Slashdot Mirror
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."
GNU/Linux gets dynamic shader compilers!h tml
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_9292.
Do these drivers export all the same extensions as their windows counter parts?
this seems to be pretty common
:(
:-/
Sadly yes, it does seem pretty common. I've got a Radeon and I often find myself checking how people are finding the new drivers before getting them myself. It shouldn't be that way
But - 'may take a little while to become fully stable' - I don't think so. We're not talking about a completely new product here. They're basically just tweaking their existing code, and should do enough testing so as the release doesn't get a bad rep straight away.
What will you say the next time nvidia makes a release? 'Well, this is the newest set of drivers, so it may take a while...' er.. yeah
Anyway, I'm more interested in X. Come on XFree86, please make it so that drivers can be released independently of XFree86 releases. I don't care about anything in 4.4.0 expect ATI support!
Judging from the Drivers page and README, it seems they haven't yet addressed the problem of the computer not able to go into sleep/suspend while the driver is loaded. A bit of a nuicance for notebook users...
$cat
I guess I must have lucked out. Reinstall my desktop today with Mandrake 9.2, and since the old one I have required a kernel interface compile (it's way too old), I downloaded the new one (5328), and worked first time I installed it. The only thing is that I can't load the GLcore module. I think sometimes you can't just take these forums as an indication of how wide spread the problem is. People who have problems are also the loudest ones.
and it is the right type of thinking.
The question is though, who are they trying to protect their intellectual property from ?
For the moment, considering your example of door locks, I choose to use them, not because they make my house impenetrable, but they ensure that most, "casual" theives won't bother to break in, because the risk and / or effort is now higher than the reward. Determined thieves won't bother with trying to break the locks, they will just cut a hole in a wall, creating a new doorway. That is if my assets are worth the risk and effort involved in doing so.
So, who are Nvidia trying to protect their intellectual property from ? Who would gain the most from seeing it ? Individual end users, or their determined rivals like ATi, who have much more at stake, and possibly more to gain from discovering Nvidia's IP ? Assuming it is ATi or other competitors, which is what most people suggest when faced with this argument, then the "locks" that Nvidia have put in place are useless, as they will not stop a determined adversary, such as ATi, who may be willing to invest multiple $100K or $1M decoding Nvidia's drivers, using AGP bus analysers etc. The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
I really can't guess why Nvidia won't open source their drivers. However, I struggle to believe only reason I always hear - "to protect IP".
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Greetings,
For what its worth, I've always been happy with the Nvidia drivers.
So the 5328 drive doesn't work for me with ONE app, the fail back was efortless and I'm playing NWN again.
Kudos to the Nvidia team.
Cheers.
It has nothing to do with keeping source code and techniques away from the competition, although the people who decide against releasing sometimes think it is.
Many major graphics card design companies out there use similar techniques in their software. I'd be willing to bet if you compared driver source code between ATI and nVIDIA you would find many many similar techniques. There's very little they can learn from each other at this point, and what techniques _can_ be copied would take development time to _actually_ copy, introduce risk, and not give them a sizeable enough competative advantage to be worth it.
You argue that seeing the source to the driver lets a competitor "skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card". This is absolute rubbish. The code may give them a glimpse at how the underlying hardware is put together, but this is far from what is required to design and fab a chip.
I used to work for a graphics card company, and knowing what each register does doesn't give me even 1% of the tools required to build even a _clone_ of this 4-year old chip, much less a competitor to todays chips.
The real reason, of course is what others have posted: These guys have some licensed 3rd party source in their drivers which they are not allowed to release.