Will NVIDIA Optimus Inevitably Come To Linux?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Will NVIDIA Optimus Inevitably Come To Linux?

Aside from political issues surrounding open vs. closed-source (graphics) drivers on Linux, the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is widely liked. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is relatively bug/trouble-free, has a performance parity to the Windows driver, supports new hardware right away, and has a near feature parity to the Windows driver. There's not much more you could ask for from a closed-source driver, aside from a few missing features. One of the missing features that's been widely talked about as of late has been Optimus...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTM3NA

[89c51]

Slightly off topic but since you mention Wayland and Nvidia in the article.

There is work by Benjamin Franzke on making Wayland play well with OpenWF. Does this mean that they don't have to support KMS and other linux technologies and still use Wayland as long as they support OpenWF???

[pingufunkybeat]

I think that this will be an interesting way to see how strong nvidia's dedication to Linux is.

So far, they have supported all consumer cards, but these are based on the same chips (or very similar ones) as the ones used by the bug render farms, CAD people, which are Nvidia's most important linux market segment. Extending the support to consumer cards is work, but not as much as supporting a completely new GPU generation, which they have to do anyway.

Optimus technology, on the other hand, is for regular consumers, at least in its current incarnation. A low-powered laptop which can add some powerful GPU rendering when needed. You don't do CAD on that. It's great for occasional gamers.

I'm guessing that they will not support it unless the FLOSS community makes it easy for them. I'm guessing that nouveau will support this before the blob does.

[curaga]

Why talk about O....

Why talk about O...

Nice copypaste there

[yogi_berra]

but these are based on the same chips (or very similar ones) as the ones used by the bug render farms

Which is a neat trick of nVidia's considering the majority of render nodes are headless.

With all of the well known wireless issues involved with Linux, why would you want to use it on a laptop?

[pingufunkybeat]

did I write "bug render farms"?


And you don't need a head to do CUDA or OpenCL.

[FireBurn]

Did anyone else find this article painful to read?

[crazycheese]

Which is a neat trick of nVidia's considering the majority of render nodes are headless.

With all of the well known wireless issues involved with Linux wireless drivers, why would you want to use it with these wireless drivers on a laptop?

*corrected*

[ellolo]

Optimus technology, on the other hand, is for regular consumers, at least in its current incarnation. A low-powered laptop which can add some powerful GPU rendering when needed. You don't do CAD on that. It's great for occasional gamers.

You don't do CAD on this kind of computer: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-l502x/pd.aspx ???!!! What do you need? It can contain a Nvidia GeForce GT540M with 2GB of memory! On such a machine, there isn't problem to work on many CAD models with high-resolution textures.

Definitely, Optimus isn't use only with low-end computers.

I'm guessing that they will not support it unless the FLOSS community makes it easy for them. I'm guessing that nouveau will support this before the blob does.

I hope not because it would also mean no CUDA and Cg since free drivers don't support these technologies.

[bridgman]

did I write "bug render farms"?

I thought you were referring to the fact that a lot of CGI seems to involve giant insects...