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nVidia Unified Drivers Including Linux/FreeBSD
Screaming Lunatic writes "nVidia has decided to include Linux and FreeBSD in their Unified Driver Architecture and offer more tech support. Sounds like great news for Linux developers and users if Linux drivers are released at the same time as Windows drivers. (The NV30 emulation driver for Linux was made available about 3 months later than for Windows) The big push is probably from big studios that use Linux tools such as Film Gimp. More info here ." Added by Heunique: You might want to look here if you are using the latest development kernel.
The FreeBSD drivers have been out for about a month. The news is that the drivers are part of the official driver package now and will be released with the regularity of the Windows drivers.
Derek Greene
They're arguably equal or (in most cases) superior to most other cards
They've always supported Linux
Installing a Geforce 4200i in my Mandrake box was a snap last year ...
BTW - it was interesting to see the comment by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games (Unreal), who was applauding nVidia for their support of Linux. If we could only get all the gaming companies to pay as much attention to the Linux platform as the consoles or the PC, I could see the entire desktop shifting towards Linux next. Ok, well maybe I'm just dreaming ...
NVidia have been "supporting" Linux for a few years so far. Unfortunately, their drivers have been closed-source, binary-only -- a fact which has caused quite a bit of grief for kernel developers, since it makes it impossible to trace the cause for a kernel oops when using the NVidia drivers.
I did a search through the article for the word "open". I found "OpenGL", but no "open source". So, IMHO, this news release is just PR bullshit (apart from the BSD bit, which may be new) -- there appears to be no move whatsoever for NVidia to open up their source.
I wonder what implications the continuing close-source approach of NVidia will have, what with the upcoming abolition of binary-only modules in Linux kernel 2.6?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
NVidia still hasn't realeased a set of drivers that work with the 2.5.x development kernel which, unfortunately, I must use day-to-day -- albeit on a non-production machine.
I won't criticize NVidia too harshly for distributing binary-only drivers -- I understand their reasoning and I accept it. I only wish that since we can't have the source, they'd support us developers with beta drivers that work with the 2.5 series kernel. It'd be nice to have an idea of what and how things will work in kernel-next.
It's actually not their fault. IIRC, their driver code contains a lot of code from other companies that is copyrighted or under very restrictive licensing. This, unfortunately is very bad for people who would like to see the driver code fully released. It'll never happen without all the contributing corporations signing off on it. I support them because they do the best they can do to support the linux community. They also just happen to do it far better than any other GPU manufacturer ever has.
I have a Geforce2 Dual card which I have been trying to get seperate X screens on so I can play OpenGL games (i.e Terminus, UT2003, etc) on one screen and put XAWTV on the second to watch TV (i.e. Simpsons & Samurai Jack). Well, the new driver supports that...
Here are the highlights of the new driver:
Linux Display Driver
Linux Graphics Driver Download
Version: 1.0-4191
Operating System: Linux IA32
Release Date: December 11, 2002
Release Highlights:
* OpenGL 1.4 with CineFX architecture support
* Support for AGP 8x and nForce2 IGP
* Support for index overlays on Quadro4 to support legacy applications
* Support for separate X screens on nView enabled GPUs
* GLX 1.3 support
Yup, seperate X screens now with the dualhead cards. Hopefully I can put this to the test in the next few days.
BTW, Don't try this on Windows kids....
Jeff
"Installing nVidia drivers means changing open source operating system into open-closed source hybride. Keep in mind, that you have choice with other cards, like ATI or Matrox."
You don't have ANY choice in this matter, unless you want to use single monitor without 3D:
1. ATIs drivers are closed source
2. There are open-sourced drivers for ATI cards, but even a 1.5 years old Radeon 8500 is poorly supported. Don't even dream about playing games with those drivers and new hardware.
3. Even Matrox Parhelia 2D-drivers are closed source. There aren't any 3D-Linux drivers for Parhelia.
Visit www.minion.de for some patches that will let you use the drivers under 2.5.x (worked great for me under 2.5.50). The author of the patches worked at nVidia as an intern doing work on the Linux/FreeBSD drivers.
Vote for global prefs bug
The Weather Channel-sponsored drivers are doing great, I use them since August and now they are basically ready - see http://dri.sf.net/. The only disadvantage with respect to closed source drivers was inability to use some patented techniques (in particular texture compression), since the patent owner (S3?) did not grant (yet) the rights to use them in the driver. Otherwise, there are much more convienent to use than Nvidia drivers I have been forced to use on my other box. And more stable, too.