Reports: NVIDIA Launching a Distro of Its Own (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: There are unconfirmed reports that NVIDIA is working on its own Linux distribution dubbed "NLINUX." This NLINUX is supposedly a Linux platform optimized for gamers and similar to SteamOS, but NVIDIA has yet to confirm these reports and the sole evidence appears to be a circulating screenshot of an NLINUX install screen. Would you be interested in a Linux distribution created by an IHV? Somewhat similar is Intel's own Linux distribution, Clear Linux, that offers high performance Linux on Intel x86_64 hardware.

Comments

Hoax

[Tenebrousedge]

It's a hoax. I modded it down in Firehose and am pissed it made the front page. That screenshot is from some page on NVIDIA's site, with an edited header. This is a non-story, and it should be blatantly obvious by now they have no interest in Linux interop.

Re:In house testing version. So what.

[BitZtream]

Just be grateful it's not FreeBSD which they they could totally embrace and not have to release any code for.

Why would I be grateful?

If they did this for FreeBSD and kept all the code private and too themselves, how am I any worse off than I am right now? What did I lose?

Whats that? I didn't lose anything because I never had that new code they wrote for FreeBSD?

What else? You're just an ignorant GPL fanboy lying about code being 'closed' and spreading FUD? Yea, I saw that already.

Games will run in VM's in a client game OS.

You want some drivers for your VMs so you can have drivers for your OS and the VM it runs in?

More virtualization IS NOT THE SOLUTION, IT IS A SYMPTOM OF THE PROBLEM. People virtualize things because their OS fails at its basic task of separating applications into their own containers. If OSes weren't such a disorganized mess (Example: Linux throws EVERYTHING into /usr/bin /usr/lib ect so everything you install has to work together or conflicts with each other, i.e. Linux is actually more of a DLLHell offender than Windows which actually HAS defined a space for non-system types of code ... people still install to the system directories but its not the right thing to do.

In linux, writing to the system directories for any random binary or config ... thats totally normal and expected ... and pretty stupid. Maybe Linux should steal this from FreeBSD? 'man heir' on a FBSD box and learn a few things about why no one wants to write commercial software for your fanboy OS

No you need drivers for your OS so that it can work with your VM ... and your hypervisor needs drivers to work with the OS it runs in ... or hardware directly. So now you've just got another piece of software that needs drivers ... you've just doubled your software maintenance effort and gained nothing at all except slower performance.

Good job on using a VM there, brilliant.

On an aside I am actually more surprised that VMWare hasn't tried to team up with AMD. AMD could create specialized CPU extensions that speed up Virtualization

. . . You do realize that every CPU that matters for virtualization ... HAS INSTRUCTIONS TO SUPPORT VIRTUALIZATION ... right? If AMD just started now ... they'd be way behind ... but they, just like Intel, started adding hardware virtualization support right around the 386 time period, but from the way you're thinking, hell everyone had extended page tables (which is a big speed booster for virtualization) and hardware/PCI virtualization support back in 2009 ... so you might even say that they did this already ... YEARS AGO.