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NVIDIA Drivers for 2.6 Kernel
fmileto writes "Kerneltrap.org is reporting that Nvidia has released drivers for the 2.6 series kernel. The driver and install directions can be found on Nvidia's website."
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> For those who've sold their GPL soul
;))
My soul is proprietary, thank-you-very-much. (Under an exclusive license, at that.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Release Highlights
* Support for Linux 2.6 kernels.
* Fixed AGP failures on some VIA motherboards.
* Fixed a problem that prevented X from running on Samsung X10 laptops.
I've been running the 2.6-series kernel since test6 (IIRC), and all the time using the Nvidia GFX drivers for my Ti4600. This story suggests that Nvidia users have had to wait for a new 2.6-compatible release of the drivers, which clearly isn't the case.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The best part I think is Fixed AGP failures on some VIA motherboards: minion.de has been proposing a good patch for 2.6 kernels for long, while this AGP issue was really boring. I hope it really works better now.
is here, courtesy of Andy Mecham, NVIDIA's Linux driver guru.
---
nV News
They won't - there is too much good stuff in there for people to steal. I haven't had trouble with them yet, so if they work who cares.
No, they aren't going to make them open source. If you want open source drivers, write one yourself. What we need now is a good driver for the centrino. And if Intel actually releases it, they should be praised, not critized for not being pure open source.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
This is making my transition to 2.6 on my laptop look much more likely. I was wondering when NVidia would get around to doing such a thing. The fact that it has been relatively prompt seems to suggest that they are still somewhat interested in the Linux market.
The next question is when will they release drivers for Keith Packard's/Freedektop.org's Xserver, because to be honest, I'm very interested in seeing what that can do...
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I tried installing it on a new Debian Woody (stable) installation, but it could not determine the module file name. I tried several options to point it to the kernel source and headers, but it didn't work. Eventually, I installed an older version using http://people.debian.org/~rdonald/index.php.
Does anyone know how to install this new version? I didn't even know it was this new, except for the distinct lack of hints that Google provides so far.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
> But when will they make them open source?
Unless there is a huge change in their business model, they will never make them open source.
The code for these drivers contains a lot of information about the underlying design... of both the hardware and the accelleration (sp?) techniques that give this product the edge... exactly the sort of stuff competing companies would love to get their hands on. Remember that a good driver can really have a marked effect on the performance of a graphics card.
Of course, all their competitors have probably already reverse engineered every card on the market, but who wants to make it easy?
I love open source as much as the next guy, but we have to accept the commericial reality that just because something runs on an open source platform, it isn't necessarily open source itsself. Oracle is a good example of this.
Linux on the desktop may change this. When enough people avoid buying Company X's product because their cross-platform support blows goats, they may very well be ready to open the source.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-53 36/README
/usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/).
From the README:
If you do not have a working XF86Config file, there are several ways
to start: there is a sample config file that comes with XFree86,
and there is a sample config file included with the NVIDIA driver
package (it gets installed in
You could also use a program like 'xf86config'; some distributions
provide their own tool for generating an XF86Config file. For more
on XF86Config file syntax, please refer to the man page.
If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver
(such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find
the relevant Device section and replace the line:
Driver "nv"
(or Driver "vesa")
with
Driver "nvidia"
In the Module section, make sure you have:
Load "glx"
You should also remove the following lines:
Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"
if they exist. There are also numerous options that can be added to
the XF86Config file to fine-tune the NVIDIA XFree86 driver. Please see
Appendix D for a complete list of these options.
My 9500Pro works great in linux with 2.6 kernels. It has since the beginning of december. Perhaps you dont have a good agpart driver?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
The more the 2.6 kernel is accepted by companies the faster it'll get to that "critical point" where distributions will have to start using it not to feel left behind. And for those trying to sell Linux (with services etc) the 2.6 kernel will be an excellent bonus.
I also hope they'll be more stable than the 2.4 + 2.6patch was... I know a fair few people for whom lack of stable videocard support was the factor stopping them upgrade to 2.6.
The last (2.4) drivers that worked for me were 1.0.4496; the recent ones are a disaster, so hopefully they've taken the time to iron out the bugs and this isn't just the latest version of the driver with the (already existing) 2.6 patch bolted on.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
that is more, or less stable and WORKS.
im quite happy with that.
I understand the IP issues involved probably prohibit a source release.
I would just.. let this one go and thank them for at least supporting the linux driver.
Now people can watch porn using cutting edge technology once again!
The nvidia kernel driver has been easy to get working with 2.6 since the 2.5.x days. Problem is, they still haven't fixed the nasty mangled console bug that has been in the last three versions. It is always great to exit X windows and have to reboot before I can go back into X windows or else it will lock up my box. But...even if I exit X windows my console is so mangled I can barely use it any how...this sure has promoted my use of X and only X :)
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
For those who've sold their GPL soul to use the binary drivers from NVIDIA (like me) you can get them now.
While I support the GPL and don't particularly like binary-only drivers, I reckon this little phrase has no place in this announcement. To NVidia's credit, they seem to be somewhat serious about supporting Linux in a somewhat timely manner. This sort of allusion won't be a great incentive for other hardware vendors to support Linux at all, they'll just think "whatever we do to be nice to them, those Linux folks will always have something to complain about".
When Linux has 80% marketshare and is a true force to be reckoned with, then perhaps the community will be able to afford sarcasm and get away with it, but in the meantime, there must be other, more constructive ways to entice vendors to embrace open-source.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Until now they had to use a third party patch, found here
I agree. Everytime somebody on /. mentions Nvidia the very first thing that is replied is when will they be opensource. I've never had a problem with the binaries either.
Atleast that is what they want people to think...
For the video drivers that might be true. Although I doubt there is really anything really new in there... a lot of manufacturers overestimate their own brilliance.
But for there chipset drivers (e.g. nForce) they are just plain assholes.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I know what you mean. I recently put together an SFF Athlon 64 system (Based off of the Biostar iDeq 200P), and I was torn with what to do for a graphics card, because I want to run gentoo as my primary OS. (With windows for the occasional test-compile for work).
I chose an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro because they have better open source drivers (community developed) for they're slightly older stuff, as well as binary support for what's current, but they can't be bothered to release 2.6 AMD64 compiled drivers, and now I'm left wishing I'd bought an Nvidia card just so it would be usable, when I know they have almost no open source support at all..
I want the graphics card companies to realize, when a decently fast graphics card (notice I didn't buy top of the line, so that's a clue to you up and comers) comes out with open source drivers, that's where I'll put my money, and where I'll tell my friends and family to go. You've got to please the geeks, guys, 'cause we influence the purchases of others, as well.
No, they should be critisized for promissing something and not doing it for a year....
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I made the mistake of getting sucked into the wonderful price point of my nforce2/Athlon system..
The proprietary graphics drivers have been a huge pain.. nvidia support has been terrible when compared to the open source community. For much of 2003 the video would go blank once you exited X11 (forcing a reboot whenever you exited X!).
And now they have gone to a monolithic installer "to make things easier". Right.
The little bit I saved pales in comparison to the time I have spent dealing with this BS.
And how long until nvidia makes my board obsolete?
Damn motherboard blew (volt-regulator poped... literally) and its been 3 weeks so far w/ no new one comming in!
;-)
BTW, does anyone know how to Overclock a GeForce 5600 in Linux? Haven't found anything yet...
Why do I get the impression that your motherboard problem wasn't entirely unprovoked?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
GNU/Linux PowerPC users -- such as in Power Macs -- are still out of luck.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Actually in the long run having the source code and/or specs to build a driver/module would be better in that the OS driver spec may change, but all you would need to do is rewrite the driver to work under the new system. (Yes, easier said than done.)
On the other hand binaries are so much easier to deal with though. Install them and they either work, kinda work, or don't.
Maybe those IBM-Linux commercials are right, "the future is open" because with closed source software and companies not supporting every single platform for ever the closed-source software is destand to become unsupported and eventually become stuck in the past. Does Windows XP support all old hardware that may still work in your computer?
Then again maybe I just think too much.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
they CAN'T, because of S3TC support. have to have a license for it, and that implies that it can't be open-sourced.
---
nV News
ATI's drivers officially supported 2.6x kernels *before* nVidia's.
here it is:
#include "stdio.h"
#define s 1
#define o 1
#define u 1
#define r 1
#define c 1
#define e printf("You won't get any source. Go away!\n -- signed: NVidia\n")
main()
{
s - o - u - r - c - e - s;
}
Enjoy...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You had 3D acceleration?
Fer sure, and its definitely been working (smooth 3D viewing of 100,000 polygon meshes). Either that, or the Underpant Gnomes installed a 10GHz processor in my machine while I was asleep...
However, its worth noting that I'm using the drivers as packaged by Gentoo. This may include the patch which another reply to my OP mentions; I wasn't aware of this patch when I posted.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Ok I'll bite,
Maybe he wants to play the linux versions of Unreal Tournament 2003, or Medal of Honor, or Neverwinter Nights, or Quake3, or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or Enemy Territory, or Savage , or Rune, or SpaceTripper, or Tribes 2 or Serious Sam, or Postal2, or America's Army or another of the various other games on Linux that requires 3D acceleration. Sure, a far cry from what's available on windows, but more games then I'll ever have time to play.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Whenever you start talking about hardware drivers, especially bleeding-edge hardware in a highly competitive market like video cards, you run into the following problems:
1) There is a natural desire to keep technical details (both in the hardware and in the driver implimentation) secret from one's competitors, so as to build a competitive advantage.
2) You may not own all the technology in the hardware or the drivers, and your licencing agreement with the 3rd-party technology providers may include terms of non-disclosure.
This tends to disincline one from open-sourcing the drivers.
The advantages of having them opened up everybody here is well aware of. But realizing those advantages takes time to sink in at the hardware company - especially when their Linux market is very small (so the perceived risks outweigh the rewards)
As time goes on, and especially as the Linux market grows (to the point where it is providing a signifigant fraction of a company's revenue) I believe the value of opening up the drivers will become more compelling to the driver authors (and more importantly, their management)
Baby steps. Rome wasn't built in a day.
In the meantime, there is value in supporting companies who provide closed-source drivers for products where there is no other alternative. Help them build the Linux experience - both on the technical and social aspects - that will eventually lead them along the path to opening their drivers up.
Would I prefer to see fully open-and-GPLed NVIDIA drivers? You bet your ass. But for whatever reason, they aren't ready to jump off that particular cliff, so I'll support them anyway in anticipation of the day when they DO open the drivers up.
We're fighting 20 years of a culture of secrecy and code-hording here. It'll take time to work through that.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Yes, build your own card. Because their aren't any. The open source drivers in linux weren't made by the card manufacturers, that is why they will never perform as well as the closed source ones. So if you want an open source driver that performs, you will have to create your own. If and when Linux ever gets the market share to create a demand, I think you will find distributions selling a separate driver CD's, and / or downloads on the manufacturers site that keeps pace with the windows drivers. But I highly doubt you will ever see open source drivers by any hardware manufacturer that faces stiff competition from others. The only periperial card that I have ever bought that had GPL'd drivers by the manufacturer was a multitech modem that contained 4 modems on the board. This was highly specialized for dialin networking and linux has the market share there to make it possible. And modems aren't exactly cutting edge stuff.
Yeah, I used page to guide me through making nvidia drivers work on a toshiba laptop running debian with a NVIDIA(R) GeForce(TM) FX Go5200 and a 2.6 kernel. Worked right away too.
Yes, well, perhaps the title of the story should've been Official NVIDIA Drivers for 2.6 kernel since what we've been using for months has been an unsupported hack. For most of people, including me, it has been working just fine, though, as you suggested, but before this there has been no-one to blame if didn't work. Now it's supported by NVIDIA.
But does the IP belong to you, or to God? (or Allah or whatever. I assume that since you believe to have a soul, you also believe in some form of God) I think you got a time-limited lease on it. A run-time licence perhaps? And I don't want to get into the physics of it, being a derivative work of your parents and all...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe he should have done 5 minutes worth of research with google before investing $400 bucks or so in a video card.
Or maybe his research was limited to the fanboy rantings of how superior the card is based on artificial benchmarks.
Why are the super tech geniouses of linux land always shocked to find the expensive hardware they just bought has no/little linux support?
Anyhow, for ATi to supply good linux support, that would mean true OpenGL support - something even the windows drivers for the Radeon series are pathetically lacking.
The cards are the 'fastest and greatest' only in Direct3D benchmark apps.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I would say a very long time. Until last year, I was using a TNT with the unified NVidia drivers, and I only switched because I managed to pick up a TNT2 for $10 or $20 (the TNT 1 was Asus's excellent model, but it wasn't good at doing 1600 x 1200).
If they're supporting a card that old, I don't think you're going to have to worry anytime soon. I'm impressed that they're supporting their entire post-Riva lineup with a single driver.
Personally, the Free drivers never worked for me; X just looked mangled. I installed NVidia's binary driver by following the directions (gasp!) and everything Just Worked, and has continued to Just Work. Recently, I used the patches from minion.de to upgrade to Linux 2.6, and yet again it's working fine. I've never heard of the console corruption or X locking problems until reading the comments on this article.
The monolithic installer certainly does make things easier. You don't have to separately install the GL libraries and the kernel module anymore. It's just one file for whatever post-Riva card you have.
I've been able to run OpenGL demos, and the power in my area is less stable than X11 (out when I left for work this morning).
Am I a big proponent of Free as in libre? Yes, certainly. But NVidia released good software which works with the hardware I had already. Same reason I still use my MP3 discman; I don't know of a company that has an Ogg-compatible CD-ROM player (my music collection is too big to constantly fiddle with hardware players, sorry). Broadcast radio in Baltimore sucks and I need music. I prefer the Free alternative when it's practical, but sometimes it's not. You definitely find that out working for a physical plant (specialized software needs).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Find a country where the law (1) forbids manufacturers to keep secrets from customers and (2) specifically permits the use of reasonable force in certain situations; or (3) forbids the release of closed-source software. {This may require the purchase of a small uninhabited island, but you probably can pick up a used one on ebay. Alternatively, there was talk about some Central / South American countries outlawing closed-source software: see if you can find one that actually has}. Go there and take a graphics card with you. Request driver source code from manufacturer. Point out that local law says you have a right to that information. If driver source code is not forthcoming, disassemble binary driver under reasonable force provisions of local law. Publish source code as discovered by you on secure web server located in that country and with all logs diverted to /dev/null. Get general feeling that this is like DeCSS all over again. Wait for authorities in USA to determine that your liberated source code is not illegal. Sue prosecutor.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Oh I dunno about assholes... As a proud owner of a NForce2 board, yeah I'm frustrated as hell with their crappy sound drivers (well, tecnically I use the ALSA drivers, but they're based on the nvidia-released ones and still aren't any good). But I mean, they *did* give us the nforce agpgart stuff for free. I guess they were bitches about the nforce ethernet driver (which was trivially reverse-engineered), so feel free to be angry about that. However, on the sound front, from what I've heard SoundStorm is at least as full of proprietary badness as their video drivers, probably Dolby IP among others. And the unofficial word is that they *are* working on a binary driver, which is probably the best they can do.
That doesn't provide framebuffer support. That provides NVidia driver support for XFree86. The 2.6 kernel doesn't seem to have a fully functional framebuffer driver for nvidia cards (I couldn't get it to work either, but it works for me in 2.4). I don't know how to get XFree86 to try to use the framebuffer driver from the kernel, but I've heard there's no performance gain over using NVidia's drivers directly.
Developers: We can use your help.
Tried installing drivers for a dlink nic on 9.2 and got a message that the binary only drivers would "pollute" the operating system or some such. Refused to install them at all - there was no do it anyways option.
/sbin/lsmod command as a user to see for yourself.
First RPM doesn't give such error messages, nor does RPM prevent you from installing the RPM you desire (Remember: Unix assumes that root knows everything, and never limits root from doing anything either)
Secondly, you are possibly confusing the above error with something not done by mandrake, but the kernel. The kernel automatically complains about non GPL/BSD modules being loaded, however this DOES NOT prevent the modules from being loaded. Issue the
Lastly, as another poster already pointed. Mandrake sells a commercial version of their distro that automatically uses such binary only drivers. (Their 100% FLOSS distro does not ship with them but like *any* other distro, can use them.)
Sunny Dubey
This is good news. Now we just need to get lirc support and ivtv support without nasty hacks, and I'll be good to go.
Nvidia drivers make the center of my screen fuzzy, (3d is fab though) I'm wondering if they are worth it, if I have to move all of my small text to the periphery of the screen to be able to read it.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I know you were just trying to be funny, but for those who think you may be serious...
No you don't need to get the 2.6 kernel to run these drivers. They still work with your old 2.4 kernel as well!
The Linux drivers NVIDIA released are actually newer than the Windows 2000/XP ones! I call that pretty darn good support!
I'm all for Open Source, but there are probably far too few 3D/OpenGL engineers who have the time to work on and release quality Open Source 3D/OpenGL drivers. NVIDIA has practically their whole driver engineering team working for us. I consider the closed part just an extended piece of 'firmware' for the (closed source) video hardware. The 'loader' and glue code are open source.
It would take a couple of man years to produce quality drivers that even come close to what we have now, and by that time the current crop of 3D hardware cards will be thrice obsoleted (hi Matrox!)
Better to spend our resources improving other things (like GNOME, D-BUS, whatnot) than to duplicate driver magic, just for the sake of being open source.
Now, if you're a PowerPC user, I take everything I said back *grin*
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
You use riva frame buffer right?
This has been around for a loong time, before the last 3 releases. It's not directly NVidia's bug, it's related to the riva frame buffer conflicting with the NVidia drivers.
Turn off frame buffer support and use a plain console and you will be fine.
I am going to download the drivers anyways.
Why? I'm sure they keep count of the linux driver downloads. If they see a boost in the numbers, maybe we will get quicker updates.
I have an ATI card, but that won't stop me from buying an NVIDIA card in the future if they provide some serious 3d support ala Windows.
Does this sound dumb? I know it's fudging the numbers, but with computers and software there is always that chicken and egg problem we have seen so many times before.
Discuss.
--
Because they're usually posting information that is available if you RTFA.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott