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How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly)How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly)Posted Nov 3, 2008 20:02 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467)Parent article: How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly)
Supports more devices, only on a naive calculation. Weighted by # of devices in the field, Linux doesn't look so hot. F'rinstance, there are probably tens of millions of nvidia GPUs in the field and Linux doesn't support them.
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How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 3, 2008 20:28 UTC (Mon) by ca9mbu (guest, #11098) [Link]
Linux doesn't support Nvidia GPUs? Even going back to a Riva TNT, I've never had issues with my Nvidia card.
Maybe what you meant was that the full 3D capabilities of the card are not supported in upstream Linux releases? That's a far cry from the card itself not working/being supported at all which is how I read your original comment.
Such support is available via binary Nvidia-supplied drivers. The lack of upstream support for the full Nvidia GPU functionality is noone's fault other than Nvidia's themselves (or, possibly, more specifically, their lawyers).
I'm not sure that anything remotely like the following is possible to get an answer for, but I think a much fairer question would be "of those devices that we have documentation for or are otherwise able to figure out how they work, how many are a) upstream or b) otherwise available as a source tarball".
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 1:27 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Not supporting 3d means not supporting the vast majority of the hardware in a video card, and not being able to use the most computationally powerful part of your machine. Too bad nVidia won't play nice, but please don't pretend this isn't a concern.
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 4:00 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
nVidia might solve the problem by disappearing or being merged. They dug themselves a pretty big hole of late with failing chips. You could see them become part of a laptop manufacturer like HP or Dell soon, as they might owe those companies so many Millions that it's the easiest way out. It might be the fault of their chip fab company and not them, but that might not save them.
nVidia chip quality declining? Posted Nov 4, 2008 19:50 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Wow! I wasn't even aware that nVidia is having reliability issues with their chips. The graphics card currently in my home PC is an nVidia 6600GT, purchased over a year ago, with a different brand name (EVGA) and a sticker on the box proclaiming a "Lifetime Warranty". I've never had any hardware issues with an nVidia card other than the occasional on-card fan breaking. (Disclosure: I use the proprietary binary driver in order to utilize all the capabilities of the graphics card. I do wish nVidia would be more Open-Source friendly, but their current "support" for Linux is about as good as I can expect for now.) You make a good point, Bruce, about nVidia possibly owing millions to the other hardware vendors... they may be a takeover target soon, but with the economy in the pan I'm a little skeptical for now.
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 9:30 UTC (Tue) by ca9mbu (guest, #11098) [Link]
Oh, don't get me wrong Joe, I'm not pretending it's not a concern. I'm just saying that slighting Linux's ability to support/provide this functionality given the vendor's behaviour is hardly fair. I have no doubt that if the datasheets et al were released by nVidia, we'd have a pretty much fully functional, robust driver in fairly short order.
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 6:30 UTC (Tue) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Based on this metric, I doubt even win32 could be said to support them.
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 8:49 UTC (Tue) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]
Based on that metric, Windows supports almost no devices, most drivers are vendor supplied.
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 12:49 UTC (Tue) by alecs1 (subscriber, #46699) [Link]
NVidia I guess is supported well enough: they function on Linux, and the binary drivers offers access to the 3d acceleration. They have working 3d drivers, the suspend problems did not hit me, neither did crashes, only the DPI settings where weird for the computer I tryed.
Fglrx doesn't do that for this computer, never did for the other one. Neither radeonhd. At this time I am very unhappy for falling in the marketing trap of radeonhd and buying a AMD/ATI card.
Listening to this interview made me feel good for the duration of the audio recording. But in reality I am very unhappy with my laptop support. Actually, I will be happy when my bug reports get some sort of attention (Debian and ALSA bts, fixing the problems myself is well beyond my capabilities, although I am programmer myself).
How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) Posted Nov 4, 2008 15:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well it's also worth keeping in mind that the #1 producer of video cards is going to be Intel, which has acceptable Linux support. AMD has released specs, documentation, code and support for developing Linux drivers for it's hardware.
So between the both of them you have the ability to the majority of video hardware under linux. Majority by a large margin.
Like Wifi cards the ability for Linux to support these things is largely dependent on the existing subsystems in the kernel... Without good code base that driver developers can take from and depend on making video card drivers is exceptionally difficult. Just like trying to support Wireless devices without a proper 802.11 protocol stack to depend on.
So by having at least two different types of hardware, three if you include the Nouveau project, the Linux devs should be able to have the facilities and non-video card specific video card code to get supporting new devices much easier.
Also you have to depend on X.org to keep up with Linux and work with Linux developers. So that adds a entirely new twist on everything.
With things like GEM, KMS, Wayland, DRI2. Gallium, etc.. Linux may be in pretty good shape in another year. OSS may even be competitive in this department with hardware that has been out for a while.
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