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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!"
Come on y'all--there's been more dicussion about this guy's rig than about the drivers. I'm sorry if you're bitter that your box is less than state of the art, but dems da breaks, kids. In the meantime, kudos to NVidia for getting these out before anyone needed them.
Don't Panic!
um...quake 3 :), ok, so it's old...but still. we put the only linux specific game maker (loki) out of business by NOT buying the games for linux. i doubt any one else will follow the lead any time soon. but it's probably safe to say that Doom 3 will be out on linux...so who'll need anything else anyway? :)
The first "officially" released drivers by nVidia may pragmaticlly seem insignificant, but in the big picture this is a big success for the linux community as a whole
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
Can you come up with any reason why they should? They certainly won't make any money from it. If anything, their competitors will gain value by seeing exactly how their hardware layer works.
What benefit would it give you? Oh, now you can see how someone writes video drivers? Well, nVidia is in the market to educate people. They're in the market to make video cards.
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If it were really that easy to reverse-engineer a binary driver as complex as Nvidia's, then their competitors would have better drivers. As it is, driver quality is a big point in favor of buying Nvidia cards. ATI, in particular, could learn a thing or two from them.
This comment is posted every single time anyone mentions anything about Nvidia, and it's starting to get old. Nvidia can't open-source the drivers, due to licensing issues. Also, why do you honestly care? Nvidia is supporting the linux (and now the FreeBSD) crowd just as well as they are the windows crowd -- personally, as long as they keep releasing drivers, I don't care whether they open-source or not.
Insightful, indeed.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
I don't care how many times this is mentioned. Every time something comes up about the nVidia cards, I hope we get a whole flood of people posting about this problem. I don't really care what excuse they have for not having Open Source drivers. I only care that they aren't.
It makes my kernel unsafe and insecure whenever I load the non-Open Source drivers into it. I end up suspecting them first in every case of strange system behavior because I know they haven't undergone peer review. I am extremely distrustful of them, and if I had any other choice that was within 75% of the performance and used Open Source drivers, I'd jump to it in an instant, even if it was %20 more in price.
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