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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!"
Are these really the first Linux graphics drivers for Hammer? Surely XFree86 and other graphics systems like the kernel framebuffer are already being ported?
It sounds like this is just the first Hammer release of Nvidia's proprietary, binary-only drivers for cards they won't release specs to. Useful, but hardly any more significant than some other random piece of proprietary software being ported.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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!
What's next? ATI doing Natalie Portman/hot grits drivers?
oh do shut up
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I guess I'll have to tough it out with my mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation for now (heh heh heh).
I don't think anyone here cares how big your e-penis is, and no... I won't stroke it.
Not to be a zealot, this is an honest question: Why dont they open-source their linux drivers? They are giving them away for free anyway, and i would think it could only increase the attraction to their products for some ppl. I can't think of any reason why not to.
"tough it out with my mere dual AMD 2400 (heh heh heh)"...
I havent gotten laid since October of '67. (sob sob sob)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
There are Linux drivers for 3 different platforms intel based platforms now. There are OS X drivers for PowerPC. Why can't Nvidia merge some of that code to give us Linux/PPC Nvidia drivers. A lack of a good graphics system for Linux/PPC is the major factor holding it back. Hopefully these things will change once IBM's GPuL hits the shelves.
Nvidia - Random Video Card Driver?!
That's like saying that Microsoft is porting some random operating system to the Hammer architecture.
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
You had sex with a mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation?
With the new drivers I didn't see any performance gains with Quake3 timedemos or Ut2k3, with a ti4200.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I guess I'll have to tough it out with my mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation for now (heh heh heh).
[sigh] You're bragging about a single dual Athlon machine when I've got a beowulf cluster of those??..
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
To clarify AMD's processor naming scheme for those who haven't been keeping up with the Joneses, the Athlon 64 is AMD's 64-bit desktop and mobile CPU, while the Opteron is AMD's 64-bit server and workstation CPU. Both utilize the x86-64 architecture, which is essentially an extension of the existing x86 instruction set for 64 bits.
A few key differences between the two are that the Opteron will be multiprocessor-enabled and have three HyperTransport pipes (each providing a theoretical 6.4GB/s of throughput) versus one in the Athlon 64. The Opteron will also have more on-die L2 cache (1MB and 2MB are being talked about right now), and will draw quite a bit more power (90W+ vs. ~65W for the Athlon 64).
From the specfile of Mandrake's rpm for XFree86:w eb.cgi/SPE CS/XFree86/XFree86.spec
http://cvs.mandrakesoft.com/cgi-bin/cvs
%ifarch x86_64
#define XF86CardDrivers mga fbdev vga ati savage nv glint vesa \
DevelDrivers XF86OSCardDrivers XF86ExtraCardDrivers
%endif
And part of the changelog:
* Mon Nov 04 2002 Gwenole Beauchesne 4.2.1-6mdk
- Build more drivers for x86-64
So I guess those drivers have been built for at least a month now in Mandrake's XFree86 rpm on x86-64.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
They are not the first. I saw at least one Opteron-based 1U system running XFree in the AMD booth at SC2002, just a few weeks ago. No idea what the video/driver subsystems were like (maybe fbdev?).
Wouldn't be surprised if this was the first x86-64 driver to support hardware accelleration though.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
And ya just know he does no 'work' on his workstation, or even have a clue what it's capable of - because he somehow thinks he needs an Opteron on release day.
*Clue stick* Opteron is not going to make either of the 2 games for linux any faster.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've had absolutely no lockups in X over the past six or so months. The drivers have come a looong way in stablity from the past. I remember about a year and a half ago, I used to get random lockups all the time, even after messing with many things like AGP 4x->2x, sidebanding off, fastwrites off, nvagpagpgart, etc.. But recently, it works fine pretty much out of the box.
binary-only drivers for cards they won't release specs to
Whinge.
They can't. There is IP involved they don't own, both from S3 and SGI.
Not that this hasn't been said everytime some jackass whined about the same thing. And not that it'll help morons like you who don't have a clue how business works understand this little concept.
I don't work for Nvidia, but if they're like most high end competitive products, there are probably trade secrets involved in their designs. Trade secrets are generally things that might not be patentable, but nonetheless are critical to the technical lead your product might have. The fact that they may not be patentable is why companies try to keep them secret for as long as possible.
In the case of NVidia, it's entirely possible that their driver code would necessarily reveal some of their hardware's trade secrets.
The irony here is that most Slashdotters probably don't have anything big against the need for hardware companies to keep trade secrets in general, but when this necessitates closed-sourcing some of their driver code, everybody screams foul.
I'm all in favor of OSS, and I use OSS for everything I do unless there's no option, but put yourself in their shoes for a moment - if you happened to make the world's fastest consumer video card at some point in time, would you be in a hurry to release details that would likely help your competitors to catch up faster?
You might ask "then how come company X can release open source drivers or specs and NVidia can't?", and this would be a valid question. I don't know the answer, but there are several possibilites. One is that the specs they release to the OSS community don't really have *all* of the details (which would mean their proprietary drivers would always be a little bit faster). Another possibility is that their design is such that the driver code or programming specs don't reveal as many trade secrets.
UK-Smiley (ironicon) £:-)
Hmm, on my screen that looks like a smiley with a bad toupee. Would that be the Marv Alberticon, or the Bill Shatnericon? Or would it be a Ted Koppelicon, being quite obvious about it being there, but insisting it's not a pound symbol on your head and just having a bad haircut for years?
They said the first public release of thier drivers. Past instances of SC have generally shown future work (as in beta stuff), not current tech. I'm willing to bet that there are other graphics drivers from other vendors that are still internal.
Plus if you don't know what video/driver subsystem how do you know it was not nvidia (and hence, still the first)?
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Is a video card manufacturer's hardware driver a trade secret?
How is this possible? The only way that we can consider software to be a trade secret is if we allow ourselves to believe that the closed source model is good for all. Is the layout of what's under the hood of a Toyota a trade secret? No? Oh. I guess software is more special. We should be happy sticking stuff in one side and getting stuff out the other without having a clue as to what's going on in the middle, even though there is absolutely no reason (in an ideal world) not to share that information.
All that open source advocates are asking for is a chance to better use the equipment that they have purchased. It's still possible to charge however much you want for the driver+card or whatever your business model requires, but, in the long run, the open source dogma says that it's better to let people play with the stuff they've bought.
The only reason why I say that you may be missing the point about open source is because I read a thread where you kept saying, "What's the point? I mean, what's the point? Tell me, what's the point?"
I gave you an example of a direct consequence of "the point" and you say you already know this? Why ask, then?
As for your quip about open-sourcing the plans for building jets, I would think that if it were possible for a heretofore unknown group of non-jet-designing-as-a-full-time-job US citizens (say, graduate students in aerospace engineering, for example) to improve on current plans then we would benefit from those people working on it in their free time, don't you? The DOD could then spend their money on actually building the equipment to make these fancy new designs. This would be the new race.
All open source people generally want is to get as many capable people as possible to attack any and all current, and sometimes unforeseen, problems. This is a good thing. There's not really much bad to say about it. If a couple stupid paradigms have to be changed on the way, so be it.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
He didn't say Athlon XP, I just finished building a dual Athlon MP 2400+ myself. The mother board is a Tyan Thunder K7X Pro, power supply is an Antec True550 EPS12V, and memory is 4 sticks of Corsair's 1GB 266MHz ECC registered memory. I also have Adaptec's 0 channel RAID controller, and 8 18GB Seagate 15K.3 RPM SCA drives. Using built in ATI RageXL video and gigabit LAN. All in a Lian Li PC-626SCA case.
The machine is rock solid from what I can tell, and blazingly fast, and I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it.
So I'm guessing you're either a beta-tester for iD's upcoming Doom 3 game, or a java developer?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.