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Nouveau NVIDIA Driver To Enter Linux 2.6.33 Kernel
An anonymous reader writes "Not only is DRBD to be included in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, but so is the Nouveau driver. The Nouveau driver is the free software driver that was created by clean-room reverse engineering NVIDIA's binary Linux driver. It has been in development for several years with 2D, 3D, and video support. The DRM component is set to enter the Linux 2.6.33 kernel as a staging driver. This is coming as a surprise move after yesterday Linus began ranting over Red Hat not upstreaming Nouveau and then Red Hat attributing this delay to microcode issues. The microcode issue is temporarily worked around by removing it from the driver itself and using the kernel's firmware loader to insert this potentially copyrighted work instead."
No it means that linux will ship with an open source alternative to the closed source Nvidia drivers.
The official closed source driver creates a proprietary dependency on an otherwise open OS kernel.
This irks some free software hippies and it also makes using Nvidia hardware on unsupported hardware platforms more difficult.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
And I know fuck all about Linux, so it must work easily. I read nvidia cards worked well, and it certainly seemed to go smoother than the Radeon in my old laptop.
You've probably paid for it with operating system crashes. Your time spent waiting for a reboot, re-creating lost work, and troubleshooting the failure is probably worth money. If a driver is Free (in the GNU sense), developers of the kernel and the X server can trace into it to see what's going wrong. Interactions with black boxes are much harder to debug.
It also irks people who noticed that a huge amount of devices didn't get 64 bit Windows drivers, because it was a lot more profitable to get people to buy new scanners, printers and webcams. Precisely thanks to this I now have a perfectly good color laser printer and scanner that my brother can't use anymore.
Experience shows that if you trust the manufacturer will release updated drivers when they become needed, you're going to get screwed sooner or later. His new scanner (also made by Canon, guess he doesn't learn) looks nearly identical, and has pretty much the same specs. The only difference is that the light has been replaced with LEDs, but really he didn't gain anything from the new model.
A number of reverse engineering tools were developed for the Nouveau effort. Some of that can be used for similar efforts with other hardware. Most of that can be used should a new graphics driver architecture come out of nVidia. I have often wonder how long it will take if the Nouveau status matrix gets a new column, for that new generation of card to get support. It's been like 3 years for all the existing ones.