NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver | Hacker News Reader

NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver

phoronix.com

52 pointsJshWright27 comments

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...

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.

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.

For me, the issue isn't that they're dropping their open source driver (as other commenters have mentioned, it was nothing more than a token "get something on the screen" driver in the first place). However, it would have been nice if the announcement had pointed people towards (or at least mentioned) the reasonably solid Nouveau driver, rather than just telling people to use vesa until they can download the propriatary driver.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

No worries since there was zero discussion there...

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.

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.

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.

You mean ATI, surely?

Did you notice that AMD bought ATI?

There's an open-source 3D driver making massive improvements for nvidia too called Nouveau.

I wouldn't get ATi with Linux, it's all nvidia straight across for me. They have excellent driver support for Linux and I strongly like it. AMD's drivers still don't support X Server -1. Yeah, there's open-source drivers out there that work OK, but they still don't approach the performance of the proprietary ones. There are also a lot of applications that are buggy with Catalyst Linux.

Linux users are still much better off with nvidia for high-performance graphics. Intel is nice and cool and provides good support but their GPUs are exclusively low-end, which is fine for low-end users, but not fine for gamers et al.

Hmm. These days I don't use the 3D acceleration for anything but window compositing. I got the impression that for that the AMD drivers are pretty stable? Might see if I can borrow an AMD card from someone and test it out before I spend money.

Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.

I have a motherboard with onboard ATI HD4200 graphics and run the latest KDE4, and the open source AMD drivers are plenty fine to manage all kinds of shiny effects. They even manage some simpler 3D stuff without problem. I've never had any problems with the stability of the drivers either.

That's an excellent data point, thank you. I was actually looking at motherboards with that chip, and I too am a KDE 4 user. One more question: do standby/hibernation work well?

Suspend to RAM works perfectly. Suspend to disk works when I call it from the command line, but not when I select it from the shutdown menu in KDE. So I imagine it can be made to work by someone willing to look into it.

Excellent, thank you!

Really? Because i feel the opposite way.

I bought an AMD card 2 years ago, a mid-range one, and it was a headache. Their open source driver didn't support my card and it had a ton of known bugs.

I had to resort to their proprietary driver and i had a lot of trouble setting up a basic dual screen set up.

Although I initially bought AMD to support them for their open source efforts, turns out it was more of a PR stunt than anything else. I'm an open source guy, but my time is more valuable than wasting it trying to set up a second screen!

Apparently, things have improved a lot in Linux AMD-land the last 2 years, whereas the nvidia drivers have stagnated.

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!

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