NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property. However, NVIDIA has decided to deprecate this open-source driver of theirs. No, NVIDIA is not working on a new driver. No, NVIDIA is not going to support the Nouveau project. Instead, NVIDIA now just recommends its users use the X.Org VESA driver to get to NVIDIA.com when installing Linux so they can install their proprietary driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14714

[synthil]

Nvidia. Providing the most reliable, most feature-rich 3d-accelerated desktop on Linux. And they will never, ever bend their knee to open-source.

3d acceleration truly is the sorest deficiency in the open source world. I hate to see Nvidia proving that open source software can never exceed prophetary software.

[synthil]

proprietary*, lol.

[SkyHiRider]

Hell, give out the specs and I bet the community could stitch up a good driver in a few years. Could have at least mentioned Nouveau driver, but he probably can't.
This is bollocks, you can see so man FOSS drivers and apps today, ATI, Intel, hell even Via has em. Think that if their new "magic" card won't be so magic, serious problems might arise for them.
From what I read up on other sites and forums, Nvidia can't compete with Ati gpu's for quite some time and is living of marketing and deception, tis true?

[cjcox]

Hoping that Nvidia loses a TON of customers over this.

Granted, AMD isn't that big of a friend... would of been nice to see ATI stand alone... but oh well.

Nvidia, evil++.

ATI+AMD, dysfunctional.

Sigh...

[kraftman]

I hate to see Nvidia proving that open source software can never exceed prophetary software.

I hope you meant 3D only? Open source software exceeds proprietary in many, many areas and when comes to graphic drivers - OS drivers provides much better 2D acceleration and are more stable.

[Ragas]

Will be nice to see the Nvidia Driver and FGLRX the only ones without KMS and Gallium3D in a few years.

[rhdunn]

To be honest, this isn't an unexpected move. What was surprising was recommending Vesa (Vesa?!), but then Nvidia see that only as a stepping stone to their proprietary binary driver.

I am trying out the new Lucid Lynx beta of Ubuntu with all the nouveau goodness. I know people have had some issues with this, but it is working really well for me. I'm not a huge fanatical gamer, so the lack of accelerated 3d does not bother me too much.

Major thanks and kudos to the nouveau team, RedHat, Linus and the Ubuntu team for getting the nouveau driver to the point where it is today.

One thing that does concern me is how different the Fermi architecture and thus resulting drivers will be. If they are significantly different, this will slow down support for the newer Nvidia chips for the nouveau project.

It is a shame that Nvidia is further closing its ranks and isolating itself from the Open Source community.

[Ex-Cyber]

Dropping it makes some sense regardless of nouveau, given the following assumptions:

1) Nvidia don't want to sink much money into supporting legacy GPUs.

2) Newer GPUs can't do more than vesa supports without setting up the 3D hardware.

3) Nvidia don't want to put any 3D hardware code under MIT/Xorg license.

[waucka]

I love my Radeons.