nVidia Posts First Linux Graphics Drivers for Opteron

Brian Stretch writes "nVidia posted the first publically available Linux graphics drivers for the Athlon 64 (aka Hammer series) on their website today. There are updates for the lesser x86 and IA64 architectures as well. Now, if only the Athlon 64 and Opteron boards and CPUs themselves were publically available, or is AMD's developer program sending out more of these things than I know? (If so, gimme!) I guess I'll have to tough it out with my mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation for now (heh heh heh)." In related news, an anonymous reader writes "The new AMD Opteron servers designed by Newisys are using embedded Linux for system management. This allows remote management via web browser or ssh to examine processor state, switch power on/off, regulate processor power states and fan speeds, update BIOS firmware, etc. See the docs for more info!"

Comments

Re:Drivers

[joshki]

If you don't like their drivers, don't use them. If you're that much of an open source zealot, I'm surprised you would tarnish your image by loading such horrible, closed source drivers by the great satan of video cards.
I mean, come on! If Nvidia's drivers really make your kernel insecure and unstable, you'd be a fool to load them, right? Why not just buy an ATI and have done with it? Having an insecure and unstable kernel would be a pretty serious problem to me -- I think I'd be willing to settle for an inferior card (what's that? oh -- somebody's telling me that ATI now has the best, not the worst 3d card on the market right now -- and their drivers are open source, right?).
Nvidia doesn't care about the people who have a religious hatred of anything they can't look at the source to. Neither does anyone else outside that group of people. Fortunately for all of us, they choose to ignore your zealotry and still make the drivers available free of charge for the rest of us who live in the real world.

While I agree that in principle, open source is better, we're talking about a driver for a video card here. Even Alan Cox says (right here on slashdot, no less) he can't think of a good reason for them to open source their drivers -- I'm not going to try to pretend that I know more about kernel development than he does -- and the more people whine and moan that they won't, the more radical and ridiculous the whole open source movement seems.