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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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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
Phoronix comments are always wild
Remind me of those who supports Red Hat for blocking sources and telling those who downstreams "code thief with no contribution to open source" lol.
I did not “support” Red Hat but I was pretty vocally in opposition to most of the reaction to it. I found the willful inaccuracy and even flagrant dishonestly from the “community” close to disgusting at times. So, you may be including people like me in your comment.
In this case, it seems very straight-forward that NVIDIA is in the wrong. Not just ethically but legally as well.
My own read is that some of the people slamming Red Hat are defending NVIDIA now. Coming away from that experience, I the over-arching principle that many adhere to most is simply whatever is best for them. Red Hat was wrong because people felt entitled to something. The kernel devs are wrong ( and NVIDIA right ) because people feel entitled to something.