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 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

238 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] 307 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (54 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] 81 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Then isn't the correct solution to sue Nvidia?

It's a legal issue with a legal solution.

[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You dont sue someone with deeper pockets than you.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago

This is what's wrong in so many countries.

[–] Zardoz 86 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (23 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] 96 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Phoronix comments are always wild

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year 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.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (36 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] 74 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If they have to rely on obscuring stuff on their user side to keep their secret sauce, I'd say they're bad at it.

This is coming from someone who deals with APIs for living.

[–] wmassingham 19 points 1 year ago

They don't have to do it well, just enough to satisfy the lawyers.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

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[–] AceFour 63 points 1 year ago (24 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Would having their own distro even help? It seems like working around this would require forking from Linux at a lower level, and even that would only circumvent technical (rather than copyright) barriers.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There's an interesting discussion about the whole topic on the Phoronix forums about this. Some people claim that removing them and Nvidia's current behavior is a DMCA violation:

The kernel includes IP only licensed under GPLv2.
While a module linked against the kernel isn't necessarily a derived work which in turn would need to be licensed GPLv2 as well, there are specific interfaces that are meant for internal use and by their very nature would make your work derived if using them. These are the interfaces marked EXPORT_GPL_ONLY.
Using these interfaces with a module not licensed GPLv2, you taint the kernel and violate the licensing.
Removing the check, you aren't necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you're removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.

It also raises the question why you'd remove checks that only prevent a possible GPLv2 violation if you're not violating GPLv2 anyways as Nvidia claims.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's just such a great image!

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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