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.
Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a time when AMD was hyped to heaven for their efforts. Wrongfully so in my opinion. Nvidia cards just always worked on linux, you had to install the blob but then it was a breeze. Fglrx on the other hand... I tried to setup a dual-gpu notebook for a friend last week. It was impossible. fglrx doesn't support the chips anymore and ubuntu doesn't support the legacy blobs. Complete fail. I had to tell her ubunt…
AMD has been paying developers for years to develop free drivers. It has taken this long because they essentially had to rewrite everything and modern display drivers are complicated beasts. The in-kernel, fancy KMS, AMD drivers should just work right now for many people. 2D is faster than the proprietary driver and the 3D speed is a significant fraction of the proprietary driver.
And it still heats badly. The most important me as for the laptop Linux user was a comfortable temerature, which AMD failed to provide either way.
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been interesting to watch the effect of Linus telling Nvidia to f*ck off.
It's easy to assume that theres a cause and effect relationship between Linus's words and Nvidia's actions, but we have no evidence this is the case, and shouldn't jump to such conclusions.
I'm not disagreeing with you but in this case I can share with you how I reasoned to that particular statement.
I've been around enough to know that there is always an effect of being called out in public, by a credible critic, inside of a company. What that effect is can vary based on how the corporate culture views itself.
In this particular case I have had over the years a bit more visibility inside [1] the company than some others. And I had been working very hard to get access to their acceleration into third party OSes. The developer program was verbally very supportive of that, but actually not so much. After a lot of work and investigation the proximate cause was the extreme patent mess around graphics and Nvidia's aggressive use of same to deal with competition.
I also discovered that at the executive level there was a belief that Nvidia was very supportive of Linux and third party use of their drivers. And even though I suggested reality was quite different than that, it didn't really affect their thinking.
When Linus called them out, and the coverage of that went viral, I thought to myself "This is going to be hard to explain in the context of an impression of support." In some ways having Nvidia not threaten or attack the nouveaux work was a big step forward. Actually contributing patches suggests to me complete surrender (or acceptance) of making "real" the notion of supporting third party use of their gear.
[1] My history was that a friend of mine from Sun was one fo the founders, he introduced me to the development program when the NV1 came out, I interviewed with them but did not take the job, but while at NetApp they were one of NetApps "Top 20" customers and I often spent time with their engineering teams working on ways their design flow would work better on network attached storage. A couple of former Intel colleagues ended up there, and a number of folks came over from there to Google when I was at Google as well. So while visibility was certainly incomplete, it wasn't strictly what was reported by the press.
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been interesting to watch the effect of Linus telling Nvidia to f*ck off.
You misspelled "fuck". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
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?
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#55On 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…
After getting a laptop with an Nvidia card built in, I'm pretty much turned off from buying an Nvidia card again. Nvidia's treatment of Optimus on Linux has been... lackluster at best.
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community drivers are pretty limited if you need to drive more than two monitors or need to work with non-trivial OpenGL applications or games. Neither open source driver has very good power management, either. They both leave a lot to desire.
I found the open source driver situation to be quite good with AMD. I was able to play non-trivial games (TF2 and Dota2) and use two monitors quite well. In fact, the open source AMD drivers had better multi monitor support then either the proprietary or the community Nvidia drivers.
What kind of AMD chipset are you running? The HD 7000 series for instance was released early in 2012 and only started having _experimental_ and incomplete OpenGL support a year later. The performance was atrocious even 18 months after release and it likely still is. In the end I bought an Nvidia card which worked fine out of the box.
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#57"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. ;)"
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has bought both brands recently-ish, I have to say I would VASTLY prefer AMD over Nvidia for Linux compatible graphics cards. I found that the community-provided AMD drivers where leagues ahead of Nvidia proprietary and community drivers (in terms of shear usability). Here's a thread where I test my Nvidia 670 and my AMD 6870 in Linux. I explain why I like one over the other: http://www.reddit.com/r/li…
The community drivers are pretty limited if you need to drive more than two monitors or need to work with non-trivial OpenGL applications or games. Neither open source driver has very good power management, either. They both leave a lot to desire.
False. I have a HD 6990, 3 2650x1600 monitors in various rotations, open source driver, no problems.
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD has been paying developers for years to develop free drivers. It has taken this long because they essentially had to rewrite everything and modern display drivers are complicated beasts. The in-kernel, fancy KMS, AMD drivers should just work right now for many people. 2D is faster than the proprietary driver and the 3D speed is a significant fraction of the proprietary driver.
And it still heats badly. The most important me as for the laptop Linux user was a comfortable temerature, which AMD failed to provide either way.
Have you tried enabling dpm? When enabled with a kernel parameter it dynamically changes the card frequency. I think you need a kernel version > 3.11. Check out:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Dynamic_power_manag...
and
Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the open source driver situation to be quite good with AMD. I was able to play non-trivial games (TF2 and Dota2) and use two monitors quite well. In fact, the open source AMD drivers had better multi monitor support then either the proprietary or the community Nvidia drivers.
What kind of AMD chipset are you running? The HD 7000 series for instance was released early in 2012 and only started having _experimental_ and incomplete OpenGL support a year later. The performance was atrocious even 18 months after release and it likely still is. In the end I bought an Nvidia card which worked fine out of the box.
AMD has been completely rewriting the drivers as free software. The 2d performance of the in-kernel drivers is now better than the proprietary driver for southern islands(HD7000). The 3d performance of the free driver is at about 50-70% of the proprietary for SI with linux 3.13, according to phoronix. The latest cards C.Islands use the same drivers as SI so the performance should be similar.
> and it likely still is.
Actually everything just works
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeo...