
Nvidia submits patches to open source driver - tbrock
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-January/053028.html
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gtaylor
On a somewhat related (non-mobile) note, I really regret buying my AMD 5870
three years ago. Things have changed quite a bit in that nvidia has done some
serious work on their Linux binary drivers, while AMD's has been utterly
unimpressive, if not embarrassingly bad.

I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which
is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that
the rest of their market segments will. But to do silly things like release
official Linux binary drivers without so much as a changelog just reeks. They
got enough bad blood from that to start releasing drivers with changelogs
again, but support for kernels/xorg server versions still typically lags far
behind nvidia's. And I can't do something as simple as run multiple monitors
without seeing all kinds of weird graphical artifacts with high frequency.

My next card with be an nvidia if things continue on their current trajectory.
I know that their binary drivers aren't perfect, but compared to AMD...

Edit: Also, I can't use the OSS drivers, so they don't weigh into my buying
decision at all. Good on AMD for doing better there, but the binary drivers
are the only ones that can run my setup.

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ChuckMcM
It has been interesting to watch the effect of Linus telling Nvidia to f*ck
off.

~~~
sneak
You misspelled "fuck".

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ)

~~~
untog
We post Louis CK videos in HN, too? I thought I'd left that stuff in
Redditland.

He spelt it the way he wants to spell it, who cares?

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nolok
Note that this is Tegra related, which might explain their new-found eagerness
to help (unlike desktop, they don't fully "own" the mobile high performance
chips market yet, and it moves very fast)

Still, a great news

~~~
exDM69
As far as I understand it, this set of patches allows you to (or at least aims
in the longer term to) run Nouveau user space on top of Nvidia Tegra Kernel
drivers (did anyone read the code, does this use nvidia kernel drivers or
nouveau kernel drivers?), which are already mostly open source.

This would mean that you could run a full open source graphics stack on an ARM
System on Chip (SoC). I don't know if this is possible on any current SoC out
there.

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chanux
Linus approves
[https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/TQDXxxr6ixm](https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/TQDXxxr6ixm)

~~~
virtualwhys
Linus: > Hey, this time I'm raising a thumb for nvidia.

Commentor in G+ thread: > They aren't there yet, more middle finger
recommended.﻿

A little chuckle to start the day ;-)

Nvidia's Linux support is generally pretty decent these days; however, the one
issue that gets the middle digit moving in their direction is power management
in a multi-head laptop setup. Ouch, max power = heat = fan noise.

I had to flash the VBIOS in order to force the chip into low power mode (not a
gamer, just need to drive multiple displays).

Doesn't help that they remove PM features from anything but their high end
chips; have a K2000M here, nvidia-smi shows a bunch of N/A, can't do diddly.

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w0ts0n
It seems to be the same discussion year after year. I really hope that SteamOS
pushes these companies to get their shit together.

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lukecampbell
"Let me also stress that although very exciting, this effort is still
experimental, so I would like to make sure that nobody makes excessive
expectations based on these few patches. The scope of this work is strictly
limited to Tegra (although given the similarities desktop GPU support will
certainly benefit from it indirectly), and we do not have any plan to work on
user-space support. So do not uninstall that proprietary driver just yet. ;)"

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amaranth
This is just the same basic enablement work they used to do with the "nv"
driver. This will just make it possible to use an unaccelerated framebuffer
and they go out of their way to mention they aren't going to do any open
source userspace (aka GL) work.

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nebulous1
Getting themselves involved in linux in the run up to SteamOS?

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mariuolo
Will this also benefit other Kepler users?

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william20111
Arghhh, all mobile! Ah well least its progress!

