The SLI Godfather 86
CaptCanuk writes "Phoronix has an insightful article about the motivation behind Nvidia's alternative operating system support. From the article: 'When it comes time for a user to upgrade their computer hardware, and decide to go with a choice from a leading manufacturer of graphics solutions, software support is a given, correct? Wrong.' Read on to find out what truly funds their development and why some think they treat Linux as a second hand citizen."
The only reason NV supports Linux.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows drivers! (Score:2, Interesting)
Before you critique this approach,look
and count the windows drivers.
Re:Another topic (Score:4, Interesting)
Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.
NVIDIA is anti-open source. They will happily peddle some binary blobs for some archs (i386) and some OS, but refuse to give any hardware documentation or even tell the name of their various chipsets.
As long as the Linux/FreeBSD crowd accepts binary blobs in order to get their hardware to work, then NVIDIA will happily continue to only handout binary blobs.
Have a look at the FreeBSD nve (NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter device driver) [freebsd.org] driver:
And this is just a NIC? What's so secret about that? And this is acceptable?
Have a look at what OpenBSD does: Reverse engineer and offer the first open source driver nfe (NVIDIA nForce MCP Ethernet driver) [openbsd.org]
[/rant]
Nvidia is bad? ATi is worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
Was I ever wrong.
The binary ATi drivers do not support any of the X1000 series cards. Hell, even the latest & greatest windows drivers do not support my X1400 chipset officially.
The beta ATi drivers apparently support my chipset, but ATi supports 24bit graphics and nothing else. Alas, the display panel in the laptop is 16 or 32 bit. Running at 24 bit yields a display that looks like something one would expect to see after dropping a couple hits of acid.
Even worse, when trying to use the vesa xorg drivers, I am not able to use the native 1280x800 resolution as when the vesa drivers poll the graphics chipset for the available modes, 1280x800 isn't listed! No amount of fussing with the xorg.conf file has yielded a working solution. The final straw is that I am unable to tell the laptop not to scale lower resolutions up to 1280x800, so 1024x768 (4:3 ratio) is scaled to fit the panel, which is 16:10, which just makes things ugly.
So, until I can get native resolution, Linux is useless on this laptop. The display is too fuzzy and stretched to be usefull. Thankfully I still have my old laptop, as it has an nvidia chipset in it. Sure, the laptop is slow compared to the Core Duo, but atleast the display works properly.
NVidia may be pro Linux, but not open source. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now for me, I use the OS as a development platform. I don't expect source for any Win32 driver I use nor do I care if I have source for Linux or Solaris for that matter. As long as it works and does the job, I'm happy. I suspect I'm a pretty typical Linux user. The Linux developers would have problems with this - having to poke around a black box is a pain in the ass. My pain point comes with having to deal with them at install/update time. I also keep a small stack of Matrox Millennium (4M PCI) cards around because they do 'just work' without binary drivers. If they made them source based it would be more convenient for me, but NVidia has been pretty good keeping up with the multiple kernels and major distros. I'd call them pro Linux, but not open source.
This article hits and misses (Score:4, Interesting)
For the Linux drivers, the engineers simply say "what do we need more urgently, these bug fixes, or these features?" If they need the features, they borrow the code from Windows and put it in, with possibly some minor glue code. With other platforms, some poor engineer has to learn enough about that one particular OS to get a driver working. Again, how does diverting this portion of time equate to revenue for ATI without a guaranteed contract from the hardware vendor? It doesn't.
nVidia has a steady stream of revenue from Windows users (gamers and casual users) and Linux users (research and education), but the same is not always true of other manufacturers like HP, Sun, etc. And again, why would a business invest their time and money if they don't have a reasonable assurance of profit?