The Linux Foundation is trying to push Nvidia to make its graphics drivers more accessible. The Foundation's beef: closed drivers make Linux look unstable to end users.
Though a statement issued Monday does not cite Nvidia by name, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair James Bottomley cited Nvidia in a phone interview. "My intent is to point out the problems Nvidia has been causing themselves with their binary-only (drivers)," he said. "They are certainly one of the few companies sticking to a binary-only strategy." Binary-only means the drivers are essentially closed.
"We...consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable," the official statement begins. "Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors."
But Bottomley gets much more specific than this. "Their (Nvidia's) binary module is one of the top causes of kernel crashes, which makes Linux look bad," he said.
"Nvidia does a reasonable job of Q-and-A-ing (quality assurance) of a certain number of configurations but the problem is that their configurations (are) a lot less than what's actually out there on the market," Bottomley said.
In the past, Intel had been the target of open-source advocates, but the chipmaker is now a leading open-source code provider. And graphics-chip supplier ATI Technologies, acquired in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices, is open source too, Bottomley said. He did, however, cite some outstanding problems with an ATI "FireGL" driver.
"It's basically a reflection of the fact that graphics is one of the most complex and most difficult areas of technology that sits in a computer nowadays," he added.
Nvidia says it provides a high-quality Linux driver. "Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver," Nvidia said in a response to an e-mail query.
But the graphics chip maker defends its binary-only policy. "Nvidia's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software," according to Nvidia.
"We try to make things open source whenever it makes sense," Nvidia said. The company cited examples here and here.
"To assume that customers won't have access to open-source updates from Linux kernel.org if they use closed source modules is not correct," Nvidia said. "Nvidia's Linux graphics driver kernel module is structured so that all the code that is Linux-specific is provided in source code as a 'kernel interface layer.' When customers upgrade their kernel to get the latest from kernel.org, they have everything they need to rebuild (and even patch, if necessary) the Nvidia's driver's kernel interface layer."
See: Linux developers petition for open Linux kernel drivers and ZDNet report here.
One year ago, Linux kernel development was almost predominately Red Hat's game. Today, Red Hat's lead has dipped considerably, according to a report just released by the Linux Foundation.
Red Hat continues to contribute/sponsor 11.2 percent of the Linux kernel's development, down from 14.4 percent in 2007, while Novell has jumped from an anemic 3.6 percent in 2007 to a robust 8.9 percent in 2008.
(Credit:
Linux Foundation)
Perhaps not surprisingly, Novell's share of the Linux market has grown considerably in that same time, with Novell reporting a 200 percent increase in its Linux business over the past year.
So, while Novell crows about its rise in revenue market share in the Linux market, it's the company's development market share that I view as the true leading indicator of its business. Linux sales are up 200 percent, while Linux development is up 250 percent. See a correlation?
In open source, it's all about "owning" the source of code, not necessarily the source code.
Importantly, it's not just Novell and Red Hat who contribute. As detailed statistics demonstrate, the Linux kernel is perhaps the world's largest, most distributed development effort, reflecting its increasing importance to an ever-widening array of disparate parties:
... Read moreA Linux kernel programmer has got Linux running on a logical domain, Sun Microsystems' term for an operating system partition on its newer UltraSparc-based servers.
"I just recently finished writing preliminary support for Linux to run as a guest under Sun LDoms," said programmer David Miller in a blog posting Wednesday.
Sun servers can be sliced into smaller pieces in a variety of ways. First came hardware partitions, which electrically isolated groups of processors so separate operating systems could run on each. Next came containers, which are independent slices of a single instance of Sun's Solaris operating system. Sun's newest partitioning technology, the intermediate-level logical domains (LDoms), lets as many as 32 operating systems run atop a single UltraSparc T1 processor.
The software is still raw, though.
"Things are in a bit of a rough state, but you can play around with installing a basic Linux guest with Solaris running the control node. There is a lot of missing functionality, and several major problems to resolve," Miller said.
Sun is trying to encourage the development of Linux on its newer Sparc-based servers, but Solaris remains the company's primary operating system focus.
Robert Love, a high-profile Linux kernel programmer and chief architect of Novell's Linux Desktop project, has left the company for Google.
Love announced his departure from Novell on Friday via his blog, then followed up likewise Monday with news of his new employer. Love said he'll join Google's Open Source Program Office after a few weeks off finishing a new book to be published by O'Reilly and Associates: Linux System Programming: Talking Directly to the Kernel and C Library.
Love's departure takes place a few months after another high-profile open source programmer, Jeremy Allison, also left Novell for Google.
Allison blamed Novell's patent pact with Microsoft as a reason for his departure, but Love apparently doesn't fit into the same category. "The Microsoft/Novell agreement was not the motivation behind my departure," Love said in a posting on the Slashdot "news for nerds" site.
Google also employs Andrew Morton, another top Linux programmer.
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