Linux

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

a) Good for them

b) How long before NVIDIA throws up their hands at the whole thing and does their own Linux distro + pushes all their cloud AI customers to use it? (it doesn't seem like they're ever going to be shamed / coerced into actually open-sourcing their driver)

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?

That's just such a great image!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.

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.

Given that symbol_get was only ever intended for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls lawsuits.

Luis Chamberlain further added in today's pull request: "Christoph Hellwig's symbol_get() fix to Nvidia's efforts to circumvent the protection he put in place in year 2020 to prevent proprietary modules from using GPL only symbols, and also ensuring proprietary modules which export symbols grandfather their taint.

The circumvention tactic used by Nvidia was to use symbol_get() to purposely swift through proprietary module symbols and completley bypass our traditional EXPORT_SYMBOL*() annotations and community agreed upon restrictions."

Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being.

The original article contains 476 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

And that's why I'm happy to see that the lock on modifying the Nvidia BIOS for their old graphics cards has finally been decrypted. That means that Nouveau will have a much easier route to make their open-source drivers work properly on the 10xx and 20xx cards, so we don't have to rely on the tainted crumbs that Nvidia offered here. (Then again, I eventually moved to a 6600 specifically to no longer have to deal with this kind of shenanigans)

I get why the Linux folks are doing this, but I don't expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux (which is a lot of people). I'm sure that my employer will choose up-to-date Nvidia drivers over up-to-date versions of the kernel, at least in the short term. In the long term it probably won't be an issue since Nvidia will figure something out, but if it did become an issue then ultimately Nvidia driver support is non-negotiable for the company where I work.

(No one cares what a small tech company does, but the big guys need Nvidia too so it should be possible to piggyback on whatever they do.)

Lousy criminals. NVIDIA, I mean. If I wrote code like that, I'd be dragged in front of a judge and made to answer for breaking the DMCA. But if you're a big, rich company, the government won't touch you.

Can someone ELI5 what this is about? Why does Nvidia wants to access parts if the Linux kernel and why are linux kernel maintainers against it? Wouldn't it be good if Nvidia uses more open-source stuff?