NVIDIA 270.18 Linux Beta Driver Is Here

This morning I talked about a stable NVIDIA Linux driver update (v260.19.36) and that a 270.xx beta driver would be imminent. It turns out, however, that the NVIDIA 270.18 Beta driver is already publicly available. It can be tested for Linux x86/x86_64 with a couple of new features to this proprietary graphics driver.

The NVIDIA 270.18 driver provides preliminary support for X.Org Server 1.10, reorders the NVIDIA /proc file-system, adds a new libnvidia-ml.so shared library, adds a 3D Vision display type X configuration option, fixes several bugs pertaining to hardware-accelerated gradients, and modified color-map updates are no longer synced to vblanks.

The initial X.Org Server 1.10 support is great, but not surprising from NVIDIA, and will ensure that they don't get in a situation like the AMD Catalyst driver with belated kernel/xorg-server support. X.Org Server 1.10 final is expected for release in February.

The NVML shared library provides access to static information and monitoring data of NVIDIA GPUs, along with limited management support. The NVML shared library is primarily intended for NVIDIA Tesla products but may work with other NVIDIA GPUs as well.

The NVIDIA 270.18 Beta Linux driver change-log and download links can be found on the Phoronix Forums.