Nvidia Drops Support For Its Open Source Driver 412
An anonymous reader writes "While Nvidia is not open-source friendly (despite public outcries over the years), they have traditionally supported the xf86-video-nv driver to provide basic mode setting support and other basic functionality. However, with the 'Fermi' and future products, even that open source support will cease to exist. Nvidia has announced they are dropping this open source support for future GPUs and really ending it altogether. Nvidia's recommendation is to just use the generic X.Org VESA driver to navigate their way to nvidia.com so that they can install the proprietary driver. Fortunately there is the Nouveau project that provides a 2D and 3D video driver for Nvidia's hardware, but Nvidia fails to acknowledge it nor support their efforts in any form."
David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.
Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Informative)
They are not discontinuing support for their proprietary driver, just their open source driver, which has always been crap. If you want good 3d performance you can still use (and always should have been using) their proprietary driver.
I know, I know. You were just making a crack about how nobody uses linux...
This isn't a big deal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
This decision has no impact on games or on people using 3D software as the parent has suggested in his comment, since the nv driver had no 3D capability anyways. Development is continuing on nVidia's high quality 3D driver. There is no reason to vote with you wallet.
Re:And yet they're still the only cards... WRONG! (Score:5, Informative)
When did you last actually try using an intel card? I bought a new laptop in December, Intel X4500 inside, running Ubuntu 9.10.
It has suspended/resumed flawlessly for three months.
Last night I plugged it into a projector, click the Display settings, it auto-detected the new projector (listed by name even) and enabling output was a single click. Options to extend desktop or mirror it worked without problem.
Again, have you actually tried any this lately?
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Nouveau driver will work for those folks. The only reason they are killing nv it seems is because the Nouveau driver is actually better than nv.
Re:So what happens to HPC with NVIDIA cards? (Score:5, Informative)
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
Exactly the same as before: you use the proprietary driver, like you had to do before this annoucement anyway. And in fact, Linux has been supported better than Windows as an HPC platform by nvidia.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Let's not forget that nVidia sued, then purchased at a discount, then killed 3Dfx, the first company to create a fully Open Source stack for 3D hardware. You can still find their "Glide" stack, there's a Debian package for it, but the hardware isn't produced any longer.
Intel and ATI find this a worthwhile market, especially because the technical workstation market is insisting on Linux and supportable (meaning Open Source) full-performance drivers for all hardware. Gamers are a useful market but not the only market that 3D vendors play to these days.
If you asked me what was the reason for this, I'd guess it was collusion.
Re:And yet they're still the only cards... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bad move.... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, AMD has released many programming specifications and sponsors the Free radeonhd drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ATI.2FAMD [wikipedia.org]
Re:ok, Im confused (Score:3, Informative)
There are 3 drivers for nVidia cards:
Since Nouveau is becoming mature enough to be the default nVidia driver in distros now (Fedora was the first, as far as I know), it is not really a loss to see support for the "nv" driver dropped.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:3, Informative)
Probably litigation costs due to patented stuff they use inside their products. It's probably easier and cheaper to have a few people developing their closed source stuff instead.
But don't ask me, I am just a simple Linux user...
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:2, Informative)
In addition to lftp's post, there is probably some technical neophyte product manager in charge of driver development who is on a knife's edge of losing his job after his team fried all those video cards a couple weeks back with a faulty driver release. I would imagine the maneuvering went something like this: "Well the reason we released a shit driver is because we've got our team having to support the open source stuff. If we didn't have to support that, we could devote more resources to completely testing our drivers before release." The other side benefit is the driver development manager doesn't have to compete against "free" to make linux drivers anymore. That makes him more important to the company, and removes a potential threat from his job.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has a history of trying to sell Linux-relevant patents to trolls and of using third-party proxies to attack Linux.
Microsoft has not changed its hostility towards Linux or open formats. Mono MAY be safe, but don't use it for infrastructure projects. Don't encourage the use of Microsoft-sponsored formats or protocols.
Mono is best used as a solely Windows compatibility tool.
Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Informative)
The ATI drivers are coming right along and the intel ones are pretty darn good these days.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:2, Informative)
Nah, NVIDIA gutted their QA department about a year and a half ago and the people they still had afterwards have been overworked. It's not like the Linux driver team was the only group that completely failed to catch the fan control problem, so it doesn't make any kind of sense that this decision would be tied to that fiasco. The more disturbing part (to me) is, this isn't even the first time that fan control regressions have made it into shipping drivers. But this time the regression caused the fans *not* to spin up properly, as opposed to spinning up too much.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:3, Informative)
Because almost always, the 3D stuff comes along for the ride, when you get a couple dual-link DVI ports strapped to it.
(And, sometimes, 2D stuff can lay on the 3D acceleration hardware.)
Even ATI's current server 2D discrete graphics chipset, the ES1000, is basically just a die-shrunk version of the Radeon 7000, which was a solid low-end PCI/AGP 3D graphics card when it came out.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just CAD work either. With Compiz 3d acceleration speed matters in regular desktop. Also, modern Nvidia graphics cards allow the majority of video codec rendering to be offloaded onto the video card's processor. Personally, prior to adopting a modern Nvidia card for my Linux system, ALL video had tearing and other problems. Not major, but noticeable next to a Mac or Windows. On a new Nvidia with VDAPI enabled, my playback is fine.
The old "Go Matrox if you just want to use desktop stuff!" became inaccurate 8 years ago.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, Vista/7 ships with drivers, and so could Linux if the GPL didn't prohibit it.
What part of the GPL prohibits shipping a completely separately licensed binary with it? Ubuntu's graphics are more encumbered than the GPL and yet they ship on the CD.
Now, nVidia's license, that's a more likely reason.
Re:Bad move.... (Score:2, Informative)
I think you may be the only person on earth who re-installs his OS just because of a new kernel.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:4, Informative)
I bought a Matrox. I think it was a Parhelia. Can't quite recall.
I had heard "buy Matrox" all along since around 95 when I first started with linux. well long story short: it's an urban legend. To be sure, the 2D on those cards are just awesome! Sucks for 3D but the 2D is just gorgeous.
However, their support for linux is just plain shoddy. At the time I was using the card, their driver wouldn't work for that particular model. someone was providing some patches to get the thing to work. but just barely. I wish they supported it better. I would love to use that card - I don't have much use for 3D. But I simply can't. Using nvidia now since it came with this computer. but would love to use Matrox. just can't.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:2, Informative)
The open source 3D support is here now, for everything except the latest generation of cards. (That's due in the next few months.)
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:3, Informative)
This is incorrect. I own an i740 graphics adapter and, unfortunately, it is unsupported:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Intel [freedesktop.org]
There's a driver for the card, but it's 2D only, and hasn't been improved in any way for the last 10 years or so. Of course, the card 3D performance is so weak that software acceleration on a modern CPU would probably be faster, however I was hugely disappointed when I wanted to get some 3D acceleration on one of my old Pentium 2 PC. And if you want a cheap card with no 3D or unusable 3D and free drivers, I'm pretty sure there are better options available.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)