NVIDIA 260.19.36 Driver Released; 270.xx Coming Soon

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 23 January 2011 at 02:39 PM EST. 1 Comment
NVIDIA
On Friday the NVIDIA engineers working on their proprietary Linux driver put out a new driver update. This new driver update is marked NVIDIA 260.19.36 Certified, but it brings just three official changes.

The NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver updates the NVIDIA kernel module to now ensure that all system memory allocated by it for either the GPU or user-space driver are initalized to zero. Beyond that memory initalization behavior change, there's also fixes for when using color index overlays in X Server 1.9+ to crash the xorg-server and also a bug that caused pixel value 255 to be transparent with color index overlays. For those that prefer the NVIDIA kernel module doesn't initalize allocations to zero, there is now a InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations kernel module option to revert back to the old uninitalized behavior.

This NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver can be downloaded for Linux x86 and x86_64 at NVIDIA.com. Meanwhile, the NVIDIA 270.xx Linux driver should soon be going into beta as we are already seeing results for this next major driver update (right now being labelled as NVIDIA 270.18) appearing in results on OpenBenchmarking.org.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week