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

Re:Year of the linux desktop

[sjalexander]

yeah, but it's 7 PM tomorrow, so it doesn't count.

Thank goodness for those drivers

[Arancaytar]

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.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[rastilin]

So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem? This is hardly a new situation, so presumably you knew this when you bought your Nvidia chipset.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[QuantumG]

Please see the last NVIDIA linux drivers story.. for fuck sake.. it's only been a month.

      http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/11/1556237

Go argue with last month.

 

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[l2718]

I have such a chipset and I've been cursing NVIDIA on a regular basis.

You must be new to this "Linux" thing. That your Hardware OEM is providing Linux drivers at all is highly unusual. That the drivers are effective is astounding -- that the installer provided the drivers is rudimentary is not worth complaining over. In any case if you really mind I'm sure you can write a replacement installer.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[timbo234]

I haven't had to do that for a few years now, modern distributions (Mandriva and OpenSuse for eg.) automatically setup DKMS or use some other mechanism to update the NVIDIA drivers automagically when a new kernel boots.

That said however it'd be better to have a working NVIDIA driver in the kernel, as these solutions are a bit hacky and potentially an open-source driver would have a faster pace of development (instead of being the poor cousin to the Windows drivers in NVIDIA's internal development priorities).

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[BrokenHalo]

So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?

Indeed, I have no problem with that. I've been using Linux or long enough to remember having to spend a lot of time getting around issues of hardware compatibility. Nvidia was in there quite early on providing good drivers for its chipsets at a time when just about every other manufacturer just shrugged its shoulders and told us to "Fuck off, We don't support Linux."

That alone has promoted a lot of goodwill as far as I'm concerned, and so nVidia chipsets are right at the top of my preferred brands list. So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[Culture20]

So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?

Indeed, I have no problem with that. I've been using Linux or long enough to remember having to spend a lot of time getting around issues of hardware compatibility. Nvidia was in there quite early on providing good drivers for its chipsets at a time when just about every other manufacturer just shrugged its shoulders and told us to "Fuck off, We don't support Linux." That alone has promoted a lot of goodwill as far as I'm concerned, and so nVidia chipsets are right at the top of my preferred brands list. So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.

Goodwill Schmoodwill. This is business. For quite some time, the only way I've been able to easily install Ubuntu on several of my Nvidia machines has been by swapping out the graphics card(s) for ATI, installing the OS and nvidia drivers, then installing the Nvidia cards again. True, this is an Ubuntu issue, since they insist on a GUI install only (sorry, but the alternate CD is a pain, at least use curses to emulate a GUI before making Mom and Pop use Debian), and they don't include the nvidia driver on the CD. The nv and vesa drivers are both broken for lots of nvidia cards (nv causes green verical lines, and vesa just crashes X continuously.
If Nvidia had created a usable neutered (2D) OSS driver that Just Worked (TM) with their cards, a la ATI/IBM, then I'd still be suggesting their cards for Linux newbies like I did back in the Aughties. Instead, I've been suggesting IBM first, ATI next, and Nvidia only for experienced folk who need superior OpenGL cards.

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: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.

Re:Thank goodness for those drivers

[ikekrull]

Theres another side to this - if you have ever tried to work with 3D apps on Linux, free or commercial - Blender, Maya or written your own OpenGL apps, and wanted support for the standards and good performance, you would realise that NVidia is your only choice. Compared to their commercial rivals, and the open source community, they do a *stellar* job at supporting Linux.

Every other manufacturer has provided such piss-poor reliability and/or performance under Linux, they just aren't an option.

I think its great that AMD docs and lots of hard work by the Xorg and driver coders mean that radeon drivers are getting to the point where they challenge NVidias status in this area, but for the last 5 years, AMD/ATI were next to useless on Linux for serious work, and Intel graphics weren't (and still aren't) an option where anything even remotely current in terms of OpenGL API usage (e.g. GLSL shaders) are concerned.

The Open Source community has done an awful job of architecting their graphics stack, with no foresight, planning or consistency across drivers. Thats not a bash, thats the natural result of open source evolution, and why they're rearchitecting it.

Now this is being reworked, we're seeing massive churn and widespread breakage. NVidia saw this coming and wrote their drivers to bypass this mess. Many of the design decisions taken by the Xorg guys are very much influenced by how NVidia handles things.

Intel, supposedly the paragon of openness and open source, managed to show a massive performance regression in the kernel and X.org revisions prior to the current ones, and their latest 'Poulsbo' chipsets have no documentation, and no open source drivers. Intel's support for these cards on Linux is way worse than NVidia. Theyre also walking away from any open source OSes except Linux by relying on Linux-only kernel mode setting.

AMD/ATI continue to release fglrx drivers that are plagued with bugs, refuse to release documentation of current products, and have 2D performance that is so abysmal it makes the VESA framebuffer look pretty good in comparison. AMD/ATI open source drivers (while improving greatly and probably a good option today for people who don't really need full OpenGL coverage,) are very much a work in progress, incapable of running even moderately advanced OpenGL apps, and they too are dumping any support for non-Linux open source OSes.

As a 3D developer, I can't rely on anything but NVidia to work, and stay working across distro upgrades. If thats the definition of 'horrible job at supporting Linux', i think you need your head read. There just isn't anything else that is usable for professional or semi-professional 3D work on Linux.

I am extremely grateful to NVidia for enabling any kind of consistent 3D support on Linux while everyone else, commercial or open source, struggles to catch up.

Re:Reverse engineered nVidia drivers?

[QuantumG]

yes, Nouveau.. its referring to a previous Slashdot story late last year:

    http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/11/1556237

And yes, that link could have been supplied, but that would require some sort of editing.

Will the kernel ever get to 3?

[petes_PoV]

Most releases seem to be minor improvements: a few bug fixes, re-porting to another architecture, some new drivers and tweaks to (or reimplementations of) existing features such as VM or filesystems.

Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?

It does appear to me that all the kernel is doing these days is mimicking the features and support found in "other" operating systems - rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation and novelty, itself.It would be a shame if Linux just fell into line and became a follower in a world of twisty little O/S's, all the same rather than producing some killer features, unique to it's implementation, that made people WANT to run Linux on their desktops and enterprise systems.

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:Will the kernel ever get to 3?

[Kjella]

Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace? In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.

Kernels are best at being mediators, be it of CPU time, GPU time, IO bandwidth, network bandwidth, whatever. Something offers resources, something consumes resources and the OS is that gray glue in the middle. Whatever killer feature you want, you probably don't want it in the kernel. You want to write a desktop environment or an application or something, and the kernel will make sure it runs gracefully together with everything else. There's a quite a few more bits to the kernel, but they're just adoptees brought into the kernel for performance reasons.

3D

[Lord Lode]

If those NVidia drivers don't support hardware accelerated 3D, then I really don't understand the point. 3D hardware acceleration is 15 years old. Linux is an operating system that should be at the frontline of technology. Working in the dark ages of pre-3D acceleration, the times of Motif GUI's, should be far past us. How can something that ignores such an important part of the graphics card, almost half the computation power of the whole computer is there, be accepted?

If they do support 3D, then congratulations, ignore my post above :)

Re:3D

[ledow]

Ignoring the obvious troll:

Anything that works will be accepted, like every other driver in the kernel... if it doesn't make *everything* work, that's not a big problem. Especially new drivers rarely have code that actually makes the device inherently useful, or supremely accelerated, immediately - but it will function. That's how you code - one bit at a time, gradually building as you go. When you have all the DMA, 2D drawing, multiscreen crap worked out *THEN* you can think about 3D. At the moment, even simple combinations like dual-displays can cause major headaches with some chipsets, whether the hardware supports them or not.

The programmers are effectively working blind with unknown hardware - and programmers don't work that way, that's a reverse engineer's job. To say they can't merge *anything* until all the features are working just means you'll never see *anything* at all. But if they merge a 2D driver today, they can add basic 3D access tomorrow and 3D acceleration the day after and maybe some day you'll see something of use. If not, at least you'll be able to boot Linux and *see* something in X-Windows on any computer that runs off that chipset (or has backwards compatibility for it).

You will not see full 3D accelerated drivers for any chipset (especially not any that compete with manufacturer's drivers in terms of acceleration) that matters to you on a new computer until manufacturers fully co-operate and help get coding too. Don't expect it, don't complain about it, don't moan when it doesn't happen or only "obsolete" chipsets ever get 3D support. When the manufacturer's co-operate, it takes nothing to make a driver. When they don't, it means knowing *everything* they know before you can really start properly.

Re:3D

[ettlz]

Because 3D requires a lot more complex heavy lifting that I don't want in the kernel when it fucks up. Teletype is quite lightweight by comparison.

Re:huh?

[rubycodez]

guess again, New Zealand is part of the continent Zealandia

it is NOT part of the continent of Australia, different shelf.

makes sense our schools gave up teaching geography and history, who needs that when we have blogs.

Re:huh?

[gardyloo]

Oh, this fighting is fun (and I have no horse in the race!). Note that even in the most generous listing of continents (comprising 7), New Zealand is NOT separated from Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number_of_continents

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.