What? Linus is happy, that means party time, right?
Nvidia slips love letter to open source driver devs
Nvidia is cozying up just a little with the open source community, with it emerging in late January that it's kicked some driver code into the Nouveau open source graphics driver project. The company has previously been the recipient of hate mail from the open source community as being difficult to work with. However, with a …
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 02:03 GMT Herby
Nof if they can get the current stuff to work properly
I'd be happy. At the present time their wonderful installer doesn't know the difference between 32 and 64 bit environments and gleefully installs in the wrong place. Then I need to go back and re-link things so adobe acrobat reader works correctly. You would think that they could get their act together.
Or: Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain. Oh, well.....
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 05:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Nof if they can get the current stuff to work properly @Herby
To be honest I've never encountered any problems like that. I don't use Adobe's Reader so I can't comment on that. Doubtless others will, to the effect that you're stupid for using stuff from Adobe. Because choice is good as long as you don't choose stuff from commercial companies ... :(
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 10:28 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: Nof if they can get the current stuff to work properly
Never had that problem with Debian. The installer always worked correctly (they have wrapped it quite a bit though).
I always use the binary driver, despite (or actually in a different sense of the word) because of all the flames.
Noveau and in the AMD case the free Radeon module do not handle correctly power management.
So if you use either, you can (and if it is fanless or laptop probably will) fry your GPU).
Examples - with noveau my fanless test Nvidia Quadro draws 20W (measured by difference in draw at "the wall") and is hovering close to its thermal limit. Same card with a correctly configured binary driver in idle is sub-5W and sub-50C. In the AMD case, either one of my laptops can and will exceed 80C if pushed despite the radeon module having dynclkcs=1. Same hardware, binary drivers, temp raises to 71-72 at max throttle and stays there.
So if this code drop does not contain the power management and the clock governors, well... not good enough. Thank you, I will come again later when it does.
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 10:53 GMT Havin_it
Re: Nof if they can get the current stuff to work properly
The radeon DPM support arrived in linux-3.11 and has pretty much put an end to the PM dramas. Before that I could indeed dry my hair using my laptop's fan vent, since then it's no longer an issue - in fact I'd say I got more heat out of it when I booted into Windows.
Both AMD and Nvidia would love to be able to bin their driver teams and let the volunteers do all the work for free. We know the only reason they don't is because of the "trade secret" (read: infringes the other side's patents and we know it) components that nobody's allowed to see.
I'm surprised we've never seen a leak of either side's driver source code in all this time. The NSA could learn a thing or two from this lot on keeping secrets.
-
-
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 09:21 GMT codejunky
About time
This is a good step from NVidia. We have steam porting to linux and now we have NVidia working with Nuoveau. If this works (and I hope it does) either ATI will have to better support the open source community or accept slipping sales, and the console manufacturers will have to up their game (pun intended) and make their games more platform independent.
I currently have a dual boot desktop with linux mint for work and win7 for games. If things continue I might be able to ignore a windows license and just use linux for both. More importantly it is about time the graphics card developers started to support linux better.
-
-
Tuesday 4th February 2014 15:00 GMT Nelbert Noggins
I'd consider work is stretching things a bit when the ATI drivers still only manage 2.0 audio over HDMI when using Linux.
Sure they'll accelerate video and video decoding, but HD sound > 2.0 Bitstreamed out the HDMI port?? When is that coming again??
If AMD ever decide to get their act together with that, maybe I'll stop using NVidia.
-
Wednesday 5th February 2014 18:56 GMT John Sanders
The anger at binary drivers
It is not about the binary drivers, no one cares about their precious binary drivers, IMHO they can stick them up where they store their stools.
What they get angry about is that Nvidia doesn't release the specs of the cards so the open source developers can get on with developing open source drivers.
It is not going to cost them much, and they will not be revealing any "trade secrets", "secret sauce" or whatever.
Nvidia is either retarded or on MS's pocket or both.
-
-
Friday 7th February 2014 12:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Wow, Linus's Expletive Worked!
It seems that my earlier comment featuring Linus's quote got rejected, so I had better not include it this time.
But he did say it (you all know what) and it does seem to have had an effect, no?
So, maybe, as a way of dealing with big companies, it might catch on.
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/18/torvalds_curses_nvidia/ --- just in case the moderators really have forgotten)