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Operating Systems Linux

Next Linux Kernel Due Early March 196

Posted by timothy from the that's-what-I-call-a-public-good dept.
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."
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Next Linux Kernel Due Early March More

Next Linux Kernel Due Early March

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  • Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Arancaytar ( 966377 ) <arancaytar.ilyaran@gmail.com> on Monday January 18, 2010 @02:20AM (#30805374) Homepage

    I have such a chipset and I've been cursing NVIDIA on a regular basis. After updating to any new kernel, I must boot into no-X mode, then run the proprietary driver installer.

    • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rastilin ( 752802 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @02:56AM (#30805500)

      So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem? This is hardly a new situation, so presumably you knew this when you bought your Nvidia chipset.

      • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 ) * <qg@biodome.org> on Monday January 18, 2010 @03:03AM (#30805530) Homepage Journal

        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)

        by BrokenHalo ( 565198 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @04:30AM (#30805816)
        So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?

        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:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @07:39AM (#30806730)

          So, Nvidia writes drivers for your system, and those drivers work. What's the problem?

          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.

          Goodwill Schmoodwill. This is business. For quite some time, the only way I've been able to easily install Ubuntu on several of my Nvidia machines has been by swapping out the graphics card(s) for ATI, installing the OS and nvidia drivers, then installing the Nvidia cards again. True, this is an Ubuntu issue, since they insist on a GUI install only (sorry, but the alternate CD is a pain, at least use curses to emulate a GUI before making Mom and Pop use Debian), and they don't include the nvidia driver on the CD. The nv and vesa drivers are both broken for lots of nvidia cards (nv causes green verical lines, and vesa just crashes X continuously.
          If Nvidia had created a usable neutered (2D) OSS driver that Just Worked (TM) with their cards, a la ATI/IBM, then I'd still be suggesting their cards for Linux newbies like I did back in the Aughties. Instead, I've been suggesting IBM first, ATI next, and Nvidia only for experienced folk who need superior OpenGL cards.

          • If Nvidia had created a usable neutered (2D) OSS driver that Just Worked (TM) with their cards, a la ATI/IBM, then I'd still be suggesting their cards for Linux newbies like I did back in the Aughties. Instead, I've been suggesting IBM first, ATI next, and Nvidia only for experienced folk who need superior OpenGL cards.

            I've never heard of IBM graphics cards. Do you mean Intel or something else? I personally recommend Intel graphics for Linux users, since the only drivers they make for Linux are opensource, with full 3D capabilities ("full" as in what the chip is capable of).

            • I've never heard of IBM graphics cards. Do you mean Intel or something else?

              Wow, I shouldn't post just after waking up. Yep, I meant Intel.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Sancho ( 17056 )

              Last I checked, the GMA500 didn't have open-source drivers. Of course, I believe that this is a chip which Intel rebrands, but it does mean that you can't simply trust that if it says "Intel graphics" it will be well-supported.

          • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Insightful)

            by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @09:28AM (#30807600) Homepage

            nv drivers broken for a lot of cards? Which ones would these be? They would not happen to be perchance cards that any Windows users would consider laughingly out of date?

            I think you will find legions of users that think you are full of sh*t and especially full of sh*t for adding Ubuntu to your rant.

            • nv drivers broken for a lot of cards? Which ones would these be? They would not happen to be perchance cards that any Windows users would consider laughingly out of date? I think you will find legions of users that think you are full of sh*t and especially full of sh*t for adding Ubuntu to your rant.

              Maybe laughingly out of date by Windows standards, but that usually means gamers. A geforce 6600 is still a good card, even if it's old (not as old as my TNT cards that still work). And if it's old, shouldn't it have better drivers? Just sayin'.
              As for the Ubuntu rant, perhaps you should do a search for "vertical lines" on ubuntuforums.org?
              http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22vertical+lines%22+green+site%3Aubuntuforums.org+nvidia&aq=f&oq=&aqi= [google.com]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jedidiah ( 1196 )

                Perhaps you should use your own argument rather than poaching someone else's.

                I've personally used nvidia cards from the 6150 to the 9400 and taken good advantage
                of the features that don't exist in the open drivers but are well supported in the
                proprietary ones. I also have firsthand experiences with some of the alternatives.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Skater ( 41976 )
          Yeah, I buy NVidia cards because I know they are supported under Linux. My one experience with an ATI card was not very good (although it was in a laptop). However, I hope the kernel dual-head support is better than NVidia's for my current card - mine will shut off the primary monitor (which gives an "out of range" error message) from time to time. VERY annoying, and I know it's not the monitor because I've had the same problem with two totally different monitors (two CRTs vs. two LCDs, running at differ

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MSG ( 12810 )

          So I get very tired of hearing people badmouthing nVidia without giving an adequate reason why.

          Here's mine: Times have changed. The Free Software community has successfully convinced the large majority of those other vendors to support Free Software properly by releasing specifications. Once upon a time, NVidia's support was "good" relative to other vendors (but, to be clear, no good in terms of the Free Software community's goals), but today better support is available from the other vendors. Since NVidia's support for Linux and the Free Software community's goals is less good then their competit

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by amRadioHed ( 463061 )

      You'll still need to do that if you want 3D support. nouveau is replacing the old nv driver, but it's not ready to replace the proprietary driver.

    • I'm running Fedora (12) and with the rpmfusion(-nonfree*) repository added, i don't need to run nvidia's installer. I just update my entire system, including the nvidia driver. If you're fed up by your way of updating, give Fedora a chance.

    • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by l2718 ( 514756 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @03:10AM (#30805556)

      I have such a chipset and I've been cursing NVIDIA on a regular basis.

      You must be new to this "Linux" thing. That your Hardware OEM is providing Linux drivers at all is highly unusual. That the drivers are effective is astounding -- that the installer provided the drivers is rudimentary is not worth complaining over. In any case if you really mind I'm sure you can write a replacement installer.

      • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thue ( 121682 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @07:50AM (#30806822) Homepage

        Except that the two other major Graphics providers, Intel and AMD, both give the Linux community far better support than NVIDIA. Intel is writing excellent well-integrated open source drivers themselves, which AMD is providing full specs, which has allowed others to write drivers. AMD's making the specs available is far better Linux support than NVIDIA making closed source drivers available.

        NVIDIA has provided neither open source drivers, firmware, nor specs. So the open source developers have to resort to reverse engineer the drivers. And to make all kinds of jumping through hoops to use the firmware, which NVIDIA has not allowed to be redistributed in binary form.

        So I think we have every right to criticize NVIDIA when comparing to the marked at large. They are doing a horrible job at supporting Linux.

        • Except that the two other major Graphics providers, Intel and AMD, both give the Linux community far better support than NVIDIA. Intel is writing excellent well-integrated open source drivers themselves

          Has AMD actually caught up yet, or are they still generations behind on releasing specs? And I have an EEE 701 and every time intel tweaks the graphics drivers they break something in the janky intel video chipset. You have to have the newest and greatest intel GPU (which is still shitty) to have good driver support. 9xx series is poo, and worked better with the old drivers.

          nVidia drivers work, as long as you have a supported card. You have to check the driver support before you buy. But since that's true o

        • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)

          by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @02:30PM (#30811296) Homepage

          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.

      • What you two completely ignored, probably with your minds fully in the windows world:

        A installer?? For Linux???
        How sick is that?

        Linux has package managers. The package belongs into the repository, just like any other software.
        Installers are Windows speak.

        And those packages are a source package (e.g. source or binaries in tar.bz2), and a description file. Sometimes wrapped in one (e.g. RPM.)
        This ensures comfortable installation, uninstallation, dependency management, updates/patches, etc.

        Installers... silly,

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by l2718 ( 514756 )
          Having been a unix sysadmin for 15 years, I'm quite aware of package managers. Unfortunately not all OEM drivers come nicely packaged, so you have to install them by hand. Yes, I know I could make an RPM file around the driver, but it's far simpler to write a shellscript that automates the tasks the OP wanted (shut down X, shut down the display, replace kernel modules and X drivers, restart display, restart X). And yes, I call such a script an "installer". It doesn't display fancy graphics, but it sure

    • Re:Thank goodness for those drivers (Score:5, Informative)

      by timbo234 ( 833667 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @03:33AM (#30805628) Journal

      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: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      |. Switch to nv driver
      2. Upgrade kernel
      3. Switch to nvidia driver

      Not that I've ever done that, I use a distro that packages the kernel and binary driver for me. Maybe if you want a userfriendly solution you should get one instead of trying to do everything manually, then complain about having to do everything manually?

      Nouveau will be much closer to nv than nvidia in pretty much everything. They got no specs, and even with specs writing a good open source 3D driver is tough, as AMD has shown us. So expect no

    • Or just use a decent distribution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @06:44AM (#30806468) Homepage

      "I have such a chipset and I've been cursing NVIDIA on a regular basis. After updating to any new kernel, I must boot into no-X mode, then run the proprietary driver installer."

      Or you could get one of the many, many, many Linux distributions that handle this automatically. Mandriva comes the mind since it has handled this stuff for years and is extremely user friendly, but as I say there are many other options as well.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Xeleema ( 453073 )

      Hm, to quote a near-forgotten troll; "You Do It Wrong"

      ProTip: Hit linuxquestions.org [linuxquestions.org] and post a detailed outline of your problem. Be sure to include things like versions, names of distributions, and how many servers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H desktops you're having this issue on.

      I'm sure you're not running X on bootup on a server, right?

    • do you use Ubuntu? If so and you didn't know about it already, use: NVidia Launchpad PPA [launchpad.net]
  • By that vague statement do they mean that nouvea will be included or is someone else making yet another set of nvidia drivers? (nv is from nVidia right?)

    • Re:Reverse engineered nVidia drivers? (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) * <qg@biodome.org> on Monday January 18, 2010 @02:48AM (#30805472) Homepage Journal

      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.

    • Noveau is included in staging (which means that it comes with the kernel, but is not considered stable). Nv isn't a kernel driver at all, but merely an X.org driver from nvidia. Though the noveau kernel and X.org drivers are more fully featured than the nv offering, they still don't support 3D-acceleration very well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XanC ( 644172 )

        "nv" is the current nvidia kernel driver. "nvidia" is the official, proprietary driver from Nvidia.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tyrione ( 134248 )

          "nv" is the current nvidia kernel driver. "nvidia" is the official, proprietary driver from Nvidia.

          Correction. nv is the current reverse engineered driver provided by Xorg.

          nvidia is the official, Nvidia corporation driver to support Xorg systems

    • It's a reverse engineered driver, but instead of copying it, the devs went to convert it to Gallium3D driver architecture. There are two components. One is the Direct Rendering Manager component (lives in the kernel) and the second one is in Mesa (the free OpenGL implementation) as a state tracker.

      A Gallium3D driver is making the graphics card visible to the system by means of an API. On top of that API features can be written (like OpenGL, OpenCL, vector graphics acceleration, etc) which are called state t

  • Dtrace for Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fibrewire ( 1132953 )

    Tell me more about this dynamic ftrace. Are there any "how-to" basic scripts to fire off a SNMP trap when ftrace picks up something of importance? It's nice for debugging, but more importantly to tie this into some network monitoring system like Nagios to be used for clustering and high availability systems. This could easily be integrated to prevent runaway virtual machines, and actually see whats robbing a system of CPU cycles - perfect for performance tuning a VM stack.

  • Will the kernel ever get to 3? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @03:28AM (#30805610)
    Most releases seem to be minor improvements: a few bug fixes, re-porting to another architecture, some new drivers and tweaks to (or reimplementations of) existing features such as VM or filesystems.

    Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?

    It does appear to me that all the kernel is doing these days is mimicking the features and support found in "other" operating systems - rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation and novelty, itself.It would be a shame if Linux just fell into line and became a follower in a world of twisty little O/S's, all the same rather than producing some killer features, unique to it's implementation, that made people WANT to run Linux on their desktops and enterprise systems.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 )

      Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?

      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].

      • The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist

        and that's why it will alway be a follower rather than a leader. The innovations are what creates the need for standards. Without them nothing new would ever be developed and there would be no need to codify and standardise any developments.

        What I would like to see is some innovation, some game-changers: giving the Linux kernel new features that no other O/S has - but once it has them, EVERYONE realises how useful, necessary and well-done they were and therefore how necessary they are to modern, leading

        • Re:Will the kernel ever get to 3? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Lennie ( 16154 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @08:10AM (#30807000)
          Linux has: USB3 before any other OS, hotswap-memory, hotswap-cpu, hotswap-pci, hotswap-scsi, numa, scales to I don't know how many nodes in a cluster and cpu-configurations. Runs on the most possible hardware-archictures (NetBSD is not the top dog in this field anymore). Has the most build-in drivers of any OS. Thus runs on really small and really large. Is used for embedded from wallplugs to netbooks all the way up to smaller mainframes. Manufacturers of TV's, networking-devices like switches use it for the control-plane. It also has the broadest range of filesystem support, etc. most of the websites you visit are running on Linux, so it's heavily used in that field as wel. I think Linux is used by the innovators, because you can change it. Some people say Google does innovation, they use Linux for pretty much everything.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Anpheus ( 908711 )

            If I recall, what Google innovated on was OS choice for their employees. I believe I read that they can choose whatever they like for their OS, and for their 20% projects they can use any number of platforms, etc. I think because of familiarity with Linux and competition with Microsoft, we won't ever see Google running on IIS, but I think that's a business move.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gr8_phk ( 621180 )

          It's a question of does Linux want to follow the innovators lead, or does it want to be out in front?

          Linux got USB3 before anyone else. Linux ran on 64-bit x86 before anyone else - before AMD made even made the first chips. What on earth would constitute something innovative in an operating system? It's a resource manager, and new resources (i.e. hardware) gets added all the time. What is this innovation you speak of?

          I could see some really innovative way to handle all those hardware variants comming alo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jensend ( 71114 )

          The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist

          and that's why it will alway be a follower rather than a leader.

          You're so totally right! What Linux needs is drivers for hardware that doesn't exist. Here's the sales pitch: You may not yet be able to purchase a combination printer/scanner/fax/toaster/singing fish/unicorn horn fabricator with a 42 megahexametapassamaquoddabit UFB (Universal Fairy Bus) 3.0 connection, but when you do, you can be sure it will work just fine with Linux, as we alre

    • "Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think?"

      Sure. Just get a time machine and you can go back to the day before Linux was the first to implement USB 3 ;-) As far as a "major re-think", the purpose of thinking things through seriously and thoroughly in the first place (before diving in) is so that you won't have to do major re-think. Major re-thinks are a bad thing unless you didn't do it right the first time.

    • Re:Will the kernel ever get to 3? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @08:31AM (#30807134) Homepage

      Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace? In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.

      Kernels are best at being mediators, be it of CPU time, GPU time, IO bandwidth, network bandwidth, whatever. Something offers resources, something consumes resources and the OS is that gray glue in the middle. Whatever killer feature you want, you probably don't want it in the kernel. You want to write a desktop environment or an application or something, and the kernel will make sure it runs gracefully together with everything else. There's a quite a few more bits to the kernel, but they're just adoptees brought into the kernel for performance reasons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vadim_t ( 324782 )

        Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace?

        The kernel does this to a large part already. In fact, printing is implemented in userspace, as well as many other devices. That's what libusb is for.

        Devices li

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.

          It already exists, and it's called "postscript".

          And you can also use Photoshop CS4 to crop screenshots, if "overkill" is not in your vocabulary.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by vadim_t ( 324782 )

            I have no clue why would it be overkill, it's supported perfectly fine by printers that are positively ancient these days and rotting on junkyards.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Kjella ( 173770 )

              Because it's a turing-complete programming language with font management and a rendering engine, that was ditched on almost all low and mid-level printers because it added cost. I'm talking about a mode where you pipe it all to Ghostscript on the computer and pipe the output as a series of raw pixels/dots right to the printer, no font management, no rendering, no instruction language beyond setting up the print area and most importantly, something that could hopefully be done on a 49$ printer without adding

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by vadim_t ( 324782 )

                Raw pixels comes out to a rather large number per page, though.
                There is another standard: IPP, which is widely supported by network printers. AKA CUPS, which is what Apple uses.

                In any case, I don't see what any of this has to do with Linux. Go and ask the printer manufacturers to standarize on a bitmap format, and I'm sure Linux would quickly get support for it.

                But, if you're worried about cost, you shouldn't be buying a $49 printer in the first place, as you'll quickly pay for that cheapness by getting gou

  • And can I switch back to the propitary drivers when my desktop boots up?

    That said, for my main desktop computer, I may switch to the Nouveau drivers since I only use it to browse the web and encode movies. I don't even have my speakers set up to that machine.

    Be nice not to have strange lockups. (To be fair, I am not sure if that is a nivdia or KDE issue but my mouse quits responding to the button click but I can still see it moving on the screen. This usually happens when running virtualbox so maybe it i

  • 3D (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Lode ( 1290856 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @04:07AM (#30805740)

    If those NVidia drivers don't support hardware accelerated 3D, then I really don't understand the point. 3D hardware acceleration is 15 years old. Linux is an operating system that should be at the frontline of technology. Working in the dark ages of pre-3D acceleration, the times of Motif GUI's, should be far past us. How can something that ignores such an important part of the graphics card, almost half the computation power of the whole computer is there, be accepted?

    If they do support 3D, then congratulations, ignore my post above :)

    • Re:3D (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @04:15AM (#30805768) Homepage

      Ignoring the obvious troll:

      Anything that works will be accepted, like every other driver in the kernel... if it doesn't make *everything* work, that's not a big problem. Especially new drivers rarely have code that actually makes the device inherently useful, or supremely accelerated, immediately - but it will function. That's how you code - one bit at a time, gradually building as you go. When you have all the DMA, 2D drawing, multiscreen crap worked out *THEN* you can think about 3D. At the moment, even simple combinations like dual-displays can cause major headaches with some chipsets, whether the hardware supports them or not.

      The programmers are effectively working blind with unknown hardware - and programmers don't work that way, that's a reverse engineer's job. To say they can't merge *anything* until all the features are working just means you'll never see *anything* at all. But if they merge a 2D driver today, they can add basic 3D access tomorrow and 3D acceleration the day after and maybe some day you'll see something of use. If not, at least you'll be able to boot Linux and *see* something in X-Windows on any computer that runs off that chipset (or has backwards compatibility for it).

      You will not see full 3D accelerated drivers for any chipset (especially not any that compete with manufacturer's drivers in terms of acceleration) that matters to you on a new computer until manufacturers fully co-operate and help get coding too. Don't expect it, don't complain about it, don't moan when it doesn't happen or only "obsolete" chipsets ever get 3D support. When the manufacturer's co-operate, it takes nothing to make a driver. When they don't, it means knowing *everything* they know before you can really start properly.

      • It's not my intention to troll. I'm a Linux user because I like the style and way of working with that operation better than Windows. So anything that is BIG and tries to limit the choice of users to "Windows-only" is bad to me (that is, things like Direct3D, IE-only webpages, Office formats, ...), because I think users should be able to make a choice what OS to use and have a good range of software choices on all.

        IMHO, I see no reason to not use the NVidia drivers, that they make for Linux, and allow me to

    • The reason you're being modded Funny, I hope, is because 3D drivers (and actually any kind of acceleration for GPUs) is a userland thing by tradition and convention. The nouveau project does sponsor development of a few Mesa/Gallium drivers, none of which are yet production-quality, but it has nothing to do with the kernel part.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Lord Lode ( 1290856 )

        Well I wasn't trying to be funny...

    • If those NVidia drivers don't support hardware accelerated 3D, then I really don't understand the point.

      The point is that the xorg nv and vesa drivers are broken for quite a few nvidia cards.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zoxed ( 676559 )

      > If those NVidia drivers don't support hardware accelerated 3D, then I really don't understand the point.

      IIRC kernel video mode setting will be available with nouveau: for a silky smooth boot experience :-)

    • A fair point - not really funny mod material ;-) The Nouveau drivers being merged are an important step in the right direction. The current situation, particularly for Free Software-only distros like Fedora is that when you install the system and boot for the first time you end up using the open source "nv" driver, which was provided by NVidia to provide basic 2D support but apparently is not very good. The Nouveau driver has support for KMS (kernel modesetting), which is needed for flicker-free graphica

  • Hello Nation. If I had a quarter for every time I said I had a nickel, I'd have five times as much theoretical money. This Is the Kernel Report!

  • Flickering on Intel chipsets (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jack Malmostoso ( 899729 ) on Monday January 18, 2010 @04:40AM (#30805858)

    I upgraded to 2.6.33-rc4 from 2.6.32 because of strong flickering and tearing on my Intel chipset.
    If you're affected by the problem you might want to give it a shot even in -rc state.

  • Is the new Nvidia functionality solely for the graphics cards or does it also mean improved support for Nvidia chipsets like the MCP78S.

    I guess what I'm really asking is: is there any chance the next kernel will fix this [kernel.org], or will using USB microphones and CDMA modems on my Pavilion P6130F remain a pipedream?

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