Quoting: Purple Library GuyI've never talked to Mussolini, and yet I feel fairly confident in calling him a jerk and reject the idea that it is cheap to do so.

If people's actions and statements are on the public record one can often be quite justified in forming judgements about their character without actually meeting them. I don't personally know whether the information about NVidia management is such as to justify such a judgement, but it certainly could be; insisting personal contact is needed is just mistaken.
And actually contrariwise, it's also possible to have met and talked to someone and not have the information you would need to determine whether they're a jerk. So personal contact is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge of jerk-hood.

Well, yes and no ;)
Your statement is technically completely correct and you have effectively proven that my statement is wrong. :)

That said, my opinion is still that I grant people the advantage if I don't know them. Lets say "innocent until proven guilty". Furthermore I draw quite a clear distinction between judging actions of someone "his actions are jerky" versus judging the person itself "he is a jerk". Actually I'm quite sensible on this, may be that's why my reactions here were quite strong. I do agree that there are actual jerks out there that deserve to be called jerks. Though I'm pretty convinced that the typical manager of a company is doing the best in his capabilities to help his company and his team to prosper. There are most likely jerks among them, but as stated, I prefer to grant advantage and prefer not to judge the person based on actions that seem jerky to me or anybody else. I'm fine with calling some action jerky, but I prefer to keep the respect of the actual person until there is really no way to misjudge like with your example.

Related to that a question, how offending is the word "jerk"? I, non native English speaker, would give it lets say a 6 on a scale from 1 (like you would talk with kids when they behave somewhat clumsy) to 10 (very offending). Is this correct?

Spoiler, click me

On a side note: I understand that your example was to effectively highlight your point and not to compare a random NVidia manager with Mussolini. With the last US election I decided for myself to skip pseudo comparisons with actual criminals of mankind. During that time you could read quite some columns of people that compared the new US administration with the German Nazi regime. As a response to that I read in another column that no matter how "evil" one thinks of the new Potus, he is not and will most likely never be a mass murderer of millions of people. That is a completely different magnitude. Any comparison like this will not paint a better picture of what to expect in the future but will only soften/weaken the crimes of the Nazi regime and hurt the victims of that time.
I decided for myself to keep that in mind. As stated, I did not read that comparison in your statement, but I thought I would share this.

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Quoting: mahagrPS. Regarding to my first comment on nVidia Linux driver quality.. That came from an nVidia employee who I know. I have also worked in a few companies where the main reason not to release source code was a bad code quality (not because of bad workers but because of there was no time to polish the code).

Thanks for the additional information. I read your posting as the "usual" NVidia bashing, though with this extra information your statements sounds much more objective. Technical dept may indeed be one of many reasons.

I apologize if my initial response was somewhat offending.

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Back on topic: "Better pipeline creation performance when there is a cache hit" sounds indeed interesting, I would be curious to know how much performance win it yields in real life scenarios.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: jensNo NVidia (or Intel/AMD whatever) manager has ever beaten me, so I really feel no need to call one ever a jerk :). I'd state that I don't agree, vote with my wallet and just move on.

That's not going to wrok as in "let's accept this jerk behavior". If you don't like criticism of Nvidia's bad practices, you can skip reading it :)

Actually there is nothing wrong with reading fair and objective criticism of NVidia or whatever vendor/organization. Name calling is something else imho. I interpreted you initial posting as the latter one.

But yeah, blocking users or skip reading GOL is indeed a valid alternative too. :)

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: jensSo I'm a jerk too because I don't like name calling and respect others decisions, even if I don't agree?

That's a shaky moral stance I'd say ("I respect any decisions no matter what they are"). I don't respect decisions that are done for anti-competitive purposes, which is the case here.

No NVidia (or Intel/AMD whatever) manager has ever beaten me, so I really feel no need to call one a jerk :). I'd state that I don't agree, vote with my wallet and just move on.

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Quoting: ShmerlWhat I find strange on the other hand, are attempts to whitewash it, especially coming from Linux users who should know better.

So I'm a jerk too because I don't like name calling and respect others decisions, even if I don't agree?

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Quoting: ShmerlHere is a relevant quote from Ilia Mirkin, one of the developers of Nouveau:

Reclocking must be done in firmware. NVIDIA now requires signed firmware to access a lot of useful functionality. They will never release the firmware in a nice redistributable manner, so the avenues for implementing it become much harder:

(a) Figure out a way to extract the firmware from their released drivers (harder than it sounds) and how to operate it to do the things we need
(b) Find a bug in their firmware to use to load our own code into the secure environment (any such exploit would be patched, but once we have a version of the firmware that's exploitable with signatures, we can just keep loading it instead of whatever's the latest)

Of course all that gets us is ... firmware which can toggle stuff GPU-side. Then we have to develop the scripts to actually perform the reclocking to pass on to the firmware. This is the hard part -- due to the wide variety of hardware, ram chips, etc there can be a lot of variation in those scripts. A single developer might only have 1% of the boards out there, but by fuzzing the vbios and seeing how the blob driver reacts, we can get much more significant coverage.

As part of the signed-everything logic, the blob driver now also verifies that the VBIOS hasn't been tampered with, which means that developing reclocking scripts will require different techniques.

Moral of the story... just get an Intel or AMD board and move on with life. NVIDIA has no interest in supporting open-source, and so if you want to support open-source, pick a company that aligns with this.

Once again, feel free to disagree what Nvidia is doing and be happy with your choice for your preferred hardware vendor.
I made my point that I would refrain from name calling, especially if one has never spoken to one of their (management) people.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: jensSo you had an interview with somebody from the Nvidia management?

It's not developers' decision, or you expected otherwise for some reason?

You called their management people jerks, so I guess you ever talked to one of them and can justify your statement? See above, if you don't like their decisions, just fine and you are rightful to do that. But calling someone a jerk you have never talked to (my assumptions) is just cheap and below every level.

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I get that people are not happy with the way NVidia is handling things for Linux, but name calling and assuming that their engineers are amateurs is just cheap talk and usually gets you nothing. They do things the way it fits for them, for quite some people this workflow and choices seems to work too. If you don't like their way, just move on.

Back on topic: "Better pipeline creation performance when there is a cache hit" sounds indeed interesting, I would be curious to know how much performance win it yields in real life scenarios.

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Quoting: ShmerlBecause it's Nvidia. Their managements are jerks and don't get what open source collaboration is.

So you had an interview with somebody from the Nvidia management?

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