2010 Through 2019 NVIDIA Linux News Topped By Linus Torvald's Criticism + Overclocking

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 19 December 2019 at 01:15 AM EST. 5 Comments
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With 2019 quickly drawing to a close, similar to yesterday's look at the most viewed Radeon Linux/open-source stories from 2010 through 2019, here is a similar look at NVIDIA's open-source/Linux news highlights.

This is a look at the 20 most popular NVIDIA news articles on Phoronix from 2010 through now, not including hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles out of some 1,350 NVIDIA articles on Phoronix fitting that criteria during the time-frame. Topping the list besides a look at the then-new overclocking support were multiple articles about Linus Torvald's criticism of the company. There is also a lot of other open-source related items topping the list and their other continued work on their feature-rich yet proprietary Linux graphics driver stack.

It will certainly be interesting to see what 2020 has in store especially with some sort of new open-source announcement potentially coming at GTC.

How To Overclock New NVIDIA GPUs On Linux
With this morning's release of the NVIDIA 337.12 Beta Linux driver there is finally GPU overclocking support for the NVIDIA "Fermi" GPUs and newer, a.k.a. the GeForce 400 series and newer. This long-awaited overclocking support, however, isn't setup the same as when overclocking older GeForce GPUs with the NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words
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 Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever
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!"

NVIDIA Starts Publishing GPU Hardware Documentation To Help Open-Source Drivers
Today is a wild one for open-source/Linux users. Let's begin with the unexpected news: NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last! Yes, freely-available hardware interface documentation to assist in the development of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau).

NVIDIA Loses Huge GPU Order Due To Linux Blob
NVIDIA has lost an order of at least ten million graphics cards because their GeForce/Quadro driver is closed-source.

NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux
As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company's plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland.

Some Early Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Vulkan Tests With NVIDIA Graphics
While waiting to test Ubuntu Bash on Windows, I decided to run some (manual) tests of Vulkan on Windows compared to some recent Ubuntu Linux figures with different NVIDIA graphics cards.

NVIDIA Has Major New Linux Driver: Optimus, RandR 1.4
NVIDIA announced the 319.12 Beta Linux graphics driver announcement this morning. While the number may seem mundane, this is a very exciting NVIDIA Linux graphics driver update. It presents work that will benefit the agonized NVIDIA Optimus Linux users, provides new RandR functionality, and other new features.

More GCC Patches To Get OpenMP Offloading To NVIDIA NVPTX Working
Fresh patches are available for GCC to get OpenMP offloading to the NVIDIA PTX ISA working for accelerating OpenMP on NVIDIA GPUs with the GNU Compiler Collection.

Nouveau: NVIDIA's New Hardware Is "VERY Open-Source Unfriendly"
While NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that's only when using the proprietary driver... NVIDIA's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware.

NVIDIA Alerts Nouveau: They're Starting To Sign/Validate GPU Firmware Images
To the dismay of open-source fans, NVIDIA is tightening the belt so to speak around their GPU hardware: with Maxwell and future hardware, certain aspects of the NVIDIA graphics processor chip will only be available to the "Falcon" (a.k.a. "FUC") firmware images that have been signed by NVIDIA. While this will throw a wrench at Nouveau's open-source effort, NVIDIA at least informed Nouveau and are jointly working towards an adequate solution.

NVIDIA Optimus Unofficially Comes To Linux
NVIDIA's Optimus multi-GPU technology now works under Linux. Well, at least for some notebooks, it's been hacked together by an open-source developer and in fact is working to use both Intel and NVIDIA graphics processors simultaneously with the respective drivers. This is the best Linux implementation we've seen yet with NVIDIA Corp still not announcing plans to officially support this technology under non-Microsoft operating systems.

Nouveau Driver Gets RandR 1.2 Fixes
While it will be a while before the next Nouveau Companion is out, we wanted to let you all know that over the past couple of days the Nouveau driver has received some additional RandR 1.2 work. The RandR 1.2 changes range from adding extra initialization code, new PLL restrictions, a regression fix, and automatically disabling RandR 1.2 support on versions previous to X server 1.3. There's also been a number of other changes taking place with this open-source NVIDIA driver over the past couple of days. Find out all of the details on the Nouveau gitweb.

The Relative Windows vs. Linux Performance For NVIDIA, Intel & AMD
Following the recent Windows vs. Linux AMDGPU-PRO / RadeonSI testing, GTX 1080 Windows vs. Linux results, and yesterday's Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, here is a look at all three sets of numbers when using some OpenBenchmarking.org magic to merge the data-sets and normalize the results.

Former NVIDIA, Microsoft Developers Doing Lots Of The SteamOS Work
A former NVIDIA engineer joined Valve some months ago and is responsible for lots of the work on SteamOS and their Linux support. A long-time Microsoft employee is also involved in designing SteamOS. Here's also a few other bits of information in my SteamOS adventures this evening.

NVIDIA's "Open-Source Guy" Has Left The Company
One of the main public-facing figures to NVIDIA's open-source driver efforts has left the company to pursue a new opportunity.

NVIDIA Tegra 3 Makes For Fast Ubuntu On ARM
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.

Rumor: NVIDIA Working On Their Own Distribution For Linux Gamers
Making the rounds on the Internet today is a rumor that NVIDIA Corp is allegedly working on their own Linux distribution.

NVIDIA Confirms It's Working On Optimus Linux Support
At long last, NVIDIA confirms they are working on supporting their multi-GPU Optimus Technology under Linux with their proprietary graphics driver.

NVIDIA Is Joining The Linux Foundation
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.
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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.

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