Next Linux Kernel Due Early March 196
swandives writes "The Linux.conf.au is in full-swing in Wellington, New Zealand, and Computerworld Australia has an interview with Jon Corbet in the leadup to his Kernel Report. The latest kernel release is due early March and will include reversed-engineered drivers for Nvidia chipsets."
Re:Year of the linux desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, just 2.6.33. Even less exciting is that 2.6.33-rc4 was available 5 days ago.
This isn't news, but what should we expect of a late night update, eh?
Re:Reverse engineered nVidia drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
yes, Nouveau.. its referring to a previous Slashdot story late last year:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/11/1556237 [slashdot.org]
And yes, that link could have been supplied, but that would require some sort of editing.
Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Please see the last NVIDIA linux drivers story.. for fuck sake.. it's only been a month.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/11/1556237 [slashdot.org]
Go argue with last month.
Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't had to do that for a few years now, modern distributions (Mandriva and OpenSuse for eg.) automatically setup DKMS or use some other mechanism to update the NVIDIA drivers automagically when a new kernel boots.
That said however it'd be better to have a working NVIDIA driver in the kernel, as these solutions are a bit hacky and potentially an open-source driver would have a faster pace of development (instead of being the poor cousin to the Windows drivers in NVIDIA's internal development priorities).
Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, I have no problem with that. I've been using Linux or long enough to remember having to spend a lot of time getting around issues of hardware compatibility. Nvidia was in there quite early on providing good drivers for its chipsets at a time when just about every other manufacturer just shrugged its shoulders and told us to "Fuck off, We don't support Linux."
That alone has promoted a lot of goodwill as far as I'm concerned, and so nVidia chipsets are right at the top of my preferred brands list. So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
guess again, New Zealand is part of the continent Zealandia [wikipedia.org]
it is NOT part of the continent of Australia, different shelf.
makes sense our schools gave up teaching geography and history, who needs that when we have blogs.
Re:huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Pfffffffffft... It's an urban myth made up by kiwis to make themselves feel special, pay no attention to it.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, this fighting is fun (and I have no horse in the race!). Note that even in the most generous listing of continents (comprising 7), New Zealand is NOT separated from Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number_of_continents [wikipedia.org]
Yes (Score:1, Informative)
and no.
As it is, I do my encoding on tty2 and tty3 since I hate having to restart an encode (take to long.)
$ man 1 screen
Re:Will the kernel ever get to 3? (Score:3, Informative)
USB and SMP are things the kernel implemented, but weren't created inside it. The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist, so it's not going to get more things like that, unless new standards get created.
But, new things get added all the time, just watch the kernel reports at LWN [lwn.net].
Re:3D (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, "Far better support" from Intel.
My Vaio P is sitting on my desk unused, waiting for a GMA500 driver...
INTEL SUCKS!
(sorry for this little rant)
Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Theres another side to this - if you have ever tried to work with 3D apps on Linux, free or commercial - Blender, Maya or written your own OpenGL apps, and wanted support for the standards and good performance, you would realise that NVidia is your only choice. Compared to their commercial rivals, and the open source community, they do a *stellar* job at supporting Linux.
Every other manufacturer has provided such piss-poor reliability and/or performance under Linux, they just aren't an option.
I think its great that AMD docs and lots of hard work by the Xorg and driver coders mean that radeon drivers are getting to the point where they challenge NVidias status in this area, but for the last 5 years, AMD/ATI were next to useless on Linux for serious work, and Intel graphics weren't (and still aren't) an option where anything even remotely current in terms of OpenGL API usage (e.g. GLSL shaders) are concerned.
The Open Source community has done an awful job of architecting their graphics stack, with no foresight, planning or consistency across drivers. Thats not a bash, thats the natural result of open source evolution, and why they're rearchitecting it.
Now this is being reworked, we're seeing massive churn and widespread breakage. NVidia saw this coming and wrote their drivers to bypass this mess. Many of the design decisions taken by the Xorg guys are very much influenced by how NVidia handles things.
Intel, supposedly the paragon of openness and open source, managed to show a massive performance regression in the kernel and X.org revisions prior to the current ones, and their latest 'Poulsbo' chipsets have no documentation, and no open source drivers. Intel's support for these cards on Linux is way worse than NVidia. Theyre also walking away from any open source OSes except Linux by relying on Linux-only kernel mode setting.
AMD/ATI continue to release fglrx drivers that are plagued with bugs, refuse to release documentation of current products, and have 2D performance that is so abysmal it makes the VESA framebuffer look pretty good in comparison. AMD/ATI open source drivers (while improving greatly and probably a good option today for people who don't really need full OpenGL coverage,) are very much a work in progress, incapable of running even moderately advanced OpenGL apps, and they too are dumping any support for non-Linux open source OSes.
As a 3D developer, I can't rely on anything but NVidia to work, and stay working across distro upgrades. If thats the definition of 'horrible job at supporting Linux', i think you need your head read. There just isn't anything else that is usable for professional or semi-professional 3D work on Linux.
I am extremely grateful to NVidia for enabling any kind of consistent 3D support on Linux while everyone else, commercial or open source, struggles to catch up.