KMS etc. [LWN.net]

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:01 UTC (Tue) by Tracey (subscriber, #30515)
In reply to: KMS etc. by corbet
Parent article: The abrupt merging of Nouveau

I run fedora on a couple of fedora systems with nvidia graphics.

As much as I wanted to be able to use the nouveau driver I couldn't; it just wasn't ready(tearing, crashing. etc).

When time is permitting, I like to test out new things, and I've been trying to stay on top of fedora's nouveau drivers(usually getting the rawhide versions): but I still haven't been able to get the newest nouveau drivers from fedora to work.

For fedora users there are two ways to get decent 3d graphics to run on newer(past 3-4 years) nvidia cards. The first one is to go to nvidia's site and download nvidia's drivers, which I have avoided for a few years now. The second way is to use the rpm-fusion repository and install the nvidia drivers in a way that(I find) is less intrusive to the system.

I can understand red hat's position on this: That binary blob belongs to nvidia. The red hat / fedora developers have their hands tied on this. Unless Linus has some personal assurance from nvidia that nvidia won't be it's usual jerky self; distributing nvidia's property is not a good thing.

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KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:47 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

As I understand the issue, it's not known that the blob is actually nVidia's "property". Most of it isn't actually included in their binary drivers, for example, and is most likely generated at runtime based on the local configuration. That would make it similar to the output of a compiler.

In any event the Nouveau team appears to be well on their way to creating their own replacement, which should make the uncertain legal status of the captured blob irrelevant.