NVIDIA Releases New Linux Drivers

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."

Comments

Good job NVIDIA

[after]

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.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[Cyclops]

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.

Re:Nvidia's Detonators are designed to force upgra

[DeathPenguin]

>>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.

NWN works

[DeathPenguin]

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.

Re:What?!!

[LordHunter317]

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.

Rambling Post:

[big_groo]

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.

Re:Explanation please.

[Chep]

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.

Re:face it nVidia

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Re:This is where Linux is retarded...

[fruey]

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!

Re:This is where Linux is retarded...

[The One KEA]

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.

Re:What?!!

[RupW]

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.

Re:Gee...

[SQLz]

Actually, 302.

See the list!