NVIDIA's Oldest Legacy Driver Will Not Gain New Support

[V!NCENT]

I used to have problems with Nvidia on my laptop, especially with suspend. However, I haven't had any problems with my Quadro 570m since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. Besides their installer, Nvidia's drivers are spectacular.

Heh... Are you talking the truth? My dad actually has a Dell Precision with a QuadroFX 570m and dual boots win7 and Ubuntu. Boy did he have problems with the nVidia blob. Don't even start about talking such a simple app as Google Earth... The corruption untill hitting the login screen. Hybernate and suspend? Don't even try it. Not what you'd expect from the world ruling nVidia and they top notch "does everything". Even fscking Noveau can do such a basic thing as suspend and resume...

[Hans]

So you guys enjoyed the flame fest?
2. FGLRX drivers, anyone, who have never encountered problems withit: fluid compiz desktop,

My compiz is fluid with fglrx 10.6, with its latest 2d accleration.

tear free window animation, tear free stutter free video playback,

When I enable vsync through the Ati control panel, at least I don't see any tearing. If I disable it, I definitely see tearing.

no locking, games running fine,

Never had any lockups with games in about a half year. I don't game much on linux, but I like QuakeWars, HoN and some wine games like Guildwars. With the latest wine 1.2-rcX and fglrx 10.6 everything seems fine with wine. That said nvidia is probably still better for wine.

X start/stop fine, VT switching fine,

I really think its a year ago, when there were problems with VT switching and X hardlocking when logging out. Also suspend/resume works very well with fglrx.

please say your name below! I would like to see who is the luckiest man in the world. Perhaps you should go buy lotto now, that's definitely going to be able to fund you buying a new video card and your struggle financial situations.

I might be the luckiest man in the world, but at least on Ubuntu 10.04 (one of the supported distroes), fglrx is running just fine. Wine is basically the only thing it might be worse at than nvidia.

Don't believe me? Tell me how to prove it.
Oh and btw. At least fglrx doesn't have problems with xrandr and suspend issues like nvidia does ;-) I own a nvidia too you know (7600 GS).

[pmorph]

It's not hard, it's a pain in the ass.

No. Spending 20 seconds to install a new driver is not a pain in the ass.
Configuring and compiling the whole kernel just to get a new gfx driver is a pain in the ass.

[mirv]

No. Spending 20 seconds to install a new driver is not a pain in the ass.
Configuring and compiling the whole kernel just to get a new gfx driver is a pain in the ass.

Well, both fglrx and nvidia binaries install as modules - you do realise that that's possible with open source drivers too? It might cut down on your driver installation time.

[brent]

Well, both fglrx and nvidia binaries install as modules - you do realise that that's possible with open source drivers too? It might cut down on your driver installation time.

DRM is shipped with the linux kernel, though. So, for a complete graphics stack update, you usually have to install an up-to-date kernel. Same if you need an update of WiFi drivers and the like.

IMO the monolithic kernel model (as in: one huge package that includes everything and the kitchen sink) doesn't work that well anymore.

[pingufunkybeat]

No. Spending 20 seconds to install a new driver is not a pain in the ass.
Configuring and compiling the whole kernel just to get a new gfx driver is a pain in the ass.

Configuring and compiling the kernel is a normal thing that every user should do regularly, for security and performance reasons. And you can install a kernel provided by your distribution too. The blob doesn't save you any work, it's always extra work.

Spending 20 seconds (more like a couple of minutes) every time you upgrade any part of your system gets old pretty quickly. I did it for 6 years, and prefer the open source approach.

[pingufunkybeat]

If I didn't care about having a driver that only supports half the features of the chipset and isn't optimized for 3d. Yes, I would run open source drivers. This works for "ALOT" of people that don't want/use those features. But I like alot of people have a $150+ GPU and to want to use a Binary(ati/nvidia) driver to get the most performance/features out of that investment.

And who exactly is preventing you from doing this?

[pingufunkybeat]

Not sure I agree with this. What Nvidia cards are unsupported by their drivers?

Unsupported by the kernel. The nouveau drm only supports a small subset of the functionality. Almost all other hardware on this planet works with Linux out of the box.

[pmorph]

Well, both fglrx and nvidia binaries install as modules - you do realise that that's possible with open source drivers too? It might cut down on your driver installation time.

This is what I do to update the Nvidia driver:
- download the blob
- open x-term
- cd to download path
- get root access
- chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-nnn.nn.nn-pkg1.run
- ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-nnn.nn.nn-pkg1.run

The exact same process has worked for me for years now; the installer is polished and tested enough to just work.

Is there a similarly simple and systematic (no need to alter the process in any way between driver releases, works for years in a row exactly the same way) and reliable (has never failed and required user to investigate the reason) way to update the open source driver modules? Basically something that could be scripted with a couple of lines of code and then forgotten.

You do realise that the install process needs to fail only once and I'll quickly be spending more time solving it than I spend installing the NVIDIA driver the next 10 years with the process I described above.

[mirv]

This is what I do to update the Nvidia driver:
- download the blob
- open x-term
- cd to download path
- get root access
- chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-nnn.nn.nn-pkg1.run
- ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-nnn.nn.nn-pkg1.run

The exact same process has worked for me for years now; the installer is polished and tested enough to just work.

Is there a similarly simple and systematic (no need to alter the process in any way between driver releases, works for years in a row exactly the same way) and reliable (has never failed and required user to investigate the reason) way to update the open source driver modules? Basically something that could be scripted with a couple of lines of code and then forgotten.

You do realise that the install process needs to fail only once and I'll quickly be spending more time solving it than I spend installing the NVIDIA driver the next 10 years with the process I described above.

If I (or perhaps when I) spend enough time with the open source drivers, yeah it can probably be done that way. Of course, it's a simple enable in the kernel away, which is oh-so-difficult. Really, it's very hard, dunno I might hurt a finger.
I had quite a few problems with my initial install of nvidia's drivers on gentoo - the nvidia settings panel still thinks it belongs at another resolution and magnifies itself to be almost unusable (that's about the best description I can give). Updates of course are now an emerge away. The same with fglrx (which I use for the OpenGL 3.x support). Open source drivers I could probably script in to be about the same.
And other than installation time, I've spent more time trying fix nvidia driver problems than fglrx ones - I'm sure others have different experiences, but I haven't.