14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia started to make some good progress with the Linux community, and the company invested a lot of effort into drivers for the open-source platform, not to mention the fact that they provided valuable help to the developers of the Nouveau drivers (open source). Now the company is in hot water again, and the Linux community will surely react.
Many Linux users still remember Linus Torvalds giving the finger to Nvidia for their poor support for Optimus powered hardware. Optimus supports hasn't gotten all that much better, but Nvidia did show that they were willing to invest time and money into their drivers and other products, like PhysX, for example. Developers from the company also helped Nouveau developers with certain aspects, and it seems to be a fruitful relationship.
But then Nvidia launched their latest line of GPUs, the GTX 900 series, and things have gotten really bad for Nouveau. As it turns out, Nvidia now digitally signs the firmware images, and the protection they got in place make it impossible to the developers of open-source drivers to do anything about it.
The Linux community is only superficially happy with Nvidia
Companies like Nvidia and AMD are not usually all that highly regarded in the Linux community, although Nvidia has come a long way. The problem is that they provided proprietary drivers, which are closed and not subject to scrutiny. They do this to protect their technology, so it doesn't seem like they have a choice. The fact is that they did protect their products before, but now they are going over the top.
"I spent a lot of time trying to find a viable way of doing gr ctxsw without signed firmware, but the 'security' restrictions on the fecs/gpccs falcons are excessive and go beyond what'd be necessary to protect the host from malicious firmware. This newer nvidia hw is VERY open-source unfriendly," wrote Dave Airlie, one of the developers from the Nouveau team.
It remains unclear what other solution is left for the Nouveau team, but it's possible that Nvidia will reach out to the developers and provide them with a way of continuing their work. If not, it will only mean that GTX 900 users will have to use only the proprietary drivers, which will make a lot of people unhappy.