this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Oh wow the comments on Phoronix for this one are bonkers.

From what I understand (because it wasn't clear to me from either of the TLDRs posted here) Nvidia's proprietary graphics driver has been calling parts of the kernel that they shouldn't be, because their driver is closed source.

These seem to be parts of the kernel that another company may own patents to, but has only licensed it to the kernel for free use with GPL open source code only, i.e. closed source/proprietary code is not allowed to use it.

Nvidia seems to have open sourced a tiny communication shim to try and bypass this restriction, so their closed source driver talks to the shim, and the shim talks to the restricted code in the kernel, that Nvidia does not have a license to use. This is a DMCA violation, hence why the Kernel devs are putting in preventions to block the shim, as far as I can see.

I don't understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here. Some commenters have gone as far as to call the Linux kernel maintainers "zealots", would not be surprised if they are alts for Nvidia devs...

Edit: typo

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Just a perspective on why people would support NVIDIA here:

  • They don't believe in copyright law so they don't mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.

  • They do care about copyright law but think having a working driver outweighs respecting them.

Not my opinion here just saying that for some people usability trumps any other aspects.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

They don't believe in copyright law so they don't mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.

I don't believe in copyright law, but I especially don't believe in partially enforced copyright law. Nvidia doesn't get to use copyright to protect their proprietary code while infringing on the copyright of FOSS.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Also, some of us are using Nvidia because we rely on software that doesn't work on AMD. I really enjoy using Linux, but if it's going to make my life difficult I'll go back to using Windows with WSL.

I agree Nvidia should resolve the licensing issues, but man GPL zealots get a such a raging hard-on for anything Nvidia related it's funny to watch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Linux is the gold standard in many high end GPU applications, like AI, though?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

we rely on software that doesn’t work on AMD

Which software?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

3D rendering software using iRay. I've started trying to learn Blender, but I've still got thousands spent on assets and hardware which means I'm not going to run out tomorrow and pickup a new card. It all works fine under Wine, but the amount of Nvidia hate on here is just tiring.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

So you use iRay as the rendering engine for Blender? And (I'm assuming a lot here) iRay doesn't use CUDA, OpenCL etc, but straight talks to the GPU via graphics drivers, thus having hardware depency for nvidia GPU?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Then isn't the correct solution to sue Nvidia?

It's a legal issue with a legal solution.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You dont sue someone with deeper pockets than you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

This is what's wrong in so many countries.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

So you want the company that licensed the patents to the Linux kernel for open source use to have to sue Nvidia for wrongly using their code? You want the company to have to spend a bunch of money suing Nvidia and possibly lose which would open the flood gates to more closed source code leeching off the Linux kernel?

Yeah that's going to make them want to keep licensing their IP to the Linux Foundation (which they're probably doing for free).

Or the maintainers can just submit a fairly simple patch to ensure that the kernel and the patents are being respected. Do you really think the first approach is the way to go?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah probably, but Nvidia can afford lawyers and delays for years. Much longer than any oss group could afford

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because sueing is never great

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Neither is having your copyright infringed. Neither is wasting volunteer manpower playing a technical game of cat and mouse

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

"I'm also very happy to point out that nVidia has been the worst [...] so nVidia, "fuck you!""

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

But why is it a problem if they call on parts of the kernal they shouldn't? is it just a privacy concern, does it also impact performance? i don't understand

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Cause the GPL is a virus

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

And it's a good thing. Fuck proprietary software 😎

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

We'll be down voted, but agreed.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

As the commenter stated, it is a copyright issue. Nvidia is not allowed to use this code in a proprietary driver.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't that automatically make their code GPL?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

No it would just make Nvidia guilty of copyright infringement

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If they want to use that code legally they should make their code GPL but i doubt there proprietary code gets automatically overrules. I wish it did.

I do wonder what would happen if someone would hack and leak Nvidia’s code under the defense that they thought Nvidia to be operating legally therefor assuming there code is GPL, I presume Nvidia would need to officially confess their crime as a legal defense that they never ment to open source their own code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Free Software Foundation, Inc. Vs Cisco Systems Inc. disagrees. The FSF sued Linksys for violating the license for GCC, libc etc.

And they were forced in court to release all their WRT stuff under GPL, which is how OpenWRT got its start.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just the idea of nvidia being forced to open source there drivers makes me drool in sweet winners justice.

But realistically, Nvidia feels like one of the more powerful corporations around do we stand a chance? I do hope FSF tries regardless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Linksys was part of Cisco. They had veryy deep pockets, but the FSF & SFC prevailed regardless.

I doubt the FSF or SFC will go after Nvidia, this has been a long standing issue and I haven't heard about any lawsuits being brought because of it, even before Nvidia had more money than God.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't see how the copyright mechanism works here. The GPL has rules about linking to GPL code, enforced by the notion that the linked binary is a protected derivative work. Going and finding out where in memory some functions are and jumping to them is not going to create a derivative work.

The Linux devs just have a rule about who they want to call these symbols and are trying to enforce it themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You not seeing how this violates the copyright does not mean you are correct

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html

Is the available source code complete, or is it designed for linking in other nonfree modules?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Which they technically didn't. I'm sure Nvidia has a legal team that vetted their solution, they certainly have the money for it. At this point the "protection" against the proprietary driver is just anti-consumer.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

I don’t understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here.

They think they're gonna get a free 4090 in the mail any day now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just installed the nvidia-driver for my 2080 SUPER and my system isn't starting now. I'm using Debian 12.1 and after installing the driver, it crashes after entering in my password for my encrypted drive.

I will load up a Live USB and see if I can fix the issue. Any help would be appreciated!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Blacklist the Nvidia driver and un-blacklist nouveau. I'm going from memory, but I think if you can get to GRUB, you can append 'single' to your kernel parameters. That should get you into a system with minimal drivers loaded.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Riddle me this, why is there such a thing as proprietary drivers for anything? Especially consumer facing products like this?

Don't you want anyone and anything using your product in any situation? Help me understand NVIDIA's bit with this?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Driver code might expose some underlying secret sauce they're using in the hardware. That's the justification they always used to give, at any rate. At this point, though, it's probably some code they've inherited from an acquisition that has a bunch of legal encumbrance stopping it from being open sources.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I assume nVidia have licensed other code that they don't have the rights to distribute the source code for.

I get what the GPL fans want here, but it's just going to lead to a gimped driver, no driver, or an even larger shim between the open and closed source bits. The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

The Linux market is massive for Nvidia. Nobody is using Windows for ML and everybody is using Nvidia for ML.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The Linux community is literally Nvidia's biggest market. The current Linux market share in data centers is currently estimated to be 77%.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

With GPUs being used for AI stuff and all sane people using Linux for servers, no, Linux market isn't small at all for Nvidia.