This morning I talked about a stable NVIDIA Linux driver update (v260.19.36) and that a 270.xx beta driver would be imminent. It turns out, however, that the NVIDIA 270.18 Beta driver is already publicly available. It can be tested for Linux x86/x86_64 with a couple of new features to this proprietary graphics driver...
Updated the NVIDIA kernel module to ensure that all system memory allocated by it for use with GPUs or within user-space components of the NVIDIA driver stack is initialized to zero. A new NVIDIA kernel module option, InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations, allows administrators to revert to the previous behavior.
Added preliminary support for xserver 1.10.
Reorganized the NVIDIA driver's /proc file system layout to better reflect current needs: /proc/driver/nvidia/cards/0..N has been moved to /proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/0..N/information
Added new shared library: libnvidia-ml.so.
NVML provides programmatic access to static information and monitoring data for NVIDIA GPUs, as well as limited managment capabilities. It is intended for use with Tesla compute products.
See web-based documentation and associated nvml.h header for more info.
Added a new X configuration option "3DVisionDisplayType" to specify the display type when NVIDIA 3D Vision is enabled with a non 3D Vision ready display.
Fixed several bugs relating to hardware-accelerated gradients, which were causing visual corruption in some of the default Ubuntu GNOME themes.
Modified colormap updates to no longer be synchronized to vblank. This allows applications to send XStoreColor and XStoreColors requests faster than the screen's refresh rate. This behavior can be controlled by a new NV-CONTROL attribute, NV_CONTROL_SYNC_LUT_UPDATES. By default, LUT updates are not synchronized. This may cause flickering in some applications that use the colormap to perform animation, such as xpilot running on a depth 8 Xscreen. If you experience flickering, try running nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/SynchronousPaletteUpdates=1