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NVIDIA Releases New Linux Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the proprietary dept.

mlmitton writes "NVIDIA just released new Linux drivers (1.0-5328). But the early reports by users are less than encouraging. People are weighing in with mostly bad news about how well these new drivers work. Some people are finding that Neverwinter Nights doesn't work and they're reverting to the old drivers (4496). I spent a few long hours recently trying to get the old drivers to work with Fedora Core 1 so I'm going to hold off on these new ones."

31 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. new drivers by AndreyF · · Score: 1, Insightful

    this seems to be pretty common. newest drivers, like any kind of software, may take a little while to become fully stable.

  2. Good job NVIDIA by after · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good, they haven't updated the Linux drivers for a while.

    I am happy to see that NVIDIA is even supporting Linux, unlike some Microsoft-only "partners" that do not care for Professor Joe.

    I also like that they include some source code, so I can change what I want. However, I would like to see the full source code to the drivers (???, sorry if I am wrong here) just for the pleasure of how they do all the neat tricks they do.

    Good job NVIDIA, thanks for the drivers.

    1. Re:Good job NVIDIA by after · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Read every ``Unsupported'' link in the Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO

    2. Re:Good job NVIDIA by Cyclops · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Not true at all. The closed portion of the nVidia drivers is only the X driver. The kernel module is and has always been open source, and you can compile it for whatever version of the kernel you wish (assuming the kernel module interface hasn't changed drastically, of course).


      This is a completely bogus statement. More than so, it's so false that it reeks of lack of either knowledge or good intentions.

      In order to work around module versioning limitations or to give a chance for people with different kernels than the officially supported, nVidia provides a wrapper source that is what is compiled as a module, all the intelligence being in the binary only driver that is injected by this "open source" code.

      If you are, as I hope, only talking without a clue, then it stands as one more evidence that nVidia succeeds in convincing people that they don't provide binary modules.

      Go ahead and type: /sbin/lsmod

      Do you like that Tainted flag? That's a signal of how "open source" that driver is.

      I just hope you don't ever bother the Linux developers with weird problems on your system, specifically those involving 'oops'es and whatnot. Not only you'll be wasting their time, but also you might get silence, pity, mocking, or other reactions.
    3. Re:Good job NVIDIA by latroM · · Score: 2, Insightful

      NVIDIA doesn't really care about the users of Free Software. If they did they would tell us how to code a free driver for their graphics board by providing a good documentation.

  3. Gee... by JoeLinux · · Score: 2, Insightful

    and people wonder why ATI suddenly comes out ahead of NVidia. I know *I'm* getting an ATI 9800XT when I build my next system.

    You know, I wish hardware manufacturers would learn that they have nothing to lose by releasing the specs on the system. We Linux users can't pirate hardware. We still have to buy it. Oh well...

    1. Re:Gee... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
      We Linux users can't pirate hardware.

      Speak for yourself, but don't include me in your 'we' when you infer that Linux users are 'pirates'. I don't copy software illegally as I only use Free/Open Software.

      To generalise, I think you will find Linux users are very aware of software licensing and rarely copy closed source software. Rather it is proprietory software users, who don't care about freedon in software and don't care about licensing conditions, who do the copying.

    2. Re:Gee... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      speak for yourself. All the linux fanatics I've known have been major warez dudes. of course, they also rebooted into their warez copy of windows 98 to play games, but you probably don't do that either.

    3. Re:Gee... by Temporal · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I wish hardware manufacturers would learn that they have nothing to lose by releasing the specs on the system.

      What on Earth makes you think that?

      ATI would LOVE to know how NVidia's graphics cards work, and vice versa. Graphics cards are very complicated pieces of hardware that require far more research and development than just about anything else in your computer (perhaps even more than the CPU itself). The interface between the card and the OS is not by any means simple, and designing a good interface can make quite a difference in the speed and stability of the card. If NVidia released their specs, not only would ATI be able to get some insight out of it, but other companies who aren't quite so advanced (like S3) could simply read the spec and skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card.

      Furthermore, releasing the spec isn't going to do as much good as you think. Someone would still have to write the drivers. Now, open source has worked great for other kinds of device drivers, but graphics cards are entirely different. Graphics drivers have hundreds of times the functionality of almost any other sort of device driver. OpenGL is a huge library with hundreds (if not thousands) of functions, and all of the extensions supported by modern graphics cards can easily double that size. Furthermore, the OpenGL specification requires that any GL functionality not implemented in hardware be done in software. NVidia has spent a lot of time optimizing their drivers, including software implementations of a large chunk of OpenGL. They have a team of tens if not hundreds of programmers working on it full-time, and those programmers have the luxury of being able to walk down the hall and talk to the people who designed the hardware if they can't figure something out. I like open source at all (I run several open source projects), but I really don't think an open source driver would ever match what NVidia has produced.

      And what about releasing the driver open source? Well, remember how I said that OpenGL functionality that isn't supported in hardware must be done in software? NVidia's software implementations of GL and their whole driver infrastructure could easily be used in competitors' products, saving that competitor millions of dollars of R&D.

      Bottom line: If NVidia were to release hardware specs or open source drivers, they would lose a lot of money. It has nothing to do with piracy.

      (Side Note: The Linux kernel maintainers have been known to frequently change the kernel interfaces in ways that break closed-source drivers, even though it is often possible for them to avoid such changes. As a result, NVidia is forced to spend a lot of effort updating their drivers for the latest kernel modifications, which they do even though Linux already represents a miniscule portion of their market. Maybe you should let the kernel devs know that you'd like to see better binary compatibility between kernel versions, so that your graphics drivers aren't always broken.)

      (Oh, and, as already noted, ATI isn't doing any better as far as Linux goes.)

    4. Re:Gee... by SQLz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, 302.

      See the list!

  4. What?!! by DigiShaman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just what are you talking about? nVidia doesn't make new drivers from scratch. They just modify existing source code and recompile. Basically, their new drivers are an evolution based on an older subset. If you ask me, there isn't any excuse for this. Sounds like bad programming to me, or the managment there of...

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:What?!! by LordHunter317 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bullshit. Whatever makes you think it is that easy to build drivers for graphics cards that can just pull the source to the old one and recompile? Absolute nonsense. At best, that might be true within a single driver family, and even then, some hacking is required to update PCI IDs, and possibly the list of features the card supports.

      Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.

      Have you ever doen any hardware programming before? The fact that nVidia has a single driver serving such a wide line of cards is quite a feat. I've seen drivers that had to have 2 seperate code paths simply because of revisions to firmeware within the same "Version" of the software.

    2. Re:What?!! by heydonms · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would be happy to have to choose the model, verion and revision of my graphics card every time I update my drivers if they would just stop crashing my machine.

    3. Re:What?!! by RupW · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.

      OK, but they can lift this out of their Windows drivers.

      I used to work for a network card manufacturer, and we wrote our drivers in three layers: OS-specific hardware interface layer, general card control layer, OS-specific API. So once we'd got the top and bottom layers right, we got all any fixes and improvements in the card control logic across all OSes for free.

      NVidia are big on their "unified driver architecture" and stuff so I'd be very surprised if they didn't do it this way too. So all they need to do is to swap the Linux glue layers into their latest Windows drivers and recompile.

  5. ATi this time by DigiShaman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm not going start an nVidia vs ATi flamewar. But, for now, ATi has the best card available on the market. And their drivers are awsome. They actually are very rock solid and have extra features I *gasp* use. Of course, the tide may change back again in nVidias favor. But until that happens, I'm staying with ATi for now. God, I love my 9800 Pro >;-)

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:ATi this time by Enucite · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And their drivers are awsome

      Obviously you don't use Linux or FreeBSD. :)

  6. They sell MB chipsets, too.... by veg_all · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...and they are way late in releasing compilable source (never mind a binary) for Mandrake 9.2 for their nForce2 chipsets. While they were busy worsening their video drivers, I had to go out and buy a new NIC to replace the onboard ethernet! Is this complaint worth tossing out my moderation rights on this topic? Oh, who gives a fuck. Someone else can modify the damn GNA posts.

    --
    grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
  7. Re:Nvidia's Detonators are designed to force upgra by DeathPenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >>Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX?

    Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.

    Believe it or not, many people don't even know which video card they own, much less could they tell the difference between a GeForce MX 200, GeForce MX 400, GeForce MX 440, GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 5900, GeForce 5950 Ultra, one of many varieties of "Quadro" based products, etc. It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.

  8. NWN works by DeathPenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny, I can play Neverwinter Nights just fine with my Ti4600 and 5328 drivers. Heck, I'm even using kernel 2.6 with the Minion.de driver patch.

    Yes, I've seen a lot of complaints about the drivers on the nVnews.net forums, but I really wish Slashdot editors would refrain from making blanket statements.

  9. Rambling Post: by big_groo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    From the article, it sounds as if it's a certain card that seems to be having problems - if it doesn't work for you, well, you should have backed up your kernel before trying. I have no sympathy for people who are *going* to say 'I can't even get X to start!'.

    Another poster mentioned that someone has already built 2.6.0 .run files - that's cool, but I have no reason to change my *stable* system. Maybe next week when I'm bored.

    Reading though this thread I've seen people extole the virtues of ATI and slam Nvidia. One particular poster said (s)he loves h(er/is) 9800. The first Google I get on this card shows a price of $299.00 US. I don't know about anyone else, but I think this is a *total* waste of money. I upgraded my last video card from a TNT2 (32MB) when I couldn't install Unreal Tournament 2003. Time to upgrade. Picked up a GeForce4 MX440. $99.00 CAN. I bought this card for one reason: Nvidia had drivers for Linux - and as a recent Linux convert, let me tell you, this is good news. Cudos to Nvidia - they'll get my $$ when it's time to upgrade again, and I'll get a card that's equivalent to the 299US card for 99CAN.

  10. Re:Explanation please. by Chep · · Score: 4, Insightful
    everybody does this. ATI did it, NVDA did it, now XGI is owing many an explanation or two...

    It looks like it's just the way they do business.

    Me, I bought an ATI, specifically because it's supported by the XFree86 and DRI projects. No binary-only NV disaster on my PC, thanks.

  11. Re:Wonderful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The "source code" consists of some headers and a couple large binary object files, so you can relink the kernel driver against whatever kernel you have to be running. The X11 driver is pure closed source.

    Nobody should praise NVIDIA as a perfect Linux citizen for providing these drivers. They do work, and it is a better solution than some hardware companies that provide no support at all. But they have consistently refused to provide documentation to write a fully free driver, so there is no 3d support at all and usually the XFree86 driver does not support the latest generation or so of chipsets at all.

  12. Re:face it nVidia by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Um, no. How about the fact that the Windows driver APIs remain constant within any major release of Windows, whereas Linux driver APIs (or really ABIs here) change slightly even between minor releases of Linux kernels? This is of course intentional - it's supposed to be hard to make closed source drivers. If Linux developers wanted to make it easy, there would be a simple, clear, well documented set of driver development and interface ABIs that only changed with major version releases (2.2, 2.4, 2.6, etc.). Then it wouldn't be necessary to do a partial/stub recompile for every version and have dozens of different packagings of binary and partial-source versions of the NVidia drivers, and they would probably end up much more stable and functional.


    So yes, I agree it's quite hard to produce Linux drivers that are stable and functional across a broad range of Linux kernel versions and XFree versions, and I am sure it is in part because there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers, in large part it's because of the inherent features of the Linux platform. Which of course may be desireable for many people who want to encourage companies to release specs or truly Open Source drivers.

  13. Re:face it nVidia by jrockway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > And Linux nVidia Driver will be always described with one word: crappy.

    Let's give nVidia a break. Yeah, one bad version of drivers. They work fine for me (although not with AGP enabled). Anyway, let's see if they fix this. They probably will, and we'll all be happy again.

    And BTW many games get higher fps under linux than windows. Crappy indeed.

    --
    My other car is first.
  14. That's why they have patents by anti-NAT · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Patents are intended to protect intellectual property. Nvidia shouldn't be worried about protecting it in their closed source drivers.

    Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.

    Other people may disagree, but I belive this "intellectual property, must close source" is just a furphy.

    Even more contrary to this argument, companies like Nvidia and ATI want their extensions to be added to the OpenGL specs, which results in both an industry wide endorsement of their techniques, as well as licensing revenue from their competitors.

    --
    The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
  15. Poor Nvidia by superpulpsicle · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They have been getting such a bad wrap one after another. I'll tell you from owning both ATI Radeon and Nvidia Geforce cards, that Nvidia has always been the one with the better drivers.

    Owning an ATI Radeon 9800 now with so many graphical features disabled and tweaks in general, I swear I am almost better off owning a Geforce FX5900.

  16. This is where Linux is retarded... by mcrbids · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Linux is retarded in the area of any kind of kernel module.

    Yes, the Linux kernel is nice and modular, and you can make modules and do some neat stuff (like dynamic loading) with them, but....

    Why do modules have to be custom compiled to each exact kernel version?

    A binary API should be developed with standard hooks that allow for things like video cards, sound cards, soft modems, scanners, and other crap to operate via a protected, binary-compatable API that doesn't change in any minor release. (EG: 2.4.x should be cross compatable)

    One of the successes of Microsoft's hardware compatability is that I can frequently use a driver from Windows 3.1 on my Windows 98 or ME system.

    Linux developers can cry all they want to about "open" drivers, but there are plenty of times where that just isn't feasible. And, why shouldn't there be a single, well-documented API that allows for binary driver distribution?

    Why should this "pollute" anything at all?

    Spending any more than 10 or 20 minutes loading a driver is retarded, and even though I'm a firm believer in Linux and its future, I'll be the first to say this.

    Create a clear, binary-compatable API for drivers and the drivers will appear like magic, especially if it's similar to the API for Windows drivers.

    Hardware companies are begging for more sales, and if they can get them by recompiling their windows drivers, or at the very least putting out and supporting a single driver file for "2.4.x kernel" Linux, you'll find that lots of companies would be perfectly happy to "play nice"...

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    1. Re:This is where Linux is retarded... by fruey · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I can frequently use a driver from Windows 3.1 on my Windows 98 or ME system.

      You might get a printer to work with older drivers, but are you really serious in saying that 16 bit Win3.1 drivers worked satisfactorily for you in Windows? We are talking about high end graphics card drivers here, not keyboard, printer or network card drivers. The only things which most Linux users can't get to work these days fall into two categories:

      • software driven hardware... that is to say, hardware which is basically a simple I/O device and all processing happens in the main CPU. Like some modems, cheap USB scanners, etc.
      • high end specific cards with separate processing units on them (GPUs, low latency audio processors, hardware encoding cards, TV combo cards)

      Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you'd get any of those kinds of hardware running in WinME with even a Win98 driver let alone a driver from Win3.1!

      --
      Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
    2. Re:This is where Linux is retarded... by The+One+KEA · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What you suggest will never happen, because Linus has made it absolutely clear that the Linux kernel will NEVER have a binary-compatible ABI. He absolutely refuses to support closed-source binary modules and will NOT accept patches to the kernel to make it friendly to such modules.

      Why? Because it goes against the spirit of the GPL AND because it's a legal grey area which could result in frivolous lawsuits which could waste the time of the OSS community, like SCO is so successfully doing right now.

      Unless Linus changes his mind (unlikely) or hardware manufacturers GPL their code and/or release full programming specs, then the status quo will undoubtedly remain.

      --
      SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
    3. Re:This is where Linux is retarded... by oshy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is a solution to driver problems with Linux.

      If everyone went for the hardware that has Linux drivers then there wont be any problems. Eg, not all software modems have linux drivers, only buy the ones that do (or the hardware controled ones), then the manufacturers that don't supply Linux drivers will have to do something or lose out on a share of the market.

  17. No problem with quake3 by Jayanef · · Score: 1, Insightful

    upgrading to new version
    PIII/733 with cheap nvidia 8MB, mandrake 9.2, my own kernel compiled with Con Kolivas patchset

    --
    -- There is four mistake in this sentences.