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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."
The real story is when they open the source to the drivers.
thisnukes4u.net
Ok... wtf is a 4k stack?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
It seems that this driver's OpenGL headers are a little buggy, but the solution was given by NVIDIA employee in this thread at nvnews.net forum.
I've been testing these drivers under Fedora Core 2 for a while, and they appear to work flawlessly.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
this is a cut/paste of this article. Unless you actually wrote it, don't copy with no reference.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
The "zealots" just want to control their own computers. That's what Open Source is about. If you have an nVidia video card in your linux system, and you want full functionality, you have to let nVidia control your computer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. The bedrock of capitalism is simply a market system based on private ownership. Now, most people want to extend that into monopolistic control to maximize their own profit in self-serving interest, but at the same time consumers generally tend to want a lot of competitors that can offer substitutes that give them greater value.
But, the fact is that if IBM hadn't "goofed" and created a mostly open system, it's likely that either another more open system would have succeeded even though it had a lot of obvious fault or no system would have succeeded and the information age wouldn't be near the point it is. Why? Because a more open system allows for programmers, both hobbyist and capitalist, to more easily develop software for the system. This barrier to entry would mean less software overall which would directly decrease the demand for computers. At the same time, monopolistic control would keep prices high, fixing the quality sold at a smaller rate than it is today thanks to the vast number of clones.
So, it's unlikely IBM would have a better market share or sell more products. They might, still, be making more profit due to monopolistic pricing. It does seem unlikely for this to be the case, however, when various other architectures would have likely succeeded in IBM's place and relegated IBM computers into dinosaurs like the Amiga (no offense to the Amiga intended).
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
Without number two, number one could be fixed with creative hardware locking mechanisms. The total cost of such hardware locking would be minimal in comparison to the boosted sales of all the likely free porting and driver work done by volunteers on the NVidia driver. The fact is, NVidia is a hardware company so it is in their best interest to commoditize all software for their hardware to be run on. Open sourcing their driver, if possible, would very likely have this effect (it's hard to argue that it could have the reverse effect, at least).
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*. All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS, and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
There is magic in their drivers, and it is explained EVERY SINGLE TIME NVIDIA GETS MENTIONED HERE. It's called a special OpenGL license from SGI and it's also some special in-house code.
Try to remember it this time, it's only the 400 millionth time it's been mentioned.
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