NVIDIA's Working On A New Driver Architecture?

[kayosiii]

Perhaps I missed it, but does the current nvidia driver provide any facility for run-time resolution/orientation/multi-monitor adjustments? As a laptop user, lack of this feature alone makes the driver completely worthless to me.

Should do... The nVidia settings applet does this for me.....

[gilboa]

I thought KMS was more of a religious or political issue than a technical one. I understand KMS to be something that nVidia simply cannot be reasonably expected to provide in the near future, given that probably 90% of all the IP used in their hardware and software probably isn't even owned by them, but people more like the team behind abominations like Poulsbo.

You are dead wrong - KMS is anything but political.
KMS is required in-order to ship root-less X.org (read: X.org with no suid). Without KMS, Xorg requires root-access in-order to load and configure the driver(s).
As it stands X.org is a fairly big source of privilege escalation exploits.

As for the "nVidia simply cannot" part, neither you nor me have any means to make this assertion as neither of us have access to their code. Never the less, nVidia doesn't have technical reason not support KMS (beyond resource issues), as nouveau already supports it.

- Gilboa

[myxal]

Should do... The nVidia settings applet does this for me.....

Does the app make adjustments on-the-fly though (which is what I mean by run-time? Last time I saw it (6 months ago) it was basically a beefed-up xorg.conf editor frontend and any adjustments beyond resolution changes required restarting X.

[kayosiii]

Does the app make adjustments on-the-fly though (which is what I mean by run-time? Last time I saw it (6 months ago) it was basically a beefed-up xorg.conf editor frontend and any adjustments beyond resolution changes required restarting X.

Seems to work that way for me I use it when I hook my laptop up to an external screen It can do this without requiring an X restart. It can be used to modify your X config settings on startup. But other than that everything works live.

[hdas]

@ myxal and kayosiii: Yes, the nvidia-settings gui application shipped with the driver does on-the-fly stuff like multi-montior setups.

As a side note, if you need a command-line utility that is more convenient and functional (for people like me), checkout this awesome tool called "disper": http://willem.engen.nl/projects/disper/ .

[myxal]

@hdas: Intriguing. Sounds like I should have given the FX5200 another whirr before ditching it. Ah well...

[Havner]

Sounds a lot more than they're just slowly refactoring their existing driver.

Precisely.

Whole big article just because NVidia engineer put "architecture" word in his sentence. Not even "new architecture". Two pages of pure speculations. And you then wonder why officials don't want to comment on various things when they need to watch every single word they say.

[Havner]

Sorry for double post, but apparently can't edit post after 1 minute.

Just wanted to add that article title suggests that some revolutionary changes might be ongoing while after reading the quote it just looks like they are refactoring, and not necessarily the whole driver, might be just the part that was mentioned.

[Fenrin]

In some games e.g. Regnum Online there was a huge performance regression between NVIDIA driver 19x and 25x/26x drivers. Regnum Online uses shaders, but even with disabled shaders the performance regression exists (here is a very short thread in the NVIDIA forum about this issue, it was close very early).

I wonder why and also if other more advanced Linux games are affected by this performance regression.

[mirv]

In some games e.g. Regnum Online there was a huge performance regression between NVIDIA driver 19x and 25x/26x drivers. Regnum Online uses shaders, but even with disabled shaders the performance regression exists (here is a very short thread in the NVIDIA forum about this issue, it was close very early).

I wonder why and also if other more advanced Linux games are affected by this performance regression.

If nvidia are internally rewriting the drivers to a new architecture, the focus is on getting said new architecture working first, then increasing performance, so I wouldn't really call it a performance regression - it's not a bug. The benefit is of course that the driver should be able to be better maintained in the future, and can likely handle and provide new features easier.