NVIDIA Announces New Legacy Linux Support

[Gusar]

I was referring to this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE3MzY

I don't see how what's in that article is connected to the FU, despite what the last sentence says. correlation != causation
What makes sense: a) Nvidia is looking into supporting Optimus because Linus showed them the middle finger, or b) Nvidia is looking into supporting Optimus because the graphics stack is now capable of it thanks to dma-buf and xrandr1.4?

I'm pretty sure xrandr 1.4 never existed. I believe xorg decided not to release that and skipped to xrandr 1.5.

What was initially meant to be 1.4 was scraped, so now the output/offload slave stuff required for Optimus is 1.4. There will be no number-skipping.

Other than the potentially false remark here about licensing issues, it would seem to make sense that they implement the kernel one and remove their custom one since it would reduce bloat in their driver from a programmer's perspective.

Why move from an established working solution they have to something new, when there aren't apparent benefits? What would be the incentive to invest in the effort? Also, have you seen the size of the Nvidia driver? I don't think they care about avoiding bloat.

Switching from twinview to xrandr1.2 is different, it means existing DE tools for monitor configuration now work. Also, twinview didn't support rotating a single display in a multi-monitor scenario, whereas xrandr1.2 does. There might be a few other benefits that I can't recall currently. There are no such benefits in switching kernel modesetting implementations.

Somehow it doesn't seem all that tiny since linux runs on a lot of embedded devices (tablets, smartphones, etc).

Yeah, but we're talking here about desktop Linux.

In terms of desktop users (laptops too), it also doesn't seem that small.

But it is. Thinking otherwise would be naive. Nvidia supports the Linux desktop at all only because of two reasons - they can reuse a lot of stuff from the Windows driver, and there are high-paying customers in the workstation space. The effort required to then support the desktop after you already have a workstation driver isn't that much.
Though sometimes we do get goodies that appear desktop-only (VDPAU), desktop Linux is nevertheless low priority for Nvidia. Because the market share simply isn't there.