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NVIDIA's Andy Ritger On Linux Drivers

Posted by kdawson on from the straight-dope dept.

tykev writes "The Director of Unix Software at NVIDIA talks about Linux drivers, planned features, development cycle, and the open source Nouveau driver. (The interview is in English but all the comments are in Czech.) Quoting: 'NVIDIA's stance is to neither help nor hinder Nouveau. We are committed to supporting Linux through a) an open source 2d "nv" X driver which NVIDIA engineers actively maintain and improve, and b) our fully featured proprietary Linux driver which leverages common code with the other platforms that NVIDIA supports.'"

3 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nouveau by babbling · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nouveau probably won't ever be "complete" since there's always new cards to add support for and that sort of thing. If Nouveau gets good enough and is the default driver they will probably start contributing to it. They would save money on driver development, and continuing their proprietary driver would be a bit pointless since everyone would be using Nouveau.

    Until Nouveau gets good, I imagine they'll keep pushing the proprietary driver, though.

  2. Considering by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Insightful
    the fact that the "nv" driver is buggy there is a lot of room left to improve on here.

    I experienced a problem with the "nv" driver on my computer with dual 7600GS cards and three displays. It wasn't possible to run all three displays at all with the "nv" driver, but the binary driver from nvidia works. The part that I'm not satisfied with is the need for an alternate driver.

    I haven't tried the Nouveau driver, but somebody else may. As I see it, Nvidia should release all information needed to allow others to write suitable drivers. (should apply to all HW manufacturers).

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Re:A question by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    seems to me demanding that a company release their drivers in open source

    I read & re-read the parent comment, but couldn't see them demanding anything. WTF are you talking about?

    I mean, to the exclusion of actually using the software which could make their computer experience better.

    Some people have quite pragmatic reasons for preferring open software - particularly kernel software. Driver crashes were one of the things that made windows (particularly in the late 90's / early 2000s) such a mess.

    If you're making a hardware purchasing decision and want to run linux, of course you should try to buy from a company that supports FOSS.

    Surely we haven't got that many mini-RMSes?

    Finish the troll with a flourish. Nice work.

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    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.