On Friday the NVIDIA engineers working on their proprietary Linux driver put out a new driver update. This new driver update is marked NVIDIA 260.19.36 Certified, but it brings just three official changes.

The NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver updates the NVIDIA kernel module to now ensure that all system memory allocated by it for either the GPU or user-space driver are initalized to zero. Beyond that memory initalization behavior change, there's also fixes for when using color index overlays in X Server 1.9+ to crash the xorg-server and also a bug that caused pixel value 255 to be transparent with color index overlays. For those that prefer the NVIDIA kernel module doesn't initalize allocations to zero, there is now a InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations kernel module option to revert back to the old uninitalized behavior.

This NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver can be downloaded for Linux x86 and x86_64 at NVIDIA.com. Meanwhile, the NVIDIA 270.xx Linux driver should soon be going into beta as we are already seeing results for this next major driver update (right now being labelled as NVIDIA 270.18) appearing in results on OpenBenchmarking.org.