NVIDIA Developer Talks Openly About Linux Support

Q: Does NVIDIA have any intentions to provide Kernel-based Mode-Setting support?

Nothing definite, no, but we do get a lot of requests for it and it is something I hope we can pursue in the future.

Q: What were NVIDIA's motives behind creating VDPAU?

The goal of VDPAU is simply to expose the video decode and presentation capabilities of modern GPUs to Linux users. Thankfully, we are able to leverage a lot of video driver code from other teams within NVIDIA.

I'm pleased with the design of the API, and I think our implementation is quite good.

It has been great that VDPAU has been so well received by the Linux community.

Q: Are there any plans to support displaying VDPAU information within the nvidia-settings panel?

Yes, we've had a low priority feature request filed for a while to incorporate vdpinfo-style reporting in nvidia-settings.

Q: Are there any plans to support setting up SLI profiles within the nvidia-settings panel?

Application profiles have been one of those would-be-nice features that have been on the radar for a long time, but have never made it terribly high on the priority list.

Q: Are there any plans to support ESA on Linux?

No plans at this time.

Q: Are there any plans to add GPU usage monitoring support to NVIDIA's Linux driver?

No definite plans, but this comes up periodically, particularly in the context of CUDA, and is something we would like to address.

Q: Are there any plans to provide PhysX Support on the GPU?

At this time, we do not have any plans to provide GPU-accelerated PhysX support on Linux.

Q: When are the plans on releasing PerfKit/PerfHUD be released for Linux?

Yes, this is another area that hasn't received enough attention lately. Our ultimate goal is to provide a perfkit driver along with every Linux graphics driver release, but there are a few internal process improvements we need to make first.

Q: How long does NVIDIA plan on supporting its legacy Linux drivers for?

We plan to support the legacy GPU drivers indefinitely, to the extent possible within a reasonable scope of work: we back-port support for newer Linux kernels and newer X.Org X servers (the one exception being that we don't have plans to backport recent X server support to the 71.86.xx driver branch). We generally don't back-port any new features to the legacy GPU driver branches.

Q: NVIDIA's program "The way it's meant to be played" is very popular on Windows. Are there any plans to extend this to cover Linux too?

No plans at this time.