NVIDIA Releases Yet Another Linux Driver

In the past week we've seen the NVIDIA 177.67 binary driver for Linux which was outdone by the NVIDIA 177.68 driver just two days later. The 177.70 Beta driver was then released this morning with fixes and other enhancements since the 177.68 driver. Yesterday we had also seen the release of the xf86-video-nv 2.1.11 driver that added support for a few more chips and fixed a couple of bugs. the xf86-video-nv driver is NVIDIA's open-source X.Org driver thats limited to 2D support and its code-base is obfuscated, which renders this code mostly useless. However, today they have issued a new xf86-video-nv release.

It turns out in the xf86-video-nv 2.1.11 release there was a rather bad regression. This bug had caused CPUToScreenColorExpandFill to treat transparent pixels as black instead, which isn't a good thing if you're interested in transparent objects. Fixing this bug just involved changing a parameter sent to G80DmaNext() from 4 to 1.

If anyone out there is using the xf86-video-nv driver, you can read the short release announcement and grab the source-code from the X.Org mailing list. It's been a chaotic week for NVIDIA with Linux driver releases.