NVIDIA Set To Discontinue Linux 2.4 Kernel Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Set To Discontinue Linux 2.4 Kernel Support

For anyone still using the ancient Linux 2.4 kernel, NVIDIA will soon be discontinuing support for the 2.4 kernel from their mainline Linux graphics driver...

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

[Tiger_Coder]

Really Kudos to them. I really like Nvidia's Legacy support. My 7 year old Geforce 6 series got mainline driver support until 304. And my 11 year old geforce mx 400 still might use Nvidia 96 driver with ubuntu 12.04( although did not start that oldi in 2 years ). I respect them really . Unlike some other vendor who's 2 year old IGP can't run even Ubuntu 12.10

[GreatEmerald]

Oh no, my router won't be able to run it any more! Oh, wait, it doesn't have NVIDIA graphics to begin with.
Indeed amazing how they kept that so long.

[Ancurio]

People are applauding Nvidia for this prolonged support, when really it was most likely just
for their commercial workstation customers running forever on stone age kernels.

If it wasn't for those, there wouldn't really be an optimized driver for Linux in the first place.

[ryao]

People are applauding Nvidia for this prolonged support, when really it was most likely just
for their commercial workstation customers running forever on stone age kernels.

If it wasn't for those, there wouldn't really be an optimized driver for Linux in the first place.

Would you care to explain why Nvidia also supports FreeBSD and Solaris?

[not.sure]

Would you care to explain why Nvidia also supports FreeBSD and Solaris?

Are you suggesting they do it out of the goodness of their heart?

[Vim_User]

People are applauding Nvidia for this prolonged support, when really it was most likely just
for their commercial workstation customers running forever on stone age kernels.

If it wasn't for those, there wouldn't really be an optimized driver for Linux in the first place.

Who cares why they do it? AMD does it for the same reasons.
Only that they just don't give you the same quality of drivers and support as Nvidia does.

[elanthis]

Would you care to explain why Nvidia also supports FreeBSD and Solaris?

Same reason they support older Linux kernels for so long. Both of those OSes are popular in high-end visual workstation and compute farm usages. Several large Hollywood VFX studios use clusters of FreeBSD machines, for example. NVIDIA caters to said users to ensure they stay product-loyal (even if switching to Linux is not a big deal) and don't switch to AMD hardware in the hopes of getting better first-class support. Solaris likely has similar usage, though I'm not personally familiar with any Solaris graphics workstation/cluster rollouts today.

Remember that the very first major ATI graphics drivers for R100 chips came about because the Weather Channel had a bunch of ATI hardware it wanted to use in its clusters. Supporting home desktop users was a very distant concern at the time (it likely was done because dogfooding the drivers on dev machines made testing and developing easier, not because supporting self-entitled users was a concern at all).

Hardware vendors don't make shit for home Linux users. They make things for companies that have a lot of Linux deployments. Same with every GPL driver pushed into the kernel by a corporate coder; they're not made so you John Q Public has support for some hardware, they do it so Rackspace or Googlr or some other large buyer will buy their hardware. Sales to individual Linux users make a few dollars on every unit sold to a small overall marketshare. Sales to Linux-using companies involve multi-million dollar support contracts and huge volumes of sales of the current product plus added loyalty resulting in more huge sales when the company upgrades later. Selling to individual home users and making a worthwhile profit (enough to justify staying in business and not closing down to invest in a different industry) requires a market penetration that Linux lacks, and would forever lack without the incidental support provided by vendors trying to please Google and research centers and so on. This is not specific to Linux, just a fact of how businesses work. They're in it for profits, not pleasing the public.

[ryszardzonk]

This is not specific to Linux, just a fact of how businesses work. They're in it for profits, not pleasing the public.

I agree, but those guys should keep in mind that sane client also do not make buying decisions because one wants increase economy's GDP but to fulfill specific need and if last product from specific vendor did not stand up to the expectations than it is quite unlikely they would see a sale happen to that client any time soon.