back to article 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 …

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  1. rvt

    What? Linus is happy, that means party time, right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @rvt

      "What? Linus is happy, that means party time, right?"

      Or that the Mayan Apocalypse believers were right, but misread the time by a few weeks.

  2. 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.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      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 ... :(

    2. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      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.

      1. 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.

  3. xperroni

    "raising a thumb for nvidia"

    Coming as it does from Linus, I'm not sure if it's honest praise or just a different kind of threat.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "raising a thumb for nvidia"

      Last time he raised a different finger at nVidia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ), this time it is a thumb. God (Linus) only knows what is coming next ... two fingers? ;)

  4. codejunky Silver badge

    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.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't the the anger at binary drivers, they spend time developing these amazing graphics chips, and then some of their proprietary stuff is in code, so they distribute binary code, not a big deal, I will stick to using the proprietary drivers because they work better.

    1. 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.

    2. John Sanders
      Linux

      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.

  6. mmeier

    Look closer

    It's only the TEGRA chips they support not all of them

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow, saying "F*** YOU" to a major company works!

    just that.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    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)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Re: earlier comment rejected

      Looks like they restored it. Mods, I forgive you :)

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