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Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Goes Stable On Linux

Posted by timothy on from the stable-means-it's-got-horsepower-right? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The open source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered incarnation of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver for Linux, has reached its biggest milestone. The Nouveau driver is now being considered stable within the Linux kernel and leaving the staging area, with the pledge of a stable ABI. Phoronix has summarized the state of the Nouveau driver, which works fine if you don't care about performance or are fine with running hardware that's a few generations old."

3 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Doesn't cut it on my hardware... by GrumpyOldMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Besides spotty hardware supprt, AFAIK it is also missing VDPAU (HD video decoding) support, which is the main reason a lot of HTPC types use Nvidia cards in their linux machines. It is also fairly hard to remove. I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.

    As a Linux (and other *nix) driver guy, I have tons of respect for how Nvidia deals with the constant, gratuitous changes in the Linux kernel APIs.

  2. Allows mulitple monitors with rotation by portablejim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One thing which you cannot do with the official NVIDIA driver for GNU/Linux is have mixed rotation monitors. (I would like to be proven wrong - have even tried to prove myself wrong, but given up).

    I currently have one monitor in portrait and one monitor in landscape and one monitor in landscape, with the ability to drag windows from one to the other. I have some acceleration, which allows me to see through terminal windows.

    Nouveau works, official one does not work. Simple choice.

    --
    kers at the wrong moment What happens when you catch stock tic
  3. Depressing standard of comments. by Mr+EdgEy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The comments on this story really do illustrate how the readership of Slashdot really has changed over the past few years.
    This is a real "News for Nerds" story, a story about open source development and how we're still not really past the bad old days of winmodems when it comes to (real, not binary blob) hardware support by manufacturers.

    A full half of the comments I can see above seem to be troll posts along the lines of "LOL M8 DOESNT RUN UNREAL TOURNAMENT 27".

    Oh dear.