Next Linux Kernel Due Early March

swandives writes "The Linux.conf.au is in full-swing in Wellington, New Zealand, and Computerworld Australia has an interview with Jon Corbet in the leadup to his Kernel Report. The latest kernel release is due early March and will include reversed-engineered drivers for Nvidia chipsets."

Comments

Or just use a decent distribution

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I have such a chipset and I've been cursing NVIDIA on a regular basis. After updating to any new kernel, I must boot into no-X mode, then run the proprietary driver installer."

Or you could get one of the many, many, many Linux distributions that handle this automatically. Mandriva comes the mind since it has handled this stuff for years and is extremely user friendly, but as I say there are many other options as well.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[thue]

Except that the two other major Graphics providers, Intel and AMD, both give the Linux community far better support than NVIDIA. Intel is writing excellent well-integrated open source drivers themselves, which AMD is providing full specs, which has allowed others to write drivers. AMD's making the specs available is far better Linux support than NVIDIA making closed source drivers available.

NVIDIA has provided neither open source drivers, firmware, nor specs. So the open source developers have to resort to reverse engineer the drivers. And to make all kinds of jumping through hoops to use the firmware, which NVIDIA has not allowed to be redistributed in binary form.

So I think we have every right to criticize NVIDIA when comparing to the marked at large. They are doing a horrible job at supporting Linux.

Re:Will the kernel ever get to 3?

[Lennie]

Linux has: USB3 before any other OS, hotswap-memory, hotswap-cpu, hotswap-pci, hotswap-scsi, numa, scales to I don't know how many nodes in a cluster and cpu-configurations. Runs on the most possible hardware-archictures (NetBSD is not the top dog in this field anymore). Has the most build-in drivers of any OS. Thus runs on really small and really large. Is used for embedded from wallplugs to netbooks all the way up to smaller mainframes. Manufacturers of TV's, networking-devices like switches use it for the control-plane. It also has the broadest range of filesystem support, etc. most of the websites you visit are running on Linux, so it's heavily used in that field as wel. I think Linux is used by the innovators, because you can change it. Some people say Google does innovation, they use Linux for pretty much everything.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[jedidiah]

nv drivers broken for a lot of cards? Which ones would these be? They would not happen to be perchance cards that any Windows users would consider laughingly out of date?

I think you will find legions of users that think you are full of sh*t and especially full of sh*t for adding Ubuntu to your rant.