

NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver - JshWright
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_kills_nv

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DrJokepu
To be fair, the open source nv module wasn't used by anyone I know for
anything else besides having something rendering the screen while they have
downloaded and insalled the proprietary nvidia module. It did provide some
basic 2D acceleration but it was largely inferior to the proprietary driver
anyway. I think that open source purists never really favoured NVidia cards
anyway due to this reason so it's not like they're going to lose an awful
amount of customers because of that. I think it's likely that this was a
purely economical (cost cutting) decision.

Unrelated but still related reading about the current problems of Linux
graphics drivers is this post on Linux Hater (offensive language):
[http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-
on...](http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-
source.html)

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hartror
Disappointing but not life changing it was poorly supported and I don't know
anyone running the open driver over the propriety one. However it would be
nice to know that someone was working on the driver that actually gave a damn
about Linux.

~~~
_delirium
I think they do care about Linux for the proprietary driver, since Linux
workstations are a pretty decent share of the market for their high-margin
Quadro cards.

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jws
They lost to Intel for me a long time ago. I don't need a proprietary driver
to cause me compatiblity problems or a second rate lip service job of an open
source driver. I want one that just works.

I presume they are on such shaky patent ground that they can not expose the
workings of their chips to scrutiny.

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jorgecastillo
Not something I will miss. I don't even see why companies make this half baked
attempts at open sourcing code. If they are going to open source something
they should put real effort in their endeavor. We don't even need hardware
companies to open source anything. What we need is good enough documentation
so that interested developers can make open source drivers with out having to
reverse engineer the hell out of the hardware.

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makmanalp
This is sort of a big deal, I assume nouveau will keep going, although they
are still lacking in support. On the other hand, the ATI / AMD open drivers
are relatively recent and are moving pretty fast.

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jrockway
I didn't know nVidia even had an open driver. When I read the title, I thought
they were completely dropping support for non-Windows Oses, which would have
been disappointing.

Maybe Intel will buy nVidia and fix this problem for us. Intel is the only
hardware company that gets open source.

~~~
rbanffy
> Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source

Something that is quite astonishing, I must add.

I can only wonder how horribly constructed a piece of hardware must be for a
company to refuse to publish enough specifications for able and willing
community to produce open-source drivers.

~~~
jrockway
It's usually because they didn't license the linked-list patent, and they
don't want anyone to find out. (Etc.)

Alienating the Free Software community is cheaper than getting on the wrong
side of a patent troll, I guess.

~~~
rbanffy
You say that jokingly, but I am sure things equally ridiculous could be to
blame for this.

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JshWright
Sorry, just noticed this was a dupe
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222354>)

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jpwagner
No worries since there was zero discussion there...

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pmjordan
This is a shame; it pretty much settles it, I'll get an AMD chip next time.
The nvidia drivers have been the best graphics drivers on Linux, but still far
from perfect, and apparently not getting better. I've had a couple of crashes
and corruption issues with them just for window compositing. Meanwhile, the
open source AMD drivers have been making massive improvements.

~~~
mbreese
Did you run the open source or closed drivers in the first place? Their
proprietary drivers have always been better than the open source ones.

~~~
pmjordan
The proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and
occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but
still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management
problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all.

Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up
and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on
rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really
aren't a good replacement at all.

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dfghjkg
So what ?

I'm perfectly happy to have a driver that works, I don't really see the
community advantage of an opensource driver as compared to an opensource
framework or application.

People are happy to use Intel cpus rather than opensparc!

