What NVIDIA's Linux Customers Want

[AnonymousCoward]

As much as I agree with you, I'm pretty sure the few customers that think like that won't even make one Nvidia exec blink...

[allquixotic]

I was (past tense) an Nvidia customer, until I learned of their apathy towards free/open source, through Phoronix and other sites.

Now, I and anyone else whom I influence will not purchase Nvidia graphics until Nvidia has a major attitude adjustment. They are the only one of the "Big Three" laptop/desktop GPU manufacturers who snubs free/open source.

Free/open source is my only criterion. The last Nvidia card I bought was a GTX 280 in 2007, and it died a year afterwards. My upgrade path into the foreseeable future will be AMD all the way for high-performance desktop graphics, and either AMD or Intel for ultraportable laptops. Currently enjoying my HD5970 on r600g.

Pay multiple Nvidia employees to work on open source graphics drivers for all Nvidia graphics chipsets and release public documentation, or this technology enthusiast will continue to snub you, Nvidia. End of story.

And yes, I appreciate Nouveau and PathScale. But I want to see Nvidia employees personally involved in the development effort. It's their responsibility to support their own hardware, not PathScale's. If they choose to be irresponsible to those demanding free/open source drivers, that is their choice, but customers will walk.

Hello, AMD. You are not perfect, but at least you try.

Hello, Intel. Thanks for the great open drivers, but maybe a little performance once in a while, eh?

Goodbye, Nvidia. It was nice knowing you.

[DScape]

All I care about is KMS and Wayland support.

[edgan]

• Twinview does not work properly with the 200 series and up drivers.

Care to explain? I use Twinview at work and home just fine.

[blackiwid]

They are falling behind the Linux kernel and xserver development

Its not possible to fill the gap between fixing stuff and new api breakages in linux kernel and xserver or just new features what you wanna call it, not even the drivers also the core components of the kernel changes all the time.

And the lines of code changes each day increases linaraly so nvidia will maybe close for a short time the gap a bit with some new developers but they fight a lost battle, bring youre CODE in the kernel or you will loose against the change speed of opensource especialy the kernel.

[spykes]

This is true. What we should be asking for instead is either a framebuffer driver for the pretty bootup stuff or an egl driver for wayland.

I also vote for EGL support with an OpenGL ES 2.0 driver.

[Shining Arcanine]

Phoronix: What NVIDIA's Linux Customers Want

Last week when talking about NVIDIA looking to expand its Linux team (hire more engineers), I asked what else NVIDIA Linux customers wanted that already wasn't offered by the proprietary driver for Linux / BSD / Solaris operating systems. Aside from the obvious one, of many desktop users wanting NVIDIA to support some sort of an open-source strategy, other expressed views are listed below...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTExMQ

There are several items that need attention that people are reporting at nvnews.net:

• Overclocking on GeForce 8 series cards is broken
• Twinview does not work properly with the 200 series and up drivers.
• 2D Performance is awful on the GeForce 7 series (e.g. my GeForce Go 7900 GS)

You could probably find more if you looked. Anyway, it seems that Nvidia's current development resources cannot support more architectures, add more features and fix all of these issues at once. With that in mind, it does not surprise me that they are asking for help.

[Thunderbird]

Optimus support will likely never come to the blob. Essentially it would require Nvidia to integrate an Intel driver into the blob. Since the way Optimus works is that the Nvidia GPU does all its rendering to the framebuffer of the Intel GPU (after a frame is done a memcpy to the Intel framebuffer happens). The Intel GPU does all the presentation of the to the main display, so a full Intel 2D driver including mode switching all the other hell is needed.

[Peterix]

What I really want is KDE window resize to stop sucking with the NVIDIA driver. I don't know why, but it's definitely not smooth - I can see the windows slowly repaint.

[patstew]

The Nvidia blob already uses kernel modesetting. What people want is for nvidia to use the same form of KMS that is used by the open drivers. And that is never going to happen, because attempting to implement it would cause a massive regression in features, performance, and stability for the nvidia driver.

This is true. What we should be asking for instead is either a framebuffer driver for the pretty bootup stuff or an egl driver for wayland.