This is the double-edged sword of stable interfaces. As nVidia works to keep their shim in sync with Linux DRI, it becomes a hassle to continue to support these other kernels. Our suffering is temporary and for a good reason. Yes, these are two very different development models, and I would hesitate to argue that one is clearly better than the other.
The pattern for Linux driver frameworks starts with organic development followed by a unification effort or two. The end results are generally very good, and that might have something to do with the number of ideas that get hurled at the wall, so to speak. If Solaris is to compete with Linux head-to-head, then a stable driver interface is going to be a strong selling point. By that point, though, it may be that most of the Linux driver interfaces will have already reached a state of de facto stability.
True, but for me, I think its going to be interesting to see where Linux is going to come up — if Sun really push hard for Solaris in the enterprise; FreeBSD will always hang around as a bastion for University students — where is Linux going to sit?
A stable in-kernel API does nothing but hinder further development in terms of new features and bugfixes. Sorry, I meant to vote you down but clicked the wrong button. Would someone do so for me please? Learn to moderate…. Same with ZFS.
Same with zones. The list goes on. A stable API just means the development model is different. More time planning, less time hacking together code that semi-works. Different models, different methods, both eventually get to the same point. One is a little more rapid at the expense of a lot of stability, one is a lot more stable at the expense of a little bit of rapidity.
That depends. More to the point, Linux is developed under a different philosophy — they have to rely on community contributions rather than paying people. So while Sun can pay people to work on a stable api the same situation in Linux may lead to a stall in development or a fork when developers get frustrated about having to worry about keeping everything stable all the time.
Then again, maybe not. None of us really know. Except it seems like a stable api would only help long-term stability. Why would it negatively affect new drivers written specifically for it more than the old ones? How is it a pain in the ass to install them?
If your distro doenst have them in their reposotory, just download them, and just run the script! On the other hand, I havent experienced this sucking of nvidia drivers that some says… I think they work really well. They have legacy drivers for linux, witch at least provide hardware 3d for older cards. Configuring dualhead without editing a line in xorg. Beryl works and all such, no problems there. I use the open source Radeon driver too for the , and the advantage of open drivers for ATi when available is that they support 3D unlike the presently available open nVidia drivers.
True, I have never experienced any X crash or anything of the kind on Linux using the open driver. There have been some news about Ati now aiming to improve their drivers and commitment to open source:.
But the only Ati video card I ever had, many years ago, I immediately changed to a higher quality Matrox card that worked way better both with Windows and Linux.
After reading news like this — also my next GPU might indeed be Intel too. Unfortunately too many companies pussy foot around around the edges instead of making their demands known, and the back it up with robust action if it is not carried out in a timely manner. No Intel chips for years. So this is the source of global warming. After installing a Radeon HD series VGA card on my motherboard and all drivers, the audio seems to be failing and after checking in Device Manager all devices seem to be normal.
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They are supportive with hardware, documentation, and drivers. Why isn't support for these devices in the kernel yet? Why does Intel which I am not upset about , and even worse..
For craps sake, it's not like these things haven't been around for many years. Why is the Linux kernel developers ignoring them? Or if they aren't ignoring them then why aren't they more supportive? This is a top notch company, about as good as anybody can expect and yet because Intel has the big name they get the big attention.
I WANT to tell people to buy these devices, but I can't because kernel support for them is shit, almost non-existant. I can't be certain that they work or anything Well with Intel they've gotten smart a long time ago and that is why they have the 'Centrino' trademark.
In order for a laptop to be labled 'Centrino' you have to have Intel cpu, Intel chipset, and Intel Wifi. So if you buy a laptop with Centrino stickers and you get a broadcom wifi then they are breaking the Intel trademark by selling you the laptop and advertising it as 'centrino'. It shouldn't be difficult to get your money back from something like that. The only thing that Centrino does not garrentee is the video chipset and I suppose other doo-dads like webcam and such.
So the answer to 'What linux laptop should I get' is fairly easy: make sure to get a Centrino laptop with Intel onboard graphics. Of course even there is enough differences to causeLinux users problems. Thank goodness for System I don't know. It's not a huge difference from the X, but they are suppose to support DirectX 10, which is a big deal for windows users. These should meet the basic requirements for games up to Doom3 or Quake4 in terms of speed and capabilities. I'd probably make sure to get the fastest ram.
Also I don't know how optimized they are and what all hardware features the drivers support. For example with the GMA , which I use, the hardware has features for motion compinsation for mpeg2 playback acceleration. Almost a requirement for higher HD resolutions. But the drivers don't support that. The GMA X should support features like shaders and hardware transformations and lighting, I don't know if the Intel drivers support that though I don't know of any place I can go to find out this information.
I went and bought myself a Ralink based PCI rt61 chipset card because of their supposed good driver support I didn't want to have to use binary drivers, ndiswrapper, etc.
There are currently 3 different flavours of Ralink drivers 4 if you include Ralinks binary drivers : 1 rt61 - legacy driver, supports WEP encryption. Even if it did, NetworkManager wouldn't be able to deal with it because it doesn't use WirelessExt to provide this support.
In order for a laptop to be labled 'Centrino' you have to have Intel cpu, Intel chipset, and Intel Wifi. So if you buy a laptop with Centrino stickers and you get a broadcom wifi then they are breaking the Intel trademark by selling you the laptop and advertising it as 'centrino'. It shouldn't be difficult to get your money back from something like that. The only thing that Centrino does not garrentee is the video chipset and I suppose other doo-dads like webcam and such.
So the answer to 'What linux laptop should I get' is fairly easy: make sure to get a Centrino laptop with Intel onboard graphics. Of course even there is enough differences to causeLinux users problems. Thank goodness for System I don't know. It's not a huge difference from the X, but they are suppose to support DirectX 10, which is a big deal for windows users. These should meet the basic requirements for games up to Doom3 or Quake4 in terms of speed and capabilities.
I'd probably make sure to get the fastest ram. Also I don't know how optimized they are and what all hardware features the drivers support. For example with the GMA , which I use, the hardware has features for motion compinsation for mpeg2 playback acceleration.
Almost a requirement for higher HD resolutions. But the drivers don't support that. The GMA X should support features like shaders and hardware transformations and lighting, I don't know if the Intel drivers support that though I don't know of any place I can go to find out this information. I went and bought myself a Ralink based PCI rt61 chipset card because of their supposed good driver support I didn't want to have to use binary drivers, ndiswrapper, etc.
There are currently 3 different flavours of Ralink drivers 4 if you include Ralinks binary drivers : 1 rt61 - legacy driver, supports WEP encryption. Even if it did, NetworkManager wouldn't be able to deal with it because it doesn't use WirelessExt to provide this support. From what I've read, I think this means one has to download binary firmware blobs and edit a config file to get WPA support, but can't confirm that.
You can bet your bottom dollar on there being plenty of announcements when this and other out-of-tree drivers that are in a similar position get merged upstream! In the mean time though, confusion abounds as google is filled with out-of-date information, or inaccurate info based on the enormous confusion caused by the various rewrites of the driver and their various configuration quirks.
The following maybe full of inaccuracies too but it's the best my failing memory can recall at the moment: Ubuntu Edgy wanted to load rt61pci by default, which wouldn't scan for wireless networks.
One had to blacklist that and get the legacy rt61 module to be loaded instead. Even then, that didn't work for me. Only with Feisty, where they reverted to the legacy rt61 driver can I finally connect to my wireless network, though I've had to drop down to WEP as it doesn't support WPA! Hopefully Gutsy will come with the new wireless stack, compatible ralink driver and I'll have one less thing to concern myself as it enters the "Just Works" list. Then you have to use the rutilT program.
You have to make sure that you have the device up before starting the program I put ifconfig ra0 up. Still though sometimes I have to take the interface down, unload the module, and reload the module for it to work. And it's just to bad, this driver has been in constant development for about 3 or more years now. I have owned 3 devices.. With the Rt61 I was able to even perform some advanced things like packet injection attacks for making wep protected networks spew arp packets.
Also besides the ralink stuff, I've owned a broadcom bcm43xx Apple Airport Extreme which sucked; but thank goodness for the good folks who reverse engineered documentation and the good folks that took that documentation and made it work.
Those prism54 drivers were one of the few early Linux I don't believe their older cards can do this, but that's a legal issue, not Intel's fault. They went way out of their way to extend hardware functionality just for Free Software users.
You can maybe argue that not giving away firmware source still makes them evil, but I've always found that silly. Those argument disappear if the firmware were hard-coded in the ASIC - the only purpose of firmware is to allow the hardware vendor to fix bugs in the firmware without forcing you to buy upgraded components. It's not something that users can really hack with any meaningful value, unless the firmware is just needlessly crippled - and the wireless firmware is crippled for legal reasons, which any company is definitely going to consider a strong need here in the real world.
The missing features in the X. I wouldn't buy their devices if it required a propriatory blob, weither or not it existed as a kernel driver or daemon. Firmware files, while I'd like to avoid, I can live with without complaint.
I can respect NDAs if the intention and purpose and effect is designed to protect things like manufacturing proccess, or future product releases.. Anything that is not nessicary to write drivers for the hardware. Say if some Linux or X. Would Keith be allowed to help him with this? Would he be allowed to talk about it? Is that other developer going to be stuck pulling the old ATI and Nvidia game with reverse engineering the hardware and mucking around capturing traffic between the hardware and the Windows drivers?
Is that proper, so that your still not allowed to know how to operate the hardware, that developers can't talk about it, can't spread information or use their skills to help get support for other hardware? So that's still distastefull for me. I care more then just about being able to redistribute source code, being able to communicate and share knowledge is very important, even potentially more important.
Although I'll take what I can get in terms of hardware support. Of course I'd love for that to happen, our list of things we'd like to see the drivers do is fairly extensive. But, unless we can provide reasonable documentation, it's going to be really hard to break into a big new area of functionality like this. The current header files document what the driver uses, but not a lot beyond that. What we are doing is trying to get some minimal XvMC support done this year so that the hardware functionality is reasonably well described in both code and comments.
At that point, I'm hoping others will be able to help expand support for additional encodings, and other activities. Any help we can get will be appreciated. Questions about specific chip operations that can be answered by consulting the specs are something I'd like to spend more time answering.
So however silly the centrino branding may otherwise be, for new laptops it looks like it will provide some reasonable assurance that the things I care about will Just Work on any sufficiently recent free linux distribution.
The big ticket items on the list for graphics are OpenGL 2. Other than that, the new drivers expose quite a bit more of the hardware than the 1.
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