NVIDIA's Optimus: Will It Come To Linux?

[BloodyIron]

It's this kind of Garbage which makes the community want OS drivers. I like how when interviewed repeatedly nVidia says it's so easy for them to port features over to linux because it's cross-platform code for 90%+ of it. Yet when these kind of features come out we're left in the dark.

I for one will not consider nVidia products in the near future.

[mtippett]

It's this kind of Garbage which makes the community want OS drivers. I like how when interviewed repeatedly nVidia says it's so easy for them to port features over to linux because it's cross-platform code for 90%+ of it. Yet when these kind of features come out we're left in the dark.

I for one will not consider nVidia products in the near future.

The main area that you get the benefit of the common drivers is in the HW enablement and generic validation. You can leverage a lot of the testing to ensure the products are mostly stable. With features that begin to get tied to the OS, you don't get the same leverage.

Optimus as implemented by NV is built heavily around the Vista/Win7 architecture. That doesn't translate to the Linux in any meaningful way.

Hence it's very expensive to port to Linux where it isn't going to be a clear differentiator that results in return on investment. The most likely source of improvements will be from the the efforts of avilella earlier in this thread. But you won't get NV's driver working on that until there is a generic architecture that supports it in a vendor neutral and vendor friendly way.

[curaga]

Yet it seems it's supported on Apple..

[deanjo]

Yet it seems it's supported on Apple..

Wrong, Apple has it's own built in house implementation. Nvidia had nothing to do with that.

[deanjo]

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...t_optimus.html


Link for ya.

[Xwang]

But from linux side is it not possible to detect if a laptop has noth nvidia card and another one and let the user choose which of the one to permanently use by backporting/disabling the other one?
Xwang

PS on ATI side are there any strange features to avoid like this one of Nvidia?

[molecule-eye]

It should be up to hardware manufacturers to at least have a hard switch or bios toggle for choosing which graphics chip to use. In other words, SWITCHABLE GRAPHICS SHOULD BE TIED TO A PARTICULAR OS.