Nouveau NVIDIA Driver To Enter Linux 2.6.33 Kernel

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 11, 2009 @04:43AM from the no-excuses dept.

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."

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Re:I'm not an Avid Linux User... by Game_Ender · 2009-12-11 04:49 · Score: 5, Informative

No it means that linux will ship with an open source alternative to the closed source Nvidia drivers.
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive by binarylarry · 2009-12-11 05:00 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Just for those who wonder... by Corporate+Troll · 2009-12-11 05:04 · Score: 5, Informative

DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management