makes the game work better, then it sounds like its doing its job!
October 13th, 2009 at 7:18 am
On that front, I am very disappointed with Intel for their Poulsbo chipset (GMA 500) that does not use the open source driver
, there is a plague of netbooks carrying these bastard chipsets thanks to Intel…
October 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am
your point is correct, but a bad graphic driver leads to a crappy desktop experience, and pushes people away from linux
October 13th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
[...] http://macslow.net/?p=394 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
The closed source NVidia drivers may perform well, they don’t integrate with the rest of the free desktop at all. Ubuntu makes it easy to install these drivers (which is a good thing as long as no decent alternatives exist), but you can’t use the graphical display configuration tool properly because the drivers lacks the extensions necessary. Also, LiveCD’s can’t use hardware acceleration because they can’t ship these proprietary drivers.
I never really noticed until I installed Ubuntu on a friend’s laptop (Intel graphics, FOSS driver compatible). It all worked out of the box and looked so professional from the moment the LiveCD finished booting. My next purchase won’t use ATI or NVidia graphical chipsets if they refuse to open up their drivers.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
@ codebeard: Competitive gaming is a weak spot for this obviously. I’ve not thought of that. But on the other hand, if game-contests are held (where the price-money comes into play), they are done within controlled environments. So unpatched drivers would of course be used. At least at that point someone, who used to play with see-through-patches will land on his/her face.
I do not see a problem with the font-size of the comment box on my 144 DPI laptop-screen.
@ Jeff: Thanks for the correction!
@ daniels: Yeah, probably
@ Chris: The main issue here is a cheat/tweak/short-cut intel’s binary/windows driver performs to “look better” in a benchmark, which is commonly referred to by OEMs or end-users to evaluate a GPU’s performance to help them guide their purchase.
@ Che: Poulsbo is indeed a curse!
@ guru: Very true, but looking at intel (i965) it offers a solid and out-of-the-box solution being fully OpenSource. At the moment the only sore spots in their driver are some aspects in GLSL. One of the bugs I encountered and reported last week has been promptly addressed and fixed. I cannot say that about nvidia. The most hassle-free desktop-experience in my opinion is still provided by intel. Here I intentionally exclude raw performance from my consideration. This is - to a large portion - directly depending of the underlying hardware. Drivers can of course always be optimized, but not by orders of magnitude. Except they are in early alpha-stages
@ Jeroen: You are of course right, regarding the lack of integration-”fit and finish” for proprietary drivers. But at least ATI try to improve their OpenSource-efforts by providing full chip-documentation for Xorg-driver developers. This is to be commended and thus they are only second to intel in terms of OpenSource-friendly-ness. Let’s disregard the bloody Pulsbo-debacle intel created
October 15th, 2009 at 1:52 am
I am really impressed with the way this KMS stuff and all the other improvements have come along lately.