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Cake day: July 5th, 2024

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  • Nvidia was “forced” to integrate Linux into its ecosystem

    100% bullcrap.

    Nvidia’s servers for data processing have always run Linux. And you know what those servers run? It’s not Windows, that’s for sure. So why would they write multiple versions of a driver for the same hardware interface? Their servers use the same drivers that you would use for gaming on a Linux desktop system.

    In fact, no version of Windows is supported on their DGX servers, and AFAIK you can’t even install Windows on it (even if you managed, it wouldn’t be usable).

    Long story short, a vendor we were working with (about 6 or 7 years ago now), was working on their Linux version of their SDK. We wanted to do some preliminary testing on Nvidia’s new T4s that at this point were only available via Nvidia’s testing datacenter (which we had access to).

    During a call with some of the Nvidia engineers I had to ask the awkward question of “any chance there’s a Windows server we can test on?”. I knew it was a cringe question and I died a little during the 10 second silence until one of the Nvidia guys finally replied with “no one uses Windows for this stuff”. And he said it slowly like the reply to such a question needed to go slow to be understood, because who else would ask that question unless you’re slow in the head?

    Nvidia has always been hostile to the Linux community or negligent to say the least

    People say “hostile”, but I think a better word is arrogant. They wanted to force the industry to use their own implementations they owned or pioneered like egl-stream instead of open standards. But AMD and Intel have proven that open source graphics drivers not only work, but benefit from being open so that the community can scratch their own itches and fix issues faster.