Will NVIDIA Open Their Linux GPU Driver?

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

With AMD's landmark announcement the other day about opening up their Linux GPU drivers, all heads are now turning to NVIDIA to see what they will be doing. Unlike ATI, there is no official NVIDIA "open driver" for Linux, although they do contribute to the basic "nv" driver. Nouveau is an NVIDIA-based open-driver that's constantly improving, though it's developers are getting no help from NVIDIA.

So will they just sit around and play this off? It's hard to say. They currently offer the best Linux drivers available that are not only stable, but offer great performance. But with the help of the community, AMD's drivers are only going to get increasingly better. If NVIDIA wishes to retain dominance, it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to consider taking a similar route as AMD.

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So what will NVIDIA's next step be if they wish to join Intel and AMD with open-source community enablement? Logically, they could provide specifications and assist these developers in a similar fashion to what AMD is doing, open-source their proprietary display driver, develop a new open-source "nv" display driver with greater functionality, or cooperate with and support the Nouveau project.

Source: Phoronix
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[abryzak]

I hope they do, it'll let would-be OS developers like myself write my own drivers for their cards instead of using the VESA compatibility.

 

[Rob Williams]

That's for sure. Only good can come out of this. Have you been doing much development so far, or are you on your way to becoming a software developer?

 

[abryzak]

That's for sure. Only good can come out of this. Have you been doing much development so far, or are you on your way to becoming a software developer?

I've been with my current (and first) job as a software developer for a bit more than 2 years now but before that I was at university doing a Bachelor of IT, majoring in Software Engineering which I've now finished.

Writing an operating system is more one of my own hobby projects rather than something done professionally. I'm doing it for a variety of reasons, the most prominent being to see if I can, to learn more about the internal workings of modern PCs and to learn assembly and C/C++ better (I'm a Java programmer for my job).