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GPL'ed Drivers For NVIDIA nForce Ethernet Devices
An anonymous reader writes "Manfred Spraul has released a GPLed driver for the ethernet device found in motherboards based on the Nvidia Nforce/Nforce2/Nforce3 chipsets. Drivers provided by Nvidia on the other hand, are closed. Andrew Morton has integrated this driver in the 2.6.9-mm2 release of his mm tree. And if you are using a 2.4x kernel, you may want to check out this post."
Its great that drivers are available for this new chipset, but is this really worth being a /. topic???
Wow, I didn't know the kernel left -test status and increased 9 versions since yesterday. Andrew Morton must be on top of things to get a -mm patch out that quick, too.
;)
Good job editors.
This is great - now I just need to get the XFree86 nv driver to play nice with my nForce2 w/ integrated video, and I'll be able to run a non-tainted kernel.
:(
Has anybody else had problems with X on such a board? There's apparantly a bug somewhere in the rendering code that crops up because the nv driver doesn't use hardware acceleration as much as the nvidia driver. I filed bug #811 on bugzilla, but no resolution yet
If I understand correctly, the Ethernet is built right onto the mainboard, with the chipset.
Audio processing went down this route a while back. Old soundcards aren't needed when the functionality was built into the chipset.
For high speed networking (like GigE), avoiding the PCI bus can potentially be faster.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
A good analogy would be there are 5 people all trying to call one guy, and Mr. Ethernet is one of the people. By being in the chipset and not on the bus, he doesn't have to keep trying to call and getting a busy signal, he can just say his message. This is because Mr. CPU could talk to 3 or 4 people at a time (he's that fast), but the phone (PCI bus) only has one line. He just skipps the problem.
OK, that's a bit simplified, but the fact is that not waiting on bus contention is good. The ethernet doesn't have to wait for/fight against the sound card, the tv tuner, and the add in raid controller.
On a side note, while NE2000 is a standard, it's for ISA, and as far as I know the NE2000 PCI standard never got big. I could be wrong. And even then, that's like using VESA to controll your GeForce FX video card. You can do it, but you could lose alot of the performance and features that you paid for because VESA doesn't know about 'em.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The transactions occur across a much faster interconnect (which can go by different names according to the chipset design), but it's still linear and you still access resources in a PCI-like manner. Just faster.
The only bus that was different was ISA.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
How much I care on the Y, title index on the X.
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GPL'ed Drivers for NVIDIA nForce...
Way to get my hopes up, Slashdot. I guess my kernel will continue to be tainted.
Reverse engineering the binary driver for the ethernet chip and making a GPL'd source tree for anyone to review is great. :-)
However, I don't think that it offers much except for hypothetical multiplatform portability. Without any specs it would be extremely hard to modify the driver and it's even harder to add new features.
Now I just hope someone has the time and skills to reverse engineer the NVidia video driver and GL libraries so that my 2.6.0-test9-mm2 kernel wouldn't give me pages of tracebacks every time I launch X using the nvidia driver.