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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."
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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