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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."

47 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. "a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sorry, this is kind of off, but still interesting and related as this was work done by reverse engineering. How do you reverse engineer on Linux, or other UNIX systems like OS X and BSD? Windows has many great software like IDA and OllyDBG, but seems there's just no such things available for Linux or UNIX. The problem isn't even about using console programs, it's about showing the debugging process and being able to put breakpoints.

    1. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Development
      I'm no engineer, not even a reverse engineer, but I'd probably start with a bus analyzer, gdb, and follow some kernel/driver debugging lists.
      Dear reader, feel free to tell me how wrong this approach is.

    2. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by cheater512 · · Score: 2

      strace, gdb, etc...

    3. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Umm, IDA is available on Linux.

    4. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      We don't reverse engineer the code, we reverse engineer what is sent to the card. Linux can dump everything going through the PCIE bus, that's the so-called mmiotrace.

      We only reverse engineer by taking the binary driver as a blackbox, sending commands and seeing what comes out.

      Martin Peres - Nouveau developper

    5. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Uhhh...If you are Mr Peres, why don't you have an account instead of posting AC? After all both Eric Raymond and even Linus Torvalds has accounts, even if Linus naturally hasn't got the time to use his much.

      Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?

      If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?

      Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    6. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      For one thing, DMCA only fits if they actually implemented some type of protection scheme which may or may not be the case. In either case, this does not apply at all as the DRM isn't being broken. The blackbox driver is working as intended and not taken apart in any way, it's like trying to see how a car works without actually taking it apart by systematically doing what you normally would do anyways and recording it's response.

      Instead of running a program that sends a large set of commands to the driver and having it returns random responses, you send 1 specific command at a time and recording each response so you are able to reproduce it in their own driver.

      What they are doing, is basically mapping the interface (doorway as you will) to the blackbox driver. An interface can not be copyrighted (this has some precedence in court rulings and is done often like emulators). It's only illegal once you start copying either parts of the source code or machine code. If you copy the outside, the inside really doesn't matter in the greater scheme (though of course there are issues of performances and driver specific bugs)

      Yes, this is an insane amount of work and these people should be respected greatly especially if they are not being paid to help improve linux.

      (Different Anon)

    7. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Forever+Wondering · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now for my other question, since you are basically snatching the data from a binary blob which i'm sure is full of proprietary code, after all if it wasn't they could just FOSS the thing, do you worry about DMCA? i know that AMD can't release full specs on their GPUs because protected path isn't theirs and would break DMCA and since Nvidia cards i'm sure have protected path as well do you have to worry about legal ramifications? or have you set up the project in some place that doesn't recognize software patents?

      What nouveau development does is feed data through the API and look at the I/O ports and what data they get. The developers are feeding data they "own" [e.g. the address of a frame buffer they created] and then retrieving it after it is transmuted. Virtually all devices in a system (e.g. disk controllers, etc.) have a port list so just having that is not novel (i.e. not patentable). Since nVidia isn't publishing a document on the port list, no copyright either. Might be claimed as a proprietary trade secret, but it's okay to reverse engineer in this manner [reverse engineer is a protected activity under the right "clean room" circumstances].

      The "clean room" methodology has been court tested many times. In this instance, we have three groups that do not communicate, except in controlled ways. Group A does the above "port probing" and writes a document of their findings. Group B writes an API document using only Group A's report. Group C uses the API document generated by Group B to write the device driver code.

      If you ARE Mr Peres I would like to say I admire your guts, frankly I wouldn't want to go within 100 yards of anything to do with video as long as all these crazy patents and lawsuits are going on. And how about hardware acceleration of video? How can you do that without ending up in the whole H.26x patent minefield?

      No doubt nVidia has a license to H.264 patents. Under the exhaustion doctrine, anyone can benefit from using the API to output H.264 video. If that were not the case, any end user [even using nVidia's proprietary driver], would be required to pay H.264 patent licensing fees. Likewise for the use of one's home entertainment system.

      However, that doesn't mean some folks don't try. Lodsys [a patent troll] licensed a patent to Apple. Apple incorporated the technology under an API that software developers can use. Lodsys has been trying to extract license fees from all software developers that use the Apple API. Apple is intervening in court to stop Lodsys using the exhaustion doctrine as the basis for their challenge against Lodsys in defense of the developers.

      Frankly I think its a shame that such questions even have to be asked as while i have no problems with proprietary software and use both FOSS and proprietary software every day i do NOT support software patents but as long as that minefield exists I am curious how you intend to approach feature parity with the blob driver without stepping into the whole patent mess since one of the big uses of GPUs is video processing and that's patented up the wazoo.

      It's not so much the patent mess (as I mentioned above), but rather the difficulty of deducing the port list, API doc, etc. using the clean room method. The 2D case is [relatively] easy enough. The 3D case [with a large number of acceleration modes, etc.] is a lot more work, many more test cases, etc. Sheer scope of such an undertaking is the biggest limiting factor.

      --
      Like a good neighbor, fsck is there ...
    8. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by mupuf · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ok, I created an account. It will be simpler for others to follow. Comparing me to Linus or Eric Raymond is really over-the-top. I'm just a PhD student who has been working on power management in nouveau for little more than 1.5 years.

      Anyway, the answers to your post are right, clean-room REing is legal. The shady part is for the firmwares that you have to decode in order to re-implement them. Fortunately, we know nvidia used a compiler to compile them. As we write them in asm only and don't use the same interface, I guess we are pretty covered.

      As for video decoding, nVidia though about us and added a "safe" for the encryption keys. So yes, we can re-implement video decoding (it is an on-going work, but it's ugly) but the compliance with hdcp will never come.

      As for software patents, we do our best not to do things covered by them but sometimes we have to. In this case, we think about the sane countries that could benefit our code (most of them are "sane" ;)).

      Lastly, nVidia said they would neither help nor hinder the project. If there is something they don't like, I'm sure they will let us know before going to court. If they wanted to go to the court, that would be one hell of a pain since they would have to sue individuals from many countries, mostly european.
      Most of us are students, that would be bad PR to sue us :D

    9. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Alex+Belits · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Congratulations, you are an idiot!

      On Linux, you have a small piece of proprietary software running on an open source system entirely controlled by the developer. Most of reverse engineering is non-interactive, by running a driver/hardware combination while its interactions are watched by other software.

      On Windows, everything but your own code is proprietary, including reverse-engineering tools themselves, and you have no way to modify most of the environment or include any kind of automated logging. You are pretty much forced to single-step through giant blobs while watching disassembled code in a multitude of little windows.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
    10. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by Alex+Belits · · Score: 3, Funny

      Shut up, hairyfeet, you are supposed to write pages and pages about horrors of not having a single unchanging ABI for kernel drivers, so poor proprietary drivers developers can write shit drivers.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
    11. Re:"a reverse-engineered incarnation" by mupuf · · Score: 2

      I was familiar with clean room because I was once part of such a project. I was aware nVidia drivers had parts that they considered to be "secret sauce" algorithms (and ATI didn't?). From what you said, I'm assuming it was the firmware which must be loaded onto the card?

      I'm only vaguely familiar with the requirements for HDCP compliance, but I'm guessing that safeguarding keys is part of it. So, my assumption is that nVidia needed to do that, in general, rather than to specifically make it difficult for the nouveau project.

      Perhaps, the libdvdcss approach by players will work. The players don't have de-CSS capabilities themselves, but they do look around for the lib. If it "happens to be around" (e.g. liability is shifted to the end user who downloaded it separately), they will use it.

      In other words, you always need the card, so everything else is protected without needing specific protection of its own.

      My answer to all that is that nVidia cards are mostly software nowadays (except for the real rendering/computing core). Nvidia uses a common ISA for most engines. It was reversed engineered when Fermi was out and took more than a year before we wrote our core firmwares by ourselves. I'm currently writing the hardware monitoring firmware as a first experience with this ISA.

      These firmwares execute on harvard "microcontrolers" and all have some special capabilities depending on the engine they run on.

      The firmwares themselves aren't secure at all and aren't meant to be anyway. However, some "memory pages" can be marked as secret so as you can't access them from the host unless you know the "password". I never studied this part, if you are interested, you can read what has already been documented: https://github.com/pathscale/envytools/blob/master/hwdocs/fuc-vm.txt

      In the end, the card itself isn't particularly needed since it is mostly software and we should be able to fake many things. But what's the point of hdcp anyway?

      Another assurance for nVidia is that they know how slow going the RE is, compared to what they can do. They'll always be several steps ahead, no matter what. So, nouveau is no "threat" to them. The only people they're really concerned about are competitors like AMD/ATI and Intel that make HW.

      Right, by the time the hw is shipped, nVidia doesn't worry anymore about their secrets. Nouveau is thus not a problem for them. However, yesterday, the 3d driver for Kepler was released, less than a month after the release of the first Kepler GPU. Some people in the Nouveau really are in-human :D

      Be thankful you're in Europe. In the US, the RIAA has been known to sue widows and orphans :-)

      Yeah, the US is always crazy about IP. Can't wait for the whole damn thing be to reformed to be friendlier with those who really do make the country go forward.

  2. Or if you care about free software... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    Which I do, but I also care about performance. I've found myself having to switch back and forth between it and the propreitary Nvidia driver on some machines.

    1. Re:Or if you care about free software... by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Summary is wrong. The nouveau driver is several orders of magnitude FASTER than the proprietary driver.. Well, for 2D acceleration. It is quite slower for 3D, but I don't really play games on Linux, so 2D is more important to me.

      The nouveau driver really solves he Achilles heel of NVidia on Linux. 2D performance.

    2. Re:Or if you care about free software... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

      http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage

      Maybe this?

      Or this perhaps: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/HardwareStatus

      From what I've read 2D *is* faster for many of the cards but not all, and only notably so for the older ones that Nvidia has shuffled off to their "legacy" driver. 3D, from what I have heard, does not work at all on most cards, and is massively slower across the board on the few older cards for which there is some minimal support working thus far.

      Maybe my information is out-dated now but I would say if you have archaic Nvidia hardware (AGP-era and earlier) then this driver may be a breath of fresh air for you as far as features (KMS support, woo-woo!) and 2D application performance. For all other purposes... eh, I'd say the future of this project shows promise but it could use some generosity from Nvidia of the same sort they provided for the forcedeth ethernet driver.

  3. Re:incredibly bad move by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Way to go guys.. you've now given Nvidia massive disincentive to continue to do more work with their MODERN drivers.

    Competition is usually a motivation to improve rather than stagnate.

    Wouldn't be at all surprised to see things like VDPAU and CUDA recieve even more attention from Nvidia. Maybe even features like KMS might happen now...

  4. Nothng but Hate by goodgod43 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's amazing to me that there is so much flame out there for this. None of you could do this, Not a single one of you have tried, and yet, this small group of dedicated people have actually figured out a piece of proprietary hardware to the point of having their code included in the Linux kernel? Way to go guys.

    --
    "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle." -Linus Torvalds
    1. Re:Nothng but Hate by ghn · · Score: 2

      +1 to you. Congrats to the Nouveau developers. That is a major accomplishment.

    2. Re:Nothng but Hate by pankkake · · Score: 2

      Yep. People who will never be users or contributors, not matter what they say. They're here because they don't do anything meaningful with their lives, so they have to undermine the work of others.

      The only winning move is to ignore them.

      --
      Kill all hipsters.
  5. Software freedom trumps proprietorship every time. by jbn-o · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Software freedom is important for its own sake. You're better off with a less functional free implementation than a more powerful and reliable proprietary implementation in numerous practical ways programmers and users have known for decades.

    If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all. Proprietors control your computer and tell you what you can do with it. Free software gives you the freedom to control your own computer. One can learn to program and understand the Nouveau source code: maintain the code to work on more OSes and work with more hardware, free from the fear of DRM (digital restrictions management). If you're not a programmer, like most computer users aren't, you can still help the effort by giving programmers what they need to help you in return. Often that's money, equipment, good bug reports, documentation translations, and writing documentation for the software.

    We're better off relying on each other in freedom than we are depending on a proprietor. Socially, we can't build a better future for ourselves by relying on secret software. We should be allowed to fully own and control our computers and we'll get there with software freedom.

    Nvidia should have told their customers how to fully use the equipment they sold. Nouveau hackers are remedying that deficiency. I'm grateful for the valuable work Nouveau hackers are doing for all of us.

    --
    Digital Citizen
  6. Re:incredibly bad move by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    They are presently suffering togetherness issues on both fronts(Intel because Intel denied them authorization to build any QPI chipsets, AMD because AMD now owns ATI...); but Nvidia shoved a pretty significant number of integrated graphics chipsets out the door in the past few years. For a while, they more or less were the embedded graphics option for AMD boards, and they presented a fairly persuasive offer on the Intel side, given the dire state of Intel graphics.

    That's quite a few performance-insensitive Nvidia parts in the world, in addition to the discrete ones, which usually indicate some level of interest in performance, or at least driving a greater-than-default number of heads...

  7. Tegra by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    2) buy someone elses (likely)

    And this is what NVIDIA has done. NVIDIA bought a license for ARM's CPU and built the Tegra SoC around it.

  8. Re:incredibly bad move by gmack · · Score: 4, Informative

    The last time someone came up with a replacement for an Nvidia driver was for the ethernet drivers and Nvdia ended up discontinuing their own and contributing to the open source driver instead. If this happens again we are all better off.

  9. Why all the hate /.? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously guys why all the hate? Sure it doesn't work for everyone, it works on old hardware. But here's the deal, it works and is sufficient for day to day use. Here's the amazing and nerdy part of it too, they REVERSE ENGINEERED IT. Something as complicated as a video card. That's no small feat and they should be congratulated for their efforts to make linux just that much better. Start hating when you contribute something with any significance at all. BTW I'm not a kernel developer, just a nerd that appreciates a feat such as this.

    1. Re:Why all the hate /.? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dammit, posted AC. That'll learn me to not log in.

      Yeah I hate it when I accidentally forget to log in, and then accidentally type in a CAPTCHA, and then accidentally click "Submit", and then realize "shit, I forgot to log in!".

      Gets me every time.

    2. Re:Why all the hate /.? by chuckymonkey · · Score: 2

      Well, before that I'd honestly never posted AC before :P. I didn't know that the CAPTCHA was just for AC since I post fairly infrequently these days I actually thought it was something new. But when you say it like that, yes it was kinda stupid.

      --
      "Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
    3. Re:Why all the hate /.? by tiqui · · Score: 2

      The Nouveau guys and the distro guys brought the "hate" on themselves

      First, the Nouveau guys did a remarkable thing (a very good effort at reversing a very complicated thing and providing a somewhat functional result), but then it was jammed into the distros before it was ready and in a way that was just amazingly annoying. Hint to Linux distribution people: if you are going to bundle a buggy, not-really-ready driver into a release, make it an obvious obvious checkbox-type option at install time like this:

      Install super-buggy and annoying, very slow but ideologically-pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow video driver people say usually works as long as you do nothing serious and do not care about performance video driver [x]

      I originally thought this project sounded admirable and wished the developers well, but I now despise this driver.

      Part of the problem is the oft-cited and completely dishonest use of the word "free" by some open-source advocates. "Freedom" is not, and never should be: "freedom for me to demand that you do things my way". Open source advocates often rant about "freedom", particularly for the users of software... but then they erect completely unnecessary barriers/annoyances to try to manipulate those very same users into only using certain software, or only using it in certain ways. I use Linux precisely because I value my freedom, and that includes my freedom to do anything I want with that software... but that includes one of the most important freedoms of all: running proprietary code. When somebody does something that blocks my use of proprietary code, or prevents that code from doing certain things, or reports proprietary code as "tainted" (an act that serves no legitimate purpose other than to scare less-educated users away from proprietary code) he perverts the very notion of "freedom". Installing a marginal open source driver automatically (without asking at install time) in a manner that makes it just an annoying extra task to get rid of it (and keep it from continually rising from the grave to attack again) is an act that just baits users to hate the auto-installed thing.

      I run multiple proprietary and very specialized CAD applications which run perfectly on Linux with the proprietary Nvidia drivers... we get a better user experience on Linux than on Windows (for non-video driver related reasons). With the Nouveau drivers, the applications are essentially unusable, therefore Nouveau harms the reputation of Linux... it makes newer releases of Linux look buggy and in need of manual tweaking and fixing. The Nouveau driver must be manually removed and replaced with real Nvidia drivers that actually work. Then, when the systems auto-update certain components, things break and we have to re-install the proprietary drivers (again, making Linux look buggy, when it never was before). This is a new pain-in-the-butt we never used to have to deal with. Ever since Nouveau went into the build, nearly every IT problem we have (and all the wasted time solving it) is tied directly to the presence of Nouveau. I now want the project to die a fast and painful death.... though I am open to it rising again and re-entering the distros someday when it is fully functional (speed and compatability are a very basic part of functionality). Video drivers are very unlike many other drivers; they can have a critical impact on everything in the system in ways that a printer driver, for example, does not. It's a major screw-up to auto-install a known-bad driver into a system by default. Note: bad in this context means "does not function properly and with the proper speed on all associated hardware" rather than "waaaaahhhhh! the programmers would not give me their source code! waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!"

      Fanboys who say the Nouveau drivers work great ( as long as you only do certain things, or only use certain cards, and as long as you do not care about performance, etc... ) should just go back to their e-mail, twitter, and web browsing (and other tasks so simple they can be done on a tablet) and let those of us who need our systems to really work, in a stable manner, with excellent performance, decide when a driver is finally minimally acceptable.

  10. No, nVidia isn't stupid by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They realize their top notch drivers are a big selling point of their hardware. You'll find more than a couple people who have the opinion that AMD has good graphics hardware, crippled by poor drivers.

    nVidia will only discontinue Linux drivers if the market shrinks to such a size that it is no longer worth it. If Linux becomes an "embedded only" OS or something they'll stop. However so long as it is being used a reasonable amount, they'll keep making drivers for it (they also have FreeBSD and Solaris drivers to give you an idea).

    Particularly since it is a big market for their GPGPU stuff. When people get a big multi-card Tesla system, they sometimes want to run Linux on it. That is only doable with first flight drivers that have all the features supported, work with the latest hardware, and give up nothing in terms of speed.

    1. Re:No, nVidia isn't stupid by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't forget that render farms are a major franchise for NVidia and Linux pretty much owns that space.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  11. 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.

  12. Awesome! by starseeker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm using this driver (well, probably a slightly older version of it) with my desktop now, and so far I've been pleasently surprised. I don't need blazing fast performance on 3D for most things. FlightGear/OpenArena level games are about as far as I'm likely to push, since I'm not into the latest and greatest FPS anymore. Given that, the prospect of an integrated driver that "just works" without having to do anything extra is awesome.

    My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
  13. 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
    1. Re:Allows mulitple monitors with rotation by dbIII · · Score: 2
      I'm doing it now with the NVIDIA driver - one horizontal and one vertical. The line in xorg.conf for the vertical screen is:

      Option "Rotate" "Left"

      Now for some reason the GUI tool doesn't include that option but it can be done by adding that option to the configuration file.

      I think there also might be a driver independent way to do with RandR as well instead of in xorg.conf but I haven't touched RandR for a while.
      Of course if Nouveau already does what you want then there's no reason to stop using it even if there are other ways to solve the problem. I'm just pointing out an option that I probably found deep in the long NVIDIA readme file a year or two back and have used since.

  14. There's a cultural side to the open source thing.. by Gimbal · · Score: 2

    ...and it would seem to be a rather persistent thing, at that.

    Personally, I think it's great to hear some simple news about a non-trivial thing relating to a driver that also affects the overall performance of my own computer. That it's an article not written in marketspeak covered with a 20 gallon drum full of marketsauce, then, I guess that may also serve to comment to the technological integrity of the open source developer domain.

    But sure sure, we can troll, we can. Cheers.

  15. Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So true. I had a problem with my onboard network card a while ago. I dug up an old 3COM PCI 10/100 card, those cards were awesome and would survive god striking them. I put it in, boot Windows 64 bit and... obviously no driver. It's an old card and no one bothered to create a driver for Windows 7 64 bit. Then I reboot under Kubuntu also running 64 bit and hey, it's working.

  16. 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.

    1. Re:Depressing standard of comments. by Turnerj · · Score: 2

      At least the moderators are doing their job of making the better comments higher then. I think it is great that a stable open source version of the NVIDIA driver is available. I think what really should be taken away from this is that it is another improvement to the world of open source. The knowledge gained from reverse engineering and building a suitable alternative is really all that matters. Whether or not it can handle the most high end gear or not is relevant unless they pitched it as being able to.

    2. Re:Depressing standard of comments. by boristhespider · · Score: 2

      Exactly this. I'm not personally interested about the complexities of reverse-engineering, because I know it's too complex for my feeble brain, but I've a lot of respect for people who can do it even if I'd leave the open source driver another couple of years before using it. (I've no moral compunctions against binary blobs.) But I came to this thread pretty much knowing it was going to have the shit trolled out of it, entirely because of that part of the summary.

  17. Re:incredibly bad move by ArcherB · · Score: 2

    Not dismissing what's obviously a pretty daunting technical challenge, but still. The problem is...

    Why would you buy a $250 3D Nvidia card if you didn't care about performance?

    Well, you could dual boot. In this case you would want all the performance you can get while gaming in Windows. Since you are probably not gaming much in Linux, all you really need is enough power for desktop effects, which require a 3D driver.

    Or you could just by a $50 Nvidia GPU and use this driver with it. I don't thing it's limited to the latest and greatest Nvidia cards.

    --
    There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
  18. Your comments could've been said in 1991 of Linux by csirac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Point being: this shit is hard, and the current milestone represents a huge achievement. If everybody had the attitude that "well it sucks compared to [something else] right now, why bother", nothing hard would ever be attempted.

  19. Software patents fail by dbIII · · Score: 2

    It's a software patent thing that Nvidia are very sensitive about since they have some ex-SGI guys that have already been dragged through the courts once by patent trolls. I can't see them opening their drivers any time soon and I don't blame them for it.

  20. Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti by pankkake · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > If the proprietor stops supporting something and they're all you've got to depend on, you're out of luck left with an ugly choice to run increasingly obsolete code or (apparently needlessly) do without that functionality at all.

    And nVidia does exactly this, they drop old models from their drivers (it isn't that bad, the last time it happened to me, it was really old, and the machine stopped being relevant for desktop usage a long time before). Still, I like the tranquility of mind; that's why I switched to ATI cards everywhere. It's good to have choice again. The work of Nouveau developers is impressive, considering the competing open source ati drivers got a lot of help from AMD.

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    Kill all hipsters.
  21. Re:incredibly bad move by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

    Nvidia is not releasing drivers for gamers on Linux. Shocking I know. But this hasn't and most likely never will be why Nvidia releases Linux drivers.

    Nvidia does however, create drivers for their high end workstation cards.

    Wrong and right. nVidia DOES release drivers for gamers on Linux. How can you tell? They support old hardware. Look at the supported hardware list for the geforce driver, now compare to the supported hardware list for the ATI driver and laugh. Only the very newest nVidia cards ever lack Linux support, and then only the budget ones, and they get it within a few versions.

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    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  22. Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

    Because this driver will continue to be supported for as long as there is interest in it, not just until nVidia decides that it's time for you to buy a new GPU. A few years ago, nVidia released a driver with a remotely exploitable (kernel mode arbitrary code execution) vulnerability. When this was publicly disclosed (about a year after being reported to nVidia), they released a driver update that fixed it, but which didn't provide support for all of the cards that were vulnerable. You had two choices then if you had slightly older hardware: you could run a driver with a known vulnerability, or you could use the VESA driver and have no hardware acceleration at all. Now you'd have a third choice: run a slower driver that is maintained and constantly improving.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  23. Nouveau runs hot by sgage · · Score: 2

    I have no problem with the performance of the nouveau drivers, but compared to the proprietary drivers my card (8500 GT) runs quite a bit hotter. So I tend to stick with the proprietary drivers.

    If the nouveau devs can address this point, I'd be very content to stick with nouveau.

  24. Works for me - my thanks to the devs by sensei+moreh · · Score: 2

    Subject line says it all.

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    Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
  25. Re:Software freedom trumps proprietorship every ti by jawtheshark · · Score: 2

    You mean the 3C90x? The situation is even more twisted than what you described. You will find no 32 bit or 64 bit driver for download anywhere for it... BUT, that's not the whole story because there is a driver and you can get it over Microsofts online driver search.... I'm not kidding, in order to get this driver you need to be online already. In my journal I have documented this alongside my ramblings about the fanbois saying 7 has drivers for everything out of the box. Well the 3C90x definitely doesn't, at least not out of the box.

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    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)