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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:18 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723)
In reply to: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal) by leandro
Parent article: A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

Yes, I agree, so why not share our experience?

I have installed dozen of ATI or NVIDIA cards, and consistently the
NVIDIA support for Linux is much better than ATI's. Looking
through the code that ATI provides gives the bizare impression
that they don't even try to compile once the driver, since the
code may contain C errors, or contains calls for kernel 2.4
functions while the code is intended for kernel 2.6.

Interestingly the ATI provided code inludes NVIDIA code.

Since this kind of things is not limited to a single driver release,
the impression is that ATI doesn't care producing low
quality drivers for Linux. As a result I will never buy again an
ATI card.

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A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:44 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

ATI *used to* provide information for developers to create free drivers.

NVIDIA never has.

As such, I tend to get Radeon 9200's nowadays, since that's the last card that had a free driver which still does everything else one wants (including 3D DRI acceleration).

I never have, and never will (if I can avoid it) buy an NVIDIA card until they change their policy on free drivers.

I'm not happy about ATI's current policies, but at least they once helped support free drivers.

I'm sad that the free driver issue is becoming more and more obfuscated as the availability of binary-only drivers is getting higher. This is true not just for video cards, but also for wireless cards. I even saw an ethernet card on a laptop a student bought that required a firmware blob to work. (We figured this out because the driver had moved out of core Debian in a recent release.)

What we REALLY need is a core clearinghouse of information for what hardware has truly free (not just zero-cost) drivers for Linux. This would be good for (a) people like me who care, and (b) to help raise general awareness that there even is such an issue.

Does such a place exist already? I know that last I checked, it was a nightmare to try and figure out what wireless card I ought to buy if I ever needed a new one.

-Rob

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 18, 2005 22:28 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

there's a huge difference between needing a firmware blob and binary-only drivers.

the firmware runs on the card in question, and if it was held in flash or ROM there would be no question about it. the firmware is dependant on the hardware details, but is completely independant of the OS.

the drivers are part of the OS and very sensitive to changes in that OS, as a result binary-only ones can't work reliably across different versions.

both of these are significant issues in their own way, but please do not mix them up

A Video Card Upgrade HOWTO (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:16 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

You're talking about the glue code that links the binary driver into the kernel for both nVidia and ATI right?

I'm not surprised if some nVidia glue code ends up in ATI's glue code. That code has to be open source at least far enough to be "GPL Compatible" so that it can go into a kernel module.

Of course, you can't see any of the code used inside the binary for either vendor.