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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

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.

skymtf ,

What ever happened to the source code nvidia did release. Was it released in such a way to where it is not helpful?

FederalAlienSmuggler ,

They are not legally allowed to build drivers from the illegally acquired source code.

worsedoughnut ,
@worsedoughnut@lemdro.id avatar

I don’t think they meant the hacked and released source code, I think they meant the kernel modules that Nvidia actually opensourced in may of '22

_cnt0 ,
@_cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social avatar

I have not had a look at it myself, but my understanding is, that that was/is only glue code to the closed source blob.

monobot ,

You are correct, it while it was technically driver for kernel, meaning it is using kernel driver api, it was not driver for graphic card. Just a bit different way to load binary blob.

Dubious_Fart , (edited )

couldnt they do the thing where one team analyzes the leaked code and documents functions.

and a nother, clean room team, creates independent fresh code to achieve the same results as the original?

I mean, clean room activity like that has a strong precedent, going back to EA vs Sega at least. where EA stole a sega genesis dev kit, had one team document the functions, had another team independently create code to execute those functions,and made their own dev kid and put out non-approved sega carts (which is why the EA sega carts were taller and had the yellow plastic tag)

Sega sued and EA won due the clean room engineering and sega and EA came to some kind of sweetheart deal/comrpromise/settlement.

ImpossibleRubiksCube ,

Sounds a lot like what I call blackbox reverse engineering.

Dubious_Fart ,

I’ve always heard cleanroom, since you keep your coders completely isolated from the investigation team so there can be no question of code pollinating across, Just documentation to be reimplemented in a unique and different way.

ImpossibleRubiksCube ,

This whole process just backs up my notion that software patents are generally BS anyway, doesn’t it.

ReversalHatchery ,

That’s only for never generation cards, from 20xx series upwards I think.
But there’s still the proprietary driver for everything before that, including 1080 and such.

fruitycoder ,

I belive the NVK work is where that headed. The released code wasn’t up to snuff for true kernel intergration on it own, but offered a lot of insights for devs working on the problem.

AceFour ,
@AceFour@lemmy.world avatar

Perfect timing buying an AMD card yesterday to replace my old NVidia. Installed today, works like a champ. Issue resolved

jack ,

I’ve had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that’s being charitable.

psyq ,

What were some of the positives and negatives? Me personally, I have an RDNA2 card and got bitten by the gamma being too dark on hardware cursors (now resolved) and memory clock stuck at 1 GHz with some refresh rates (workaround is not to use refresh above ~144 Hz).

hschen ,
@hschen@sopuli.xyz avatar

I had an rx480 that worked fantasic until a firmware update made it start freezing my pc in games after suspend, solution was to rollback that package to an older one or never use suspend. I currently have a 6650xt and that just crashes whenever it wants to sometimes, works fine for a few months then decides to freeze my whole pc, playing bg3 atm it froze on me like 3 times already

psyq ,

Ah, I just upgraded from RX580 to 6600XT and haven’t had any freezes so far. On RX580 I sometimes had games that managed to freeze the system complete with random pixel noise and VRAM fragments shown on screen for seconds before it rebooted, but that was a long time back and only on bleeding-edge Mesa and Proton Experimental so my own fault.

Mesa 22 and 23 have been great so far. Maybe the firmware got more stable as well (I’m on Debian). I’d definitely recommend an RDNA2 card over any Nvidia today despite some of these hiccups.

The GTX 1070 in my other machine has given me more headaches (kernel modules not compatible with newer kernels, random Vulkan issues resulting in broken shaders showing nonsense like sparkles or black areas, etc.).

hschen ,
@hschen@sopuli.xyz avatar

My rx 480 worked way better in terms of not crashing, it did have graphical glitches in games but i guessed thats down to using Wine. Im also using Arch so maybe that in combination with the 6650 is making it more unstable, i gotta revert to using LTS kernel every few months to stop my system crashing randomly

CaptainAniki ,

deleted_by_author

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  • hschen ,
    @hschen@sopuli.xyz avatar

    I dont have the error message atm unfortunately cause to have more disk space i set my system to delete the logs quite often (ill probably revert this now as ive got way more space), but the one part i do have is this “GCVM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS” , thats 95% of the times the error that shows up whenever my pc freezes

    I looked it up and theres a bunch of mesa bugtracker issues listing the same error but honestly gpu driver stuff is so complex who knows whats really going on. baldurs gate 3 has crashed my whole system 3 times in 20-30 hours played, but except for that this past month ive also started getting blackscreens waking up from suspend sometimes on the non LTS kernel, luckily LTS fixes that for now, but not baldurs gate. The past year i’ve had this gpu theres been like 5 times where an update made the amd drivers unstable and ive had to change back to the LTS kernel to resolve it, maybe thats cause im using arch and stuff is more bleeding edge, but i havent had this many issues on my rx 480

    jack ,

    I’ve had over twenty crashes in BG3 at this point. Crashing soeems to be more prevalent in certain areas of the game - Grymforge, especially.

    hschen ,
    @hschen@sopuli.xyz avatar

    Is your entire system crashing?, for me i have to do a hard reboot once it happens. if it gets too bad i can always play the game in a windows VM as im playing with a friend and crashing all the time would be annoying

    jack ,

    On Linux it’s usually just X that completely crashes and I get kicked back to login, but I’ve had more than one hard crash.

    Windows will usually just crash to desktop and close any hardware-accelerated applications. Have also had the odd hard crash here.

    shmanio ,
    @shmanio@lemmy.world avatar

    So the cursor really was darker! It seemed that way after switching to a new laptop, but I wasn’t sure.

    jack , (edited )

    I have an RDNA3 card (upgraded from a 1080) and am running a multi-boot triple-head setup with mixed refresh rates (60, 144).

    Pros: most things work and work well. Installation of the physical card went without a hitch and it was relatively simple to install the drivers. No issues with web video, streaming, video encoding, or standard use.

    Cons: mesa, amdgpu, and Windows drivers are all lacking significant features - I am still unable to reliably control fan curves/speeds, clock speeds, etc. FreeSync is unusable as well. I have also been experiencing regular crashes on certain games (BG3, Apex Legends, etc.) and support has been nonexistent, despite similar complaints from other users. When the card does crash, it usually results in a ring timeout and an accompanied total session crash. AMD does not seem to be responsive to these issues in either their official forum or any other space where people are lodging complaints.

    The hardware seems fine; the drivers are the main issue. If I had to do it over again, I’d hold my nose and buy NVIDIA.

    EDIT: regarding the cursor issue, I’ve had to switch to a software cursor on Linux. The hardware cursor wasn’t showing up at all.

    Regarding game-specific issues, it seems a lot of problems stem from either a greedy low power mode or DirectX issues. I’ve had to set udev rules to alleviate some of my issues, but it hasn’t solved everything.

    EDIT 2: For anyone who comes across this post, it seems like the vast majority of the crashes on linux have been resolved as of kernel 6.7. Still lacking fine-grained control over fans/clocks, but stability seems much improved.

    Molecular0079 ,

    The ring issues are killing me right now on my Radeon 680M. This isn’t brought up enough when people talk about using AMD on Linux.

    Odd, Freesync should work for you though? What’s the issue you’re experiencing?

    Cornelius ,

    Agreed, AMD is not perfect, it’s still an arguably better experience than Nvidia, but it’s still not great at times

    Molecular0079 ,

    I don’t really see the better experience to be honest. Sure, AMD is a lot better on laptops, but on desktops I still prefer Nvidia. DLSS, raytracing, Optix, CUDA are all killer features that I need that AMD doesn’t really have an answer for. Sure Wayland is great, but it doesn’t outweigh the disadvantages of not having those technologies.

    Meanwhile both my AMD GPUs (Vega 64 and Radeon 680M) have been crash happy with gfx timeouts and ring0 errors.

    jack ,

    It was inconsistently causing gamma flickering with certain fullscreen applications. I haven’t seen it since disabling it on my monitor.

    juipeltje ,
    @juipeltje@lemmy.world avatar

    Are you using wayland by any chance? Freesync was also causing flickering when i was trying out wayland recently, so i guess i’ll be staying on xorg lol.

    jack ,

    Nope, X and i3 here.

    juipeltje ,
    @juipeltje@lemmy.world avatar

    Ah, that’s unfortunate, was worth a shot.

    Cornelius ,

    There’s been some oddball nasty issues with Mesa recently. SteamVR causing the driver to crash (and the display just won’t come back :/) H265 encoding causing driver crashing, just weird stuff. Simple things like Wayland work great, but if you have even a slightly unique workload you may run into major issues

    Fisch ,
    @Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’ve had lost of issues with SteamVR too but not with anything else. I suspect those issues are actually SteamVR’s fault tho because it’s pretty buggy on Linux in general.

    Cornelius ,

    Nah, straight up driver crashes are on Mesa’s side, not SteamVR’s. No userland software should be able to permanently bring down your driver.

    uis ,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    To be fair AMD closed-source drivers were much worse

    jack ,

    That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest

    Zucca ,

    Oh those times were truly horrible.

    Zucca ,

    Phoronix thinks I’m using ad blocker. In fact I’m not. I don’t have any kind of adblocker on my network… sigh

    fhein ,

    Which browser are you using? Perhaps it has some built in blocking

    Zucca ,

    Firefox 102.14.0esr.

    fhein ,

    I believe the standard amount of blocking in Firefox is:

    • Social media trackers
    • Cross-site cookies in all windows
    • Tracking content in Private Windows
    • Cryptominers
    • Fingerprinters

    Since the line between “ads” and “tracking everything people do on the internet” has been pretty blurred, perhaps the anti-adblock checker triggers on any of those.

    Phenomenalpooran ,
    @Phenomenalpooran@kerala.party avatar

    Meanwhile me using ublock adblocker and flawlessly reading the content on firefox

    Madex ,

    So what does that mean for me on Arch, how will it affect me?

    ELI5?

    bouh ,

    I don’t use arch but I would guess you should avoid kernel 6.6 if you are using an nvidia card until we get more info about that.

    Molecular0079 ,

    If they don’t fix it before 6.6 comes out on Arch, you may have to use the LTS kernel.

    librechad ,

    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!

    TheFriendlyArtificer ,

    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.

    uis ,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    Noveau supports 2080 since 2019.

    nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html

    ultra ,

    Nouveau is slow

    Saik0Shinigami ,
    @Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com avatar

    Slow is better than broken.

    ladyanita22 ,

    That’s unrelated to this.

    uis ,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    It seems they just fixed symbol_get() so GPL-only symbols are avaliable to GPL driver

    merthyr1831 ,

    Intentionally pushing changes that could brick a bunch of systems over legal complaints is imo reckless.

    This should be a last resort move. Has the Linux foundation started chasing nVidia over this? because it sounds like this is coming out of nowhere.

    m_f ,

    Get pissed at NVIDIA. They’re the problem.

    uis ,
    @uis@lemmy.world avatar

    But when NVIDIA or gamedevs do it, it is different.

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