NVIDIA Talks Of Optimus Possibilities For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Talks Of Optimus Possibilities For Linux

A NVIDIA Linux engineer is trying to work on code that could lead to official Optimus support under Linux, but there's a catch... And it falls outside of NVIDIA Corp as the fate of this multi-GPU notebook feature could now fall with the Linux kernel developers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA0ODE

[darkbasic]

No, it's sad having to use proprietary drivers.
Nvidia, enjoy re-implementing the wheel.

[pingufunkybeat]

That "patch" was cute.

It amounted to a license change of the code (symbol) in question because an nvidia engineer thought this license to be better.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Isn't that mean DMA-BUF may be used in Intel, nouveau and R600g drivers for implementation Optimus and AMD Dual Graphics in FOSS drivers?

[agd5f]

It's meant for sharing dma-able memory between drivers. That could be muxless hybrid laptops, zero copy video between v4l and drm, etc.

[spykes]

"but we for better or worse can't share much infrastructure like DRI."

I don't understand why they can't do that ?
They can't share the user space OpenGL driver, I can understand, but why the DRI ?
The DRI part could be split from the user space OGL driver and could live in the kernel space, I believe that a number of SoC vendors already behave like this.

[birdie]

Alan Cox is one of the developers objecting to the change.

Should read as:

Fuck Linux as a viable gaming platform.

Fuck desktop Linux.

We are quite content with semi-working dead slow open source drivers for ATI/NVIDIA (which don't support well power saving features thus no sane laptop user should ever use them).

With such an attitude Linux will always have 1-1,5% market share. And don't even get me started on Stable API nonsense and lack of real backward libraries compatibility (it's just not there).

[gururise]

"but we for better or worse can't share much infrastructure like DRI."

I don't understand why they can't do that ?
They can't share the user space OpenGL driver, I can understand, but why the DRI ?
The DRI part could be split from the user space OGL driver and could live in the kernel space, I believe that a number of SoC vendors already behave like this.

For whatever reason, the management at Nvidia will not allow this. I'd hope the kernel developers realize that not every company can, or is willing to, release OSS drivers for their product. If the kernel devs are going to object on moral grounds, why not remove support for binary blobs altogether?

[agd5f]

"but we for better or worse can't share much infrastructure like DRI."

I don't understand why they can't do that ?
They can't share the user space OpenGL driver, I can understand, but why the DRI ?
The DRI part could be split from the user space OGL driver and could live in the kernel space, I believe that a number of SoC vendors already behave like this.

Their driver stack is different. They could either rewrite it to use the DRI, or continue to use the mechanism that they presumably share with their windows driver. Rewriting is more work for dubious benefit, so...

[pingufunkybeat]

Should read as:

Fuck Linux as a viable gaming platform.

Fuck desktop Linux.

We are quite content with semi-working dead slow open source drivers for ATI/NVIDIA (which don't support well power saving features thus no sane laptop user should ever use them).

With such an attitude Linux will always have 1-1,5% market share. And don't even get me started on Stable API nonsense and lack of real backward libraries compatibility (it's just not there).

NVidia's binary blobs have been around for more than a decade, offer good performance, and still they didn't propell Linux to 90% desktop share. And now it's Alan Cox' fault?

Why do you think it is exactly THIS license change which will bring all gaming to Linux and make it THE desktop for all (tm)?