NVIDIA News Archives

NVIDIA doesn't usually show up at the annual X.Org Developers' Summits/Conferences, but for some reason at least one NVIDIA employee will be trekking to Germany for meeting with the open-source developers.

Days after it was publicly revealed that a security vulnerability in the NVIDIA Linux driver easily yields root system access, NVIDIA has updated their proprietary graphics driver to address this problem.

NVIDIA's had a past few weeks with Linus Torvalds having harsh words for NVIDIA, the downing of their forums, and now a NVIDIA driver exploit being revealed that gives normal users the rights to super-user privileges.

The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux graphics driver is available this Monday afternoon. There's several exciting changes to this latest NVIDIA Linux driver for the 304 series that's still in beta.

An ex-NVIDIA engineer that had a patent concerning high compression rate texture mapping attempted to attack an open-source project for supposedly violating this patent related to software graphics texture compression. The open-source software in question is Crunch and it's written by a Valve Software developer.

NVIDIA released the 304.22 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver beta this morning, which has a number of new features and fixes. There's 27 official changes to be exact.

There's some hope for NVIDIA laptop customers that rely upon their binary Linux graphics drivers that one day hope to utilize Optimus Technology.

It's been an interesting week for NVIDIA with Torvalds speaking quite negatively of NVIDIA, NVIDIA PR's fluffy response, and their recent loss of a huge order due to not having an open-source driver / MIPS port. However, NVIDIA Linux engineers are hoping to be better Linux patrons.

A while back I performed an OpenCL performance comparison against a range of AMD Radeon graphics cards. In this article, the table has turned as the OpenCL results on NVIDIA's GeForce graphics cards are examined.

NVIDIA has lost an order of at least ten million graphics cards because their GeForce/Quadro driver is closed-source.

NVIDIA's PR department has issued a statement following the harsh comments by Linus Torvalds last week where he referred to the graphics company as the single worst company they have ever dealt with, called them out on not supporting Optimus, and other issues.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has called out NVIDIA for their poor graphics drivers / support in a public presentation. In the talk he called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended his green comments with "NVIDIA: FUCK YOU!"

Before calling it a week, NVIDIA Linux engineers released the 302.17 stable Linux driver. This is the first stable/certified Linux driver in the 302.xx series and thus the first that brings the long-awaited RandR 1.2/1.3 support.

It's time to update your NVIDIA binary blob.

NVIDIA has updated L4T, their "Linux For Tegra" platform, for those using NVIDIA's ARM hardware.

Aside from releasing a stable Linux driver update last week, NVIDIA also pushed out a new 302-series Linux driver beta.

NVIDIA has released the updated 295.53 binary Linux display graphics driver for GeForce and Quadro hardware.

File this as you wish, but since talking about The Biggest Problem For A Linux PC Vendor, I've heard some interesting information from a source regarding future Tegra plans. The mentioned work if it reaches the market would be extremely interesting and would be good news for Linux users.

NVIDIA has today expanded their GeForce 600 series Kepler line-up with the launch of the GeForce GTX 670.

NVIDIA CUDA developer relations just fired off an email entitled NVIDIA Contributes CUDA Compiler to Open Source Community.

About one week ago, NVIDIA released new hardfp-built Tegra Linux drivers.

While NVIDIA this week put out their first 302.xx series beta Linux graphics driver, yesterday they also released the 295.49 stable Linux driver. This update does fix the 295.40 performance regression that affected some users in April.

At long last, the NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver properly implements support for versions 1.2 and 1.3 of RandR, the Resize and Rotate extension for the X.Org Server. This support comes with the newly-introduced 302.xx beta Linux graphics driver.

NVIDIA this week announced their release of the "NVPTX" back-end for LLVM with the hope to replace the existing PTX (Parallel Thread Execution) back-end inside this compiler infrastructure. This open-source code coming out of NVIDIA is based upon their internal sources.

Yesterday I reported on it appearing the 295.40 NVIDIA Linux driver effectively fell off a cliff with a range of performance regressions, stability issues, and other problems. This issue has been confirmed by NVIDIA and they're working to address the situation.

While the NVIDIA 295.40 Linux graphics driver closes a high-risk security vulnerability, there's many reports coming in that the proprietary driver's performance has effectively fallen off a cliff and also caused stability issues.

Besides a binary driver update from the GeForce/Quadro camp coming out today, a basic DRM/KMS driver for NVIDIA's ARM-based Tegra 2 SOC has appeared this morning.

NVIDIA's Linux team this morning announced the immediate release of the 295.40 Linux driver. There aren't many changes for this release compared to the recent 295.33 driver release, but it does address a high-risk security vulnerability.

Shinpei Kato, the developer that last year at XDC2011 Chicago presented TimeGraph as an open-source GPU Linux command scheduler and PathScale's GPGPU run-time, has something new to share. Shinpei's latest project is Gdev, which comes down to being an open-source CUDA implementation that's competitive to NVIDIA's proprietary stack.

On the same-day as releasing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 as the first GeForce graphics card based upon the new Kepler architecture, there's a binary driver update from NVIDIA that ushers in the official Kepler Linux support. There's also more surprising news out of the reverse-engineering Nouveau camp, on top of their surprises earlier today.

NVIDIA has finally introduced their first Kepler-based graphics card: the GeForce GTX 680. The new Kepler graphics architecture is an exciting successor to Fermi, but how well does this new graphics processor work under Linux? Here's a glimpse in what to expect for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series on Linux.

Here are the first set of Phoronix.com benchmarks of the quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3. Needless to say, four Cortex-A9s combined with NVIDIA graphics leads to a fairly fast ARMv7 experience when running Ubuntu Linux.

NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don't break out the champagne quite yet.

Now that NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) has a public list, will NVIDIA be engaging more with the open-source driver community?

There's some resurrected hope for the kernel symbols of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism to be not restricted to only GPL drivers, which started off as a request by NVIDIA. This could lead to better NVIDIA Optimus support under Linux, among other benefits.

NVIDIA this morning formally released the 295.20 display drivers for Linux x86/x86_64.

Last week NVIDIA released a new beta Linux driver that is supportive of X.Org Server 1.12.

Back in December there was an announcement from NVIDIA that they would open-source their CUDA compiler based upon the LLVM back-end. NVIDIA today released their new CUDA implementation that's based upon LLVM. Besides being open-source, which will allow it to be ported to new (non-NVIDIA) architectures/hardware, there's also a measurable speed boost in the switch over to LLVM.

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.

Bumblebee 3.0 "Tumbleweed" has been released as an updated (and unofficial) way of handling NVIDIA Optimus technology under Linux.

It's not often that there's open-source news to report from the NVIDIA camp, but there's some great news this morning. NVIDIA Corp has open-sourced its CUDA compiler!

NVIDIA announced yesterday the 290.10 Linux graphics driver with numerous changes.

One of the features that NVIDIA introduced in the 290.03 Beta Linux driver that was released on Friday is support for an OpenGL shader disk cache.

It was just in August that NVIDIA was pushing out driver betas for their Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD 285.xx series, but now that the series is stable, they have moved onto the 290.xx series. On Friday NVIDIA released the 290.03 Linux driver beta.

As was pointed out in the forums, new binary NVIDIA Linux drivers were pushed out today. The new version is the 285.05.09 pre-release.

NVIDIA has created a new branch of their proprietary Linux graphics driver. This new driver is for the "long-lived" series. The purpose of this series is to provide just bug-fixes and other minor updates for non-legacy hardware. In other words, like their legacy drivers where they just receive minor updates, but for those just wanting these fixes for newer hardware while not exposing any new functionality.

Following a proposal earlier this summer by NVIDIA to extend the RandR protocol, they have now produced a patch for the X.Org Server that adds border property support to the RandR (Resize and Rotate) extension.

While some NVIDIA Linux developers are up here in Vancouver for LinuxCon (met some friendly and informative NVIDIA engineers at the Linux Foundation gala last night), the NVIDIA Linux desktop team back in Santa Clara has put out the first 285.xx Linux driver series beta now that the 280 driver was made official earlier in the month.

Following the 280.04 beta and 280.11 beta, NVIDIA has just made the 280 Linux driver series official with the certified release of the 280.13 build.

On the ATI/AMD Radeon side, when your hardware is no longer supported by the mainline Catalyst driver (e.g. right now all Radeon X1000 [R500] GPUs and older), you're left to use just the open-source driver stack, which obviously works quite well for many consumers on new and old hardware. AMD doesn't update their legacy Catalyst support for this older hardware in terms of bug-fixes and support for new X.Org / Linux releases. NVIDIA though, however, is continuing to support their vintage hardware via legacy Linux driver updates. This week they've released four new drivers.