NVIDIA Issues An Open-Source Driver Update

[duby229]

AFAIK the Utah-GLX devs had Nvidia docs under NDA for the Rivas and early Geforces. Wonder what happened to those.

Intel and Microsoft jointly threatened to sue them for releasing documentation about licensed IP they were using at the time. I'm not sure about the details exactly, but I understand that nvidia pulled the documentation, and then canceled the plans for the open driver. I believe it was at that time that nVidia decided to go whole hog on its own closed driver.

[Mickabouille]

I don't know anybody who does not install the binary driver anyway. I made a script to do so that even works in live mode with Debian/Ubuntu live images - on hd install of course too. I guess that's easy enough.

I do, but you don't know me

I must admit I once tried to install fglrx on my desktop, but as far as I understand, it completely locked my machine on X startup because of a problem between my mainboard (p5k I think) when using 4Gb of RAM with a 64 bit kernel. Something about bad mtrr (whatever those are). So fglrx will never work with this machine.

But I have both my desktop (2600HD) and laptop (X700) using the ati driver.

[bridgman]

Usually BIOS updates from the mobo mfg will fix issues with 4GB or higher.

[Mickabouille]

No such bios update for this motherboard.
I suppose the radeon driver will have the same problem as the fglrx one as soon as 3D accel will be there. At this point I guess I'll just change the mobo.

[nanonyme]

In a perfect world this would be really fine. But i don't think that will happen soon. The oss driver provides basic 2d acc and xv - the same you get now for ati r600/r700 gpus. For full speed you are forced in both cases to install binary drivers.

In official releases yes, in the development trees there's drivers for r600/r700 some people can already play OpenGL games with. And it's getting better all the time.

[Kano]

And you are certain that it can run the test games/apps that i want? Then show me zero ballistics running or gl2benchmark without rendering issues (fglrx had em with gl2benchmark for about a year).

[nanonyme]

And you are certain that it can run the test games/apps that i want? Then show me zero ballistics running or gl2benchmark without rendering issues (fglrx had em with gl2benchmark for about a year).

No but my point is valid and yours wrong even if I'm not certain of it. You claimed it can only do basic 2D accel and XV, I claimed it wasn't true. The important thing is that this claim is wrong, not that it can't run the programs you want it to.

[Kano]

Also it does not seem a distro out there which has the ati developer code for mesa and drm included.

[nanonyme]

Also it does not seem a distro out there which has the ati developer code for mesa and drm included.

Which has no relevance whatsoever. It's true though that even Fedora is closing in on Alpha freeze after which including it might prove difficult.