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The SLI Godfather

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the insightful-or-just-bitterly-dissapointed dept.

CaptCanuk writes "Phoronix has an insightful article about the motivation behind Nvidia's alternative operating system support. From the article: 'When it comes time for a user to upgrade their computer hardware, and decide to go with a choice from a leading manufacturer of graphics solutions, software support is a given, correct? Wrong.' Read on to find out what truly funds their development and why some think they treat Linux as a second hand citizen."

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Driver support by ubersonic · · Score: 5, Informative

    > You are a statistical outlier. Most people you know may have Linux ambitions, but most of everyone else doesn't.

    Maybe where you live, but here in germany Linux is a lot more mainstream.

    --

    -- ubersonic Kfz Versicherung
  2. Was OpenBSD really first with OSS nvidia ethernet? by Sits · · Score: 2, Informative

    Look I'm an OpenBSD fan but even I'm a little unsure on this one... The Linux folks reverse engineered the Nvidia ethernet driver in forcedeth and in fact forcedeth was helpful in the creation of nfe.

    Are you sure that you want to claim that OpenBSD had "the first [nforce ethernet] open source driver" (emphasis is mine)? Can you give some links to back this claim up? I haven't found any yet but then again I don't hang out on the OpenBSD lists all that much...

  3. out-of-tree drivers suck by r00t · · Score: 2, Informative
    I deal with 3 or 4, depending on how you count. They piss me off! I waste so much time screwing around with these drivers. They are always breaking when I upgrade the kernel, and they make it near-impossible to get support or debug things myself. They also prevent me from making a non-moduler kernel, which is a tad faster and much easier to manage.

    • NVidia's crap. IMHO, fancy video and 3d is for wankers, but I need this driver because my messed-up BIOS gets the LCD resolution wrong. The NVidia driver ignores the BIOS, while the free driver obeys the bogus info.
    • VMWare's crap. This is 2 drivers, neither of which I have working. In this case I want to use a Fedora Core 4 kernel which was compiled with gcc 4.0, but I upgraded my compiler to gcc 4.1 already. It seems that only Debian supports installing more than one compiler, so I'm screwed until I do something really non-standard.
    • Digium's crap. Digium's drivers for Asterisk are actually GPL, but too defective to be accepted into the kernel. Of course, the claim is that "development happens too fast", which is total bullshit to anybody who knows anything about the Linux development process.
  4. good drivers don't work that way by r00t · · Score: 2, Informative

    Good drivers are NOT portable. Portability makes a driver unreadable and slow. Each OS will have its own set of abstractions and coding style.

    I worked for a hardware manufacturer that made a portable driver. This driver ran in Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, SunOS (pre-Solaris), Solaris, IRIX, VxWorks, and a few other things. The driver was well over a megabyte and had to include a C library. That's disgusting. At the time, a whole kernel was a few megabytes at most.

  5. Re:Nvidia is bad? ATi is worse. by batkiwi · · Score: 2, Informative

    1. ATI has NEVER provided ANY support for laptop chipsets. That is up to your laptop provider. You can get "inf fix" drivers which are the newest drivers + the device IDs to allow you to install them, but if you check out ATI's site that is spelled out very clearly.

    Yes it sucks.

    2. This is a known problem with almost all ATI embedded chips. If you google around, there's a utility that "forces" a new modeline into the bios temporarily. What you do is choose a modeline to replace with youre 1200x800 and it just pops right in. I don't remember the name, but if you google around you'll find it.