NVIDIA Announces New Legacy Linux Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Announces New Legacy Linux Support

NVIDIA has announced today the graphics cards that are no longer supported by their mainline Linux graphics driver going forward but will be moved to a new 304.xx Linux legacy driver branch...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE4MTM

[Thaodan]

Besides the Blob vs. Open Source driver discussion no one can say that Nvidia does nothing to support their customers.

But some things that I think that are needed are KMS support and offical support from Nvidia and may be from some of ther OEMs.

[roland]

Besides the Blob vs. Open Source driver discussion no one can say that Nvidia does nothing to support their customers.

That's an interesting response to news about nvidia *dropping* support for a bunch of hardware.

[mrugiero]

That's an interesting response to news about nvidia *dropping* support for a bunch of hardware.

It's not dropping support. Dropping support means actually dropping support, you know?
Branching so they can more easily refactor and maintain newer code is not dropping, if they do keep bugfixing and updating for newer X.org releases on the branch.

[Sidicas]

People keep saying that nvidia's binary blob supports hardware much longer than AMD's binary blob.. I'd like to see it all written down in a table somewhere by GeForce series, AMD series, and the last version of X.org supported.

I think I'll start working on a table this afternoon.. Is there a good Wiki to put such a table?

[korrode]

Too bad 304.xx makes me system randomly freeze solid.
Still running 295.xx here, my opinion based on personal experience is 295.xx is the series they should've picked for the next legacy branch.

[mrugiero]

People keep saying that nvidia's binary blob supports hardware much longer than AMD's binary blob.. I'd like to see it all written down in a table somewhere by GeForce series, AMD series, and the last version of X.org supported.

I think I'll start working on a table this afternoon.. Is there a good Wiki to put such a table?

I hope you don't mean me, because I didn't compare anything. I've got no preference over the two of them, and I like to use the open source drivers on both, so I can't care less about what cards are supported through the blobs. I just corrected an incorrect statement.

[whitecat]

I think I'll start working on a table this afternoon.. Is there a good Wiki to put such a table?

Google Docs?

[Sidicas]

Google Docs?

Ya, I'll put it up on Google Docs.. So far I have AMD's cards done. AMD has been surprisingly consistent at providing Linux Proprietary Drivers for about 4 years after the hardware is released. Then after that, the Proprietary drivers don't work because Xorg and the kernel getting updated. I have it done all the way back to the R200.. Before that, it doesn't look like there were any Linux drivers at all provided by AMD so the open source drivers have a big win there as they're still going strong on Rage 128 hardware (17+ years of open source driver and still going).

I was thinking of creating timelines for all the graphics hardware showing the release of the hardware, proprietary driver support, open source driver support, end of proprietary support, end of open source support, etc. Just to put things into perspective.

I haven't even gotten to nvidia yet...

[Sidicas]

Going forward the 304.xx Linux legacy driver will mainly just be updated for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server compatibility along with any critical bug-fixes needed by major NVIDIA customers.

See that's why I keep getting so confused. nVidia *REALLY* is not dropping support at all in the same way that AMD has dropped support for cards in the past.. What I consider to be "dropped support" would be both of the following:
1) The proprietary driver is no longer installable at all, in newer distributions
2) developers are only working on the drivers for newer hardware even though there might be missing features in the older drivers.

Sure, nvidia might now be doing #2 for the mentioned hardware in the article. However, AMD already does both #1 and #2 for almost all their legacy hardware. So there is really a big difference about how AMD and nVidia go about treating their legacy hardware.

Aside from nVidia screwing Linux users with no support for Optimus and no support for Wayland, it looks like nvidia's Linux hardware support is pretty darn good, supporting the latest kernels and Xorg versions for hardware going back 10+ years with the proprietary driver. Not to mention VDPAU, while AMD really didn't do anything with UVD on Linux.