Nvidia Drops Support For Its Open Source Driver

An anonymous reader writes "While Nvidia is not open-source friendly (despite public outcries over the years), they have traditionally supported the xf86-video-nv driver to provide basic mode setting support and other basic functionality. However, with the 'Fermi' and future products, even that open source support will cease to exist. Nvidia has announced they are dropping this open source support for future GPUs and really ending it altogether. Nvidia's recommendation is to just use the generic X.Org VESA driver to navigate their way to nvidia.com so that they can install the proprietary driver. Fortunately there is the Nouveau project that provides a 2D and 3D video driver for Nvidia's hardware, but Nvidia fails to acknowledge it nor support their efforts in any form." David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.

Comments

And yet they're still the only cards...

[Gordonjcp]

... that are actually supported in Linux. Intel cards have very primitive support (good luck if you want TV out, or if you want your laptop screen to come back after going into suspend), and ATI have no functional support at all.

How hard can it be for a manufacturer to get a tiny bit of clue about this?

Re:News to me

[Arker]

You dont know what you are talking about. At best the binary blob "supports" a limited subset of linux-based systems, and even that not properly. You may find it "works well" for you on your specific setup, and you may be myopic enough to not care about anyone or anything else, but fortunately not everyone is so short-sighted. To properly support a free system requires that the actual software (NOT a derivative blob) be available and free as well. To properly support linux specifically means to comply with the requirements of the kernel team so that the driver appears in the kernel tree and is maintained as part of the kernel. A binary blob has never and will never constitute support, period.