NVIDIA Announces New Legacy Linux Support

[Gusar]

I guess I'm a newcomer to this. Please explain how I can use the nvidia blob to switch to a console quickly without having to load vesa?

You can't. Because nvidia doesn't provide a fbcon driver. But that's something separate from modesetting.

[logistiker]

Here we go *again*...

The nvidia driver has used kernel modesetting since forever. Since before there was KMS. There's no reason whatsoever for them to use KMS.

I guess I'm a newcomer to this. Please explain how I can use the nvidia blob to switch to a console quickly without having to load vesa?

[Gusar]

I agree in an earlier post that it would have been nice to have KMS support as well but then who knows if that will ever be supported by the binary blob?

Here we go *again*...

The nvidia driver has used kernel modesetting since forever. Since before there was KMS. There's no reason whatsoever for them to use KMS.

[logistiker]

I'm just glad they squeezed in xrandr support before jettisoning it as legacy so at least I can have proper multiple monitor support on my old geforce 6 desktop and geforce 7 laptop. I agree in an earlier post that it would have been nice to have KMS support as well but then who knows if that will ever be supported by the binary blob?

[bug77]

I now actually read the full announcement. The 304 branch will be supported until the end of 2017! That's a helluva long time. I was thinking two years tops. Five years, that's quite a commitment.

The 173 branch will be supported until the end of 2013. That's not nearly as much, but still cool.

On top of that, 6000 and 7000 series are quite old. Still capable, but old. By 2017, you'll be able to buy something better for $20. Or you'll have better GPU integrated into the CPU. Either way, losing support at the end of 2017 will hurt less than 1000 users, imho.

[Gusar]

I now actually read the full announcement. The 304 branch will be supported until the end of 2017! That's a helluva long time. I was thinking two years tops. Five years, that's quite a commitment.

The 173 branch will be supported until the end of 2013. That's not nearly as much, but still cool.

[bug77]

That's an interesting response to news about nvidia *dropping* support for a bunch of hardware.

Actually nvidia is doing the sanest thing possible by not bloating drivers for old cards with features they don't support anyway, while also keeping legacy code out of newer drivers

[Gusar]

The 96.x drivers was discontinued, I think.

There was one last release a few days ago. It adds support for xorg-server-1.12, which is used for example by the current Ubuntu LTS. So users of Geforce 2-4 cards are still good for a few years, with the limitation that they stick to a LTS distro.

The driver for TNT and TNT2 (71xx) has indeed not been updated for a while now. I think, but I'm not sure, the last xorg-server it supports is 1.7

@Sidicas: You should use the xorg-server version (1.xx), it's much more informative than the Xorg version (7.x)

[Naib]

Very incomplete table I made on driver timelines...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...EVlNl95MmZRYnc

would be good to show when support for an xorg api was supported by nvidia/ati
nvidia have iirc not been able to support a newer xorg (and that was by 1week and over a misunderstanding). ati lag by a good few weeks if not longer.

[RealNC]

R200 and R300 are not supported by AMD. They don't have a maintained legacy driver, like NVidia does.

TNT and TNT2 are not supported by NVidia. The 96.x drivers was discontinued, I think.