Slashdot Mirror
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."
yeah, but it's 7 PM tomorrow, so it doesn't count.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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).
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long