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NVidia Releases Linux Drivers Supporting 4K Stacks
Supermathie writes "NVidia has finally released drivers for their chipsets and the 2.6 kernel that support 4K stacks. That means compatability with Fedora Core 2 kernels, people! View the README, visit their driver page, or download the package."
Kernel Stacks... Is a kernel option in "kernel hacking" (so its a trick it would seem). It allows for mroe process threads on your computer among other things. Before, it was 8 stacks. But, as many people noticed RedHat again fucked with the kernel, and enabled 4k instead of 8k in the default kernel in fedora core 2. The drivers then could not run in that mode it seemed, and a vanilla kernel was required. They fixed that, thanks nvidia, made support for the 6800 (now that the linux driver is realeased, im giving the company my 500 bucks...see...support linux...make money....) and upadated both the x86 and amd64 driver codebase to the same version, instead of 5536 to 5532, thanks nvidia, slowly but surely you do well enough. I found this out when I recently installed slackware 10, and a new vanilla 2.6.7 kernel. Slackware on a laptop, (ibm thinkpad a30) is good shit. Gnome looks very sexy, on it. I want Doom 3.
Wonder why this story was rejected when I mentioned it 4 days ago and then submitted the story.
Methinks the only real reason you'd want to keep your drivers closed off is because you're artificially handicapping your hardware to increase differentials between various (actually fairly identical) cards you've got on the market. Conspiratorial? Yes, but nothing that doesn't happen all the time.
I wholeheartedly agree that closed-source code is appropriate for all manner of enterprises (and philosophically, I tend to look at executable code as an open, gloriously inaccessible book anyway). But closed-source device drivers? Just makes me wonder what they're hiding.
I think I'll wait for this to be tested for more than 24 hours before I try my hand on it.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Or go out and revise the nv drivers. Nothing (I would assume) prevents you from doing so. Nothing prevents you from getting a video card from another company. And by the same token, nothing should prevent NVidia from releasing closed-source drivers.
Besides, what would 99.9% of linux people do even if it was open source? Download source, not even look at it, type make install clean, and be done with it. (Or make setup or whatever the build sequence is; point being that most users wouldn't care.) And for the 0.1% of people who do mess with it, unless they discovered some great tweak that would provide a significant feature or speed advantage over the NVidia drivers, I'd just go with them, since I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
It's funny when you think about why hardware companies is they like to keep the source code secret (i.e. you only get the drivers). If they claim that someone may use it for some unfit purpose then the question is, if someone has the source code without the hardware isn't it inherently useless to them anyway?
Presumably, hardware companies like their equipment to be some black box where the relationship between the input and output is not known. This (so the theory goes) helps prevent other companies from reverse-engineering their product. The more information you have on the software running in the black box, the more likely you are to figure out exactly what the black box is. This is classic "security through obscurity."
Which is why we need to change the tech field over to a "security through clarity" model. If a company wants copyright protection on code, they should be obligated to provide a human-readable version of compilable source code. If every company is required to do so, it makes it easy to see which ones are actually creating something of value that should be afforded copyright protection, and which ones are copying (legally or illegally) the intellectual property of others. This is in addition the the benefits with fair-use of source code -- squashing bugs and enhancing security, for example.
This is why open source is not a threat to intellectual property, but a way to actually protect it as well as encouraging new ideas. Unfortunately, no one wants to be the first to show all of their code to the world, so unless we find some way of having them all do so at once -- either by legislation or by open source reaching critical mass and being the most cost-effective for the major vendors -- we'll see even relatively geek-friendly companies like nVidia keep their source from prying eyes.
Closed source software has its places,
But drivers is not one of them. Had they put the closed source code in a user mode library and used just a small open source kernel driver, we wouldn't have all the problems with the driver. It still wouldn't be optimal, but it would be way better than the current situation.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
As far as I remember, NVidia has maintained that some of the code in their drivers is licensed from a third party, and that the license does not permit source redistribution.
Several things:
1. There really isn't a way to verify that the drivers actually ship with the third-party code; NVidia may be using the issue to quelch requests for open drivers.
2. Goes to show how the license of the code you use in your projects can have determental impact on your future goals (or beneficial, depending on those goals, of course).
3. I think it's more likely that the drivers sources are kept closed because there's some benchmark tricks, or worse, cheats.
Are there processors which use > 4KB pages? What size do the 64 bit processors, Itanium, Opteron, Sparc, use?
Man, I just installed these drivers (I was wanting a good excuse to do it, I admit it) on my ancient TNT2 video card, 800mhz Duron, blahdy-blah blah, and now Metisse is running fine. Before, with the nv driver Metisse barely ran. Amazing how much a difference the driver makes. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Actually, this is the idea. The interface with the kernel is open source; the closed source code is a binary object that gets linked into the module. Sorry, user mode doesn't really make much sense here, drivers need full hw access and context switching to a different privilege level would only hurt performance.
The rest is pretty much trolling, at this level. NVidia has been so far quite open source friendly when it comes to producing drivers. But I guess there will always be people to complain. Me, I'm happy NVidia has drivers for platforms where theirs is the only accelerated choice, like amd64. Others would say the same about IA64, or FreeBSD. Windows and Linux on x86 aren't the only games in town, you know.
Finally, how do you know they don't stand to lose something by making the drivers fully open source? look only at the whole 12 pipelines vs. 16 pipelines thing going on between the latest NV and ATI cards, with last minute info prompting new cards on both sides. If NVidia releases drivers for their last generation of cards that take the competition a couple of months to disassemble and analyze, they might keep the edge long enough to move on.
nVidia might want to be sure that no one runs with broken drivers, then thinks nVidia cards are all junk, when in reality some guy made a few "improvements" that broke things, and distributed the changed version anyway.
NVIDIA could register a trademark for their official Open Source driver build and disallow the use of the trademark on the builds which are modified. The Apache does it like that, modified versions aren't "Apache" anymore.
1) nVidia's drivers contain large amounts of software that is better than any of their competition. They spent money developing this, and they want to milk the competitive edge it gives them. And that is okay.
Even if their OpenGL implementation was superior they wouldn't have to release it under a Free license. There is Mesa which is OSS and probably Free. They only have to tell us how to program the chip.
I'm getting very sick of astroturfers trying to push their marketing drivel (straight out of South Park: "closed source is gooood") at the start of slashdot replies.
By definition, for the customer (us!), open source must provide at least all the options of closed source. All the grandparent did was highlight what is probably the most beneficial potential change for slashdot'ers. If NVidia had released the source as that poster had suggested the 4K problem probably would've been fixed within hours.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I must admit-I am a bit suprised that SLASHDOT didn't pick up on it. It might just be a little insignificant thing which doesn't warrant much attention anyway-who knows. Of course everyone is mentioning the support for 4k stacks. And of course this is important. Anyone who has used Andrew Morton's patch set knows what a PITA this issue was. But nvidia even did more than fix the single most blocking issue regarding their drivers and the 2.6.x kernels.
They also:
Added support for ACPI
Fixed problem that prevented 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs.
Added support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language).
along with the new nvidia-settings utility-GPL'ed and written in GTK2....
and finally they added:
Added a new Xv adaptor on GeForce4 and GeForce FX which uses the 3D engine to do Xv PutImage requests.
Now I am not an expert on such things-25 years of experience and I am still left asking more questions than my ability to answer. _But I noticed this little innocuous "xv" thing and was like WOW-cool. I leave it up to those who know more to shoot me down-but doesn't this little "xv" thing mean that all those Linux users who use nvidia GeForce4 and FX cards suddenly got a a tremendous boost when doing much of anything with video ? After all XV is what all of the video players under Linux use for good quality full-screen video(mplayer, xine, totem, gxine, helixplayer etc.)
Now if I understand this correctly everytime a PutImage() request comes along under XV this is handed over to the 3D engine-automatically. It seems as if this would be a very, very significant reduction in CPU usage-particularly for older generation(PII/PIII) machines which happen to have fairly modern graphic cards. Full-screen divx under mplayer with the new drivers uses 12% CPU on average on my machine-I unfortunately did not do a benchmark to test this-but if my memory serves me correctly this is significantly less than what is was with the older drivers.
Now the downside to this-at least for the time being- is that some apps don't quite work with these new changes-Xine-and it's siblings(totem,gxine, kxine etc.)
But I assume these will be fixed pronto.
Well where am I going qoing with this train of thought:
Putting this kind of support for XV in the NVIDIA drivers -is really simple for the NVIDIA guys-perhaps even trivial-but it can mean a tremendous improvement for the users of these cards. NVIDIA has always treated Linux like a second class citizen-but hey who can complain-at least they acknowledge that Linux exists-compared to the BSD's Linux support is great-of course only if you are using x86 CPU's. Now everyone knows that the graphic workstation market has all but disappeared. But what if NVIDIA was to decide to simply really take advantage of the X11 windowing system and it's features.
Imagine if NVIDIA would actually provide good RENDER support-wow what a difference that would make for 2D desktop support-particularly under GNOME which uses RENDER extensively in VTE/PANGO-ie. why text scrolling in gnome-terminal is so abysmal. I am still stumped by the fact that the open-source X11 nvidia drivers support RENDEr far, far better than NVIDIA's own in-house drivers.....
Imagine if NVIDIA would really support the libfixes, libdamages and libcomposite extensions which are currently being developed at Xorg-X11. Sun's Looking Glass is already using libdamages and libfixes-I got it up and running on my machine yesterday-and yes it is still pre-alpha-but I have never, ever seen such a fluid desktop environment. This tech is almost *evil*- the promise which it presents is simply baffling-rendering all previous X11 windowing experiences to the days of the stone age. I don't really care that much about Looking Glass-if NVIDIA properly supports the X11 extensions we will have cairo-enabled desktops inside of the next year which will fundamentally alter the X11 experience for X users.
Ok. So here is the point of this little essay: If NVIDIA would simpl
Brand preference is the basis of advertising-- likely you engage in it whether you know it (or like it) or not-- coke or pepsi? Are you a Tide person, or is Cheer more your style? You likely have rational bases for your biases (cheaper, tastes better, it's what you grew up drinking) but you still have the bias. Brand preference is actually a good thing, since it rewards companies that make good products by increasing their sales in other products, as long as quality is maintained. Brand loyalty is highly sought-after and with good reason.
Brand zealotry is a better word; your decision is made independent of rational reasons, although you probably seek them out (if you can recite the Hz and pipeline specifications for a video card you've never owned, you should probably be a little leery of your own advice when it comes to choosing cards to buy).
Both are prejudicial behaviors, but one of them has a greater potential for screwing you over, since if everyone became a brand zealot, there'd be no real reason to produce quality products.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. -Henry David Thoreau
I see these articles all the time, and to me, it seems this struggling with drivers and vendor lock in with using exact specific cards for the video is the problem. Is it possible to use a comopletely separate computer to just run the video? All the cards are is a small computer system with an onboard cpu-like thing, on board ram, some controller chips etc, which to my layperson's understanding is just another form of a normal mobo and assorted gear on it stuck on a card you slap in a PCI slot or whatever. So, my question is, would it be possible to just use another computer to opensource replace the whole video card experience? Have a computer you could build yourself that mimiced what a video card does, and have drivers that can be easily written GPL fashion then? I understand you'd have to be able to get normal computer A to talk to video card emulator computer B. Just asking the smart guys here if this has ever been done, if it's possible, is it a lame idea or a good idea long term, etc? Just seems with the ability to have gigs of ram and high speed chips, etc easily obtainable on the mobo of your choice, this might be a completely alternate way to go other than being stuck with basically a couple of companies and driver hassles all the time, to move it away from propietary.
Of course,I admit I have no idea, hence asking.
There are still serious bugs left from the previous revision, which was six months ago. That's a bit long to wait. While GLSL and 6800 support is nice, an interm bugfix wouldn't be unwelcome...
A problem that leaves the console framebuffer blank after X is started remains. You need to work around it by adding
Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "TV"
to your xorg.conf. If you are actually using TV out, this could be a bit annoying.
Even worse, it hasn't been more than 24 hours since I've installed them, and these drivers have already hung X twice. When an OpenGL process segfaulted, that process assumes state D (uninteruptable sleep), and becomes completely unkillable, along with X itself. I haven't figured out how to reboot cleanly once this happens. All I can do is ssh in, sync the disks, and hit the power button.