It's remarkably straight-talking for a press release, actually. Money quote is this one: "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure.".
Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change.
I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree.
(Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)
Basically: "We only care about keeping a checkbox next to 'linux support' in our feature grid. We don't care about how shitty the experience is for linux users"
There could be a number of reasons for what Nvidia is choosing to do here. I've worked for a company that provided a kernel module separately (though, it was all GPL). There were a number of reasons for this:
* The architecture of our driver did not fit with the subsystem we were playing in (this was a SCSI module). We worked with the package maintainers, and without a near complete re-write of our code, it would not have been accepted.
* Part of the above design was cause by cross-platform code we had (parts of the driver was shared between Windows, Linux, AIX, others).
* When supporting customers that run older version of a distro, there would be no-way to give them the latest features if the code was part of the kernel. So our latest product offerings would be incompatible with older systems. We would have been at the mercy of RedHat and SUSE to backport our drivers into their older releases. (or would have had to pay them a lot of money to do it).
We had a driver that basically started development in 1997 or so, that there was no-way we were going to rewrite it just to get it into the linux kernel.
For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.
> For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.
While that's certainly fair enough, and rational in economic terms, when a user base reads between the lines that "you're not worth spending the money to do things properly", I can also see it eliciting a more visceral and less rational response such as Linus'. I think that in any case though, money isn't the issue so much as Nvidia wanting to not share their toys.
I agree, they get points for not trying to hide the fact that Linus is right.
Unfortunately, "Yeah, so what?" is not the kind of PR you want here. This was an opportunity to go "Yes, that's how it is now, but in the future, we're planning on supporting all this wonderful stuff on Linux!"
Instead, it's an advertisement for ATI/AMD's Linux support.
Although I think it's better they say this upfront than take an opportunity to lie to the community if there is no plan to support Linux properly in the future.
If you mean the ATI proprietary drivers, I can believe that nVidia's suck slightly less. However, the majority of Radeon cards have full 2D/3D support in Open Source drivers (and those drivers actually have developers from ATI working on them), whereas the reverse-engineered nouveau driver supports a smaller subset of nVidia cards with much lower 3D support (and no support from nVidia whatsoever).
So, I'd still take ATI over nVidia due to ATI's much better Open Source drivers with some development done by ATI, though I'd take Intel over ATI for having entirely Open Source drivers with much more direct development from Intel.
I guess different people had different experiences. My nVidia cards have worked just fine on Linux but my HD7750 ATI card does not work properly (random screen flashes and poor rendering) on Ubuntu no matter which driver I try.
Which is ridiculous, considering they cherry-picked RandR of all the technologies in the "Linux common infrastructure" to support with their latest driver release. I suppose I should be grateful that my projector can work without opening up NVIDIA Settings and tweaking about, but it certainly flies in the face of this statement and belies their true motivations: they'll implement the bare-minimum Linux-only feature support that will keep their business/edu customers from fleeing to AMD, and that's about it.
RandR is a Xorg extension, it's not a Linux kernel thing. To continue to provide graphics options for their customers that use OS's with recent Xorg installs (they make a FreeBSD driver available too) they had to support RandR.
This is right in line with 'we support our customers/users' not whatever the Linux kernel guys feel like doing today.
That's spun and unfair. Booting with a working framebuffer isn't something that tickles only the "kernel guys" interest. Running the GPU on your hybrid laptop likewise. You realize that, with just a handful of exceptions, the NVIDIA part on most Optimus laptops simply doesn't work under linux, right? And that NVIDIA hasn't so much as lifted a finger to fix this?
So sure, if "customers/users" includes the only handful of 3D content shops out there running linux toolchains, and not the millions of people buying NVIDIA-enabled laptops, I guess it makes sense. But for everyone else it kinda sucks.
Hardly. NVIDIA says they "made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure." HN responder says that's bullshit since they finally support RandR. I point out RandR is not 'Linux common infrastructure' but a Xorg technology and supporting that is very literally "supporting Linux ... by leveraging NVIDIA common code" because the NVIDIA common code is targeting Xorg technologies and not Linux specific ones.
Then you move the point to something completely different.
NVIDIA is clearly not interested in providing any Linux only support. Don't expect them to support anything under Linux that isn't also common to other platforms they support.
You're just making things up, stop it. DRI2 and KMS are no more "linux kernel" things than "X" things; all you have to do is check the domain hosting the specs. These are well established, well-supported APIs that have been very well received in the Linux world. And yet NVIDIA wants nothing to do with either, for silly internal reasons with poor justification.
> You realize that, with just a handful of exceptions, the NVIDIA part on most Optimus laptops simply doesn't work under linux, right? And that NVIDIA hasn't so much as lifted a finger to fix this?
I have an Optimus laptop (Thinkpad W520) and that's not really true. The problem is that you can't run both the Intel and NVidia chips at the same time without it being a PITA. If I want to use my internal display while I'm on the road, I move my NVidia Xorg.conf out of the way and it's fine. I'm not saying it's optimal, but it definitely works.
There's not just one Optimus implementation, there are many ways to wire Optimus. My colleague bought an Optimus laptop (can't remember which one now) that absolutely doesn't have the nVidia part of Optimus working. See here for details: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Optimus
> Booting with a working framebuffer isn't something that tickles only the "kernel guys" interest
Is it? If my computer boots up directly to X anyway, why do I care about a framebuffer beyond the standard vesa stuff?
PS: If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers, and commit to have at least a somewhat stable ABI, that would do more for hardware support on linux than 1000 years of ranting and moaning, which if anything, will only alienate the hardware makers even more.
"If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers"
... then he would be Microsoft and Apple, and not an Open Source operating system developer, maintainer, producer, and evangelist. All his years of working openly and freely will be squandered and his life's work beholden to closed-source, closed spec device manufacturers.
But his stance actually makes us much MORE beholden to the 3rd parties. If every minor kernel version didn't require the vendors to recompiled drivers, and quite possible change code because Linus changed the ABI again, that would result in more hardware working better for more people.
Live the open source dream if it makes you feel good. I live in a world where if it doesn't work, I couldn't care less about it.
I don't think reality bears this out. Now that Broadcom has come to their senses, NVIDIA is pretty much the only major consumer device vendor in the PC space with binary blob drivers. Everyone else has, ultimately, folded in the face of pressure from the dogmatists. I think Linus is pretty much winning, and the fact that NVIDIA is feeling pressure here is a good thing.
Do you have any examples of situations where this is making us "MORE" beholden to third parties? I honestly don't see many (though in the SoC space, the PVR drivers are a very similar situation).
Didn't AMD release a ton of documentation for their GPUs specifically so that the open source radeon drivers could become a realistic option when using their GPUs?
Nobody I know with an AMD GPU uses the propriety fglrx drivers.
Open source 3D drivers will have a hard time EVER being useable for anything beyond glgears... everything in that space is going to be really patent encumbered.
Having an unstable, internal kernel interface has nothing to do with being opposed to closed source drivers. Linus' problem is when people bitch and moan when things change and it breaks closed source drivers. He's repeatedly said that anything internal is fair game to change. If your driver is in the kernel it will be fixed if the interface changes; if it's closed then you better keep up on your own.
Quite clearly he's talking about Nvidia as a company, not about the properties of one particular subsystem. The statement stands well enough on its own.
I have refused to use Nvidia products for years even on any Windows machines; because of their policy towards Linux. Wish more people who cared about Linux would vote with their wallets.
What gets me about Linus' response though is that he's constantly labeling free software advocates as "religious" nuts. Nvidia's stance seems consistent with a certain pragmatism that I'd have thought he was fine with. He's had no aversion to using closed source proprietary software when it suited his purposes (eg. Bitkeeper) But now he's upset that Nvidia don't want to play ball?
Having said that it's nice to see him make such a strong statement that I wholeheartedly agree with, just wish it hadn't been so long in coming.
I think open sourcing drivers makes pragmatic sense to the Linux community more than it does with Bitkeeper. Without open source drivers, how can the Linux community make Nvidia's drivers a better citizen of their ecosystem?
Linus probably doesn't care if Nvidia wants to keep their GPU _accelerated_ drivers closed for desktop machines.
Nvidia Optimus is what Linus is talking about. It switches between an Intel GMA and an Nvidia GPU "transparently" for power saving reasons. Nvidia gave the whole Linux community the shaft and didn't provide any Linux support at all for those laptops and notebooks.
Laptop and notebook designers generally end up with designs that only work when power saving works correctly, and the failure mode isn't "runs slower," it's "catches fire and destroy things." So the lack of any help from Nvidia is not something that can be ignored - your laptop will be worse than useless if you put Linux on it.
That is why I sympathize with Linus here. I'm also very upset with nVidia over Optimus, but on Windows, for reasons I've mentioned in other comments. Optimus really just seems like an afterthought to nVidia. As long as it switches GPUs when the PC goes into energy-conserving mode, they think it's working just fine.
That's a typical hardware company's response - deliver only half-baked functionality and leave the debugging to platform integrators. Nvidia reaps the marketing bonus points. Laptop companies have to put in the time to actually get the power savings.
Still, I don't think many people were aware that Linux wasn't (ever * ) going to work on Optimus laptops and notebooks - and Linus' comments have helped raise awareness of the issue.
I'm done with nVidia products, not because of their Linux support, but because of their lack of support of Optimus on ANY platform. Until I can use Optimus in an optimal way, with PhysX and 3D Vision working properly and more games running at max settings, instead of the crippled version they ship, I'm done with nVidia.
Optimus causes headaches to many more people than just the Linux community.
At the risk of having the Linus Torvalds fan-boys fire all missiles in my general direction I'll stick my head out and say this:
I can only admire the guy for what he has created and accomplished. He is, without dispute, a key figure in the history of modern computing.
And, he can be a real asshole.
I have not watched a lot of his talks, just a few. The two that stick in my memory is one at Google and the one where he, well, makes friends with nVidia.
In the Google case he tells people who are in the room that they are stupid. In the nVidia case he tells the entire company "fuck you". How unbecoming.
While I found both talks to be very interesting, as a professional, I don't take kindly to this kind of behavior. It really diminishes the person in my mind to the level of an immature kid. Sophomoric behavior and jokes have their place and time.
He seems to admit that he is not polite and that he found a need to be direct. OK. Armed with that information one ought to temper childish impulses to engage in that sort of name-calling. One can be very direct and firm in making points and voicing opinion without resorting to diminishing and talking-down to those you are addressing.
Here one of Mark Twains sayings is very appropriate: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
He should stop and think for a fraction of a second before verbally defecating all over his audience like that. He is and should be smart enough to understand the value of not being a jerk.
Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course. Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.
> Perhaps he should read Dale Carnegie's book or take a course.
The one about manipulation?
> Far more could be accomplished with nVidia or anyone else if the conversation was professional, civil and with a goal to understand both sides and attempt to find common ground.
Yeah, right. Should I point you to the online petitions made to convince nVidia to open source their drivers? Guess what was their result. Nothing.
Yes, the one about manipulation. It's in the title. Go ahead: read, do the opposite of what he suggests, and see how many people thank you for how "not-Dale Carnegie" you are.
I think you are a a stupid asshole. Fuck you! Your work is stupid. Your ideas are stupid and the choices your made are stupid.
Of course, I don't mean that at all. Not even for a microsecond. Now think about how you would have felt if my reply to your post contained that. And if I meant it.
Would you be inclined to have a conversation with me? Or work with me? Or attempt to find common ground? Or even have a discussion where we could continue to disagree yet still be able to explore each others' mental space?
Probably not. There is no excuse in my book for being a jerk in almost any context. No matter who the person might be or their prior and current accomplishments.
Thing is, Linus says why something sucks. He doesn't swear just for the sake of doing it. I for one prefer real feedback to sugar coating. He's not a jerk for doing this.
This isn't about swearing. This is about respect for your audience and the people you are talking about. There's a huge difference between saying something like:
"Based on what I learned writing Git the people who wrote Subversion --who, at the time, created a great product-- may not have made the best choices"
and what he said (paraphrasing):
"...what you did is stupid and you guys are stupid..."
The first shows respect and consideration for professionals that built a tool that was well-received and used by thousands to great effect. Yes, as things go, a different approach could have been taken. That is always the case with technology.
The second form, which is the approach he took, shows no respect whatsoever for anyone and utter admiration for his own capabilities.
I don't know about you, but you talk to me like that and good luck gaining my engagement in anything of interest to you. It would be over in a microsecond.
So your response to an egomaniac who says "look how awesome my stuff is you guys suck", an admittedly egocentric way of handling things, would be to say "im taking my toys and playing elsewhere since you didn't stroke my ego and protect my super important sensitivities from your ego"? How is that not a flaming pile of hypocrisy?
Well, in this case Optimus is not all that well-received, by the Linux community and by people who thought they were going to get a good gaming experience with an nVidia graphics card, but ended up with Optimus instead. Really, nVidia deserves little respect for its lack of work with Optimus on both Windows and Linux.
When Linus uses profanity, it almost always (and in his case, was) accompanied by content.
The polite version of your impersonation is "I disagree." which is a worthless comment; the polite version of Linus' is more or less exactly what he said, minus the hand gestures. He actually said something while you did not.
Where did I propose that he should simply say "I disagree" and move on? Where is it that I tried to say something and, per your assertion, did not?
Having strong disagreements is part of life at many levels, not just business. Resorting to name-calling and insults when this happens is a formula guaranteed to not get anyone what they ultimately want. Linus is lucky that he is who he is. Anyone else would not be invited to a second talk, ever, for behaving that way. He gets a pass because he is a rock star.
The distinction here is between publicly deriding someone and having a private argument (with yelling, screaming and name-calling if you'd like). In some circles private arguments can get rather heated and might even descend into name-calling and personal attacks. I am not saying that's OK, but if it is going to happen it should be in a private setting. Once you cross the private-public threshold and deride someone (or an entire organization) in a very public way you are ringing a bell that cannot be un-rung. That is not professional behavior. Period.
This has nothing to do with the use of profanity. Under some circumstances profanity can convey a message far more efficiently than half a page full of sentences. That is not the problem.
What you and others might fail to recognize is that the question he was asked and the opportunity he had was golden. It was an opportunity to connect need with request. Rather than telling nVidia to go fuck themselves he could have taken the opportunity to deliver a mutually beneficial message that could actually produce the desired results. Maybe something like this:
"nVidia produces some of the most amazing graphics hardware in the market. While I am not a gamer I understand what they are doing and have come to appreciate the level of performance and features they put into their products. We, unfortunately, have an issue with regards to the way they've chosen to support <chip name> in Linux. I understand why they are choosing that path but would sure love to re-engage in a discussion in order to see if we can find an approach that would bring to Linux what we need from nVidia without causing them undue support issues. It is also important that you, the audience present here and watching this online engage with nVidia and voice your support for an approach that serves Linux well"
That was seat-of-the-pants but the general idea is that you take the opportunity to build a bridge, not set-off a dynamite charge that destroys it. I guarantee you that such an approach would have resulted in far more engagement than telling them "fuck you!" in the best 15-year-old pimple-faced kid style.
I also don't know if those voicing support for the "fuck you!" approach on this thread have much business experience. This is not a put-down, it's just reality. If you are in your early twenties it might feel like the best approach is this in-your-face-and-very-public approach. Give it another ten years and a few more cuts and bruises and your opinion is likely to change.
Perhaps I've been fortunate. I got into a very professional work environment from about nineteen years old and never looked back. I have never --ever-- had to deal with people who treated any other professional in this manner. Disagreements? Yes. Heated debates? Absolutely. Going for visceral ad-hominem attacks? Never. Bad idea.
Don't believe me? Try it and see how far you get. Remember, you don't have the rock-star pass card.
>Where did I propose that he should simply say "I disagree" and move on?
Your example of rude text boiled down to "I disagree", once you stripped the profanity. Sorry for the confusion.
Anyway, nVidia doesn't really give a shit about integrating better with Linux and I must say that I, if I were in their position, would not either. Their engineers, more than anyone, fully understand everything Linus could have possibly said. They know the issue inside and out already, and their best option simply isn't the best option for everyone else.
Maybe a greater point here with regards to nVidia is that the engineers are not making the decision to not over-extend the organization to support Linus, management is. What do you think the management discussion looked like when they were made aware of the "fuck you nVidia!" incident? Right. It probably took the form or "fuck you Linus!". And that ends all opportunity to engage in a constructive conversation.
It's not about engineering, it's about business and inter-personal relations. Skills that Linus, from the admittedly narrow sample I've seen, does not seem to have mastered at all.
More like, "Hey look we threw these guys a bone, and they are still whining, they've been saying the same stuff for years, but now one of them was rude, so we can play victim instead of just ignoring them".
Of course, we can keep playing the "pretend there is no context" game if you want...
Do you know what my entire experience with the programming community has been? It has been every single asshole in a mile-radius telling me I am an idiot for some ridiculous reason that serves only to demonstrate how utterly retarded they are and how little they understand about my profession. I've had networking programmers try to tell me I'm writing my graphics engine wrong. It would be comical if it wasn't so incredibly aggravating.
So until other programmers stop being giant assholes, I find the rhetoric surrounding Linus' impoliteness to be ridiculous at best, and hypocritical at worst. Linus is simply doing what is necessary to get brick-headed morons to listen to him.
If that is your entire experience with the programming community you, my friend, landed on the wrong side of town for some reason. I have never had even a small sliver of that experience, and I've worked with hundreds of people.
This is not about not being polite. This is about PUBLICLY deriding people. That's bad manners, to say the least.
Yeah, so what? You know this, I know this, even Linus knows this and admits it. But he doesn't do it just to troll someone. If you've pissed him off enough for him to curse at you, there's (almost) always a good reason why he did it.
If you really think he's a fool, you know nothing of the situation. Linus has been working on nVidia support on Linux, so he does know what he's talking about. He has been frustrated by nVidia's lack of cooperation and he got their attention.
Far more could be accomplished with nVidia if they actually worked with the Linux community. "Civility" has nothing to do with it.
This solves nothing - the driver support for NVidia GPUs in Linux is still crappy, FreeBSD is worse, Kernel upgrades on machines with Nvidia GPU and binary driver are still a pain, instability and bugs are still plenty etc. So this PR response deserves another huge "FU" to Nvidia for refusing the provide documentation - especially in the face of ATI and Intel doing so successfully.
I stopped buying anything Nvidia - all my machines are AMD or Intel only. It's also very easy to avoid Tegra based Androids.
Kernel upgrades on machines with nVidia GPUs and binary drivers are a pain because the Linux kernel developers have chosen to not provide a stable binary interface, and in some cases, have deliberately broken interfaces by changing them to "GPL-only".
Meanwhile, Windows, Solaris, and FreeBSD users generally have no problems between kernel updates.
I just went from the open source Nouveau drivers to the closed source one a few days ago.
My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right.
Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this?
Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.
The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine.
The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.
As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.
Optimus was my first huge disappointment for me from NVidia. When I used Linux, I preferred NVidia over ATI, because it worked out of the box with the official NVidia driver. This all changed when I bought a laptop with NVidia Optimus, it didn't work at all. If NVidia had provided a proprietary driver, that would have been fine, but they simply ignored it, which was the "fuck you" to the consumers who wanted to use Linux on their laptops which had NVidia Optimus.
NVidia, should just do what they did before: make things work for the [Linux] consumer. Just make a proprietary/open source/open core/semi open source driver that just works with Optimus hardware without having to hack stuff. It's 2012, video should just work.
Yes the talk is quite good and it is worth watching. Quite a few insightfull questions and answers. I would even say that the nVidia outburst was the least interesting part.
As has been discussed here before, the individual developers might not be bad people, this seems to be more of a management issue.
You can see developers replying on the nvidia forums regarding bugs, asking for bug reports etc.[1]. So you will probably be alright if you work there. If you go into management however... (gives you the evil eye) ;)
I see Linus's rant as just pragmatic realpolitik. He's just one guy and he's wielding his influence in an effective way. He wouldn't be able to have nearly as much of an impact if he played by this idea that he should operate in a "professional" manner using only formal language and press releases.
given, "a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance."
Linus is certainly temperamental, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone he's less that a world-class developer, and critical to the linux community.
His creation is used to run half of the world's smartphones and probably 90+ percent of the world's servers.
His other creation (git) is used to develop maybe half of the world's software projects.
Having this in mind, I can't really imagine how can he have an "inflated view of their own talent or importance". I would say he is even quite modest...
This makes me wonder: are there any truly `built-for Linux` video card/chips out there? Aside from ATI/AMD, nVidia and Intel, I can only think of Matrox and S3 -- with S3 being recently bought by HTC, and I have no idea what Matrox does these days, especially after the Parhelia failure.
Intel. Works very, very closely closely with Linux devs, and AFAIK releases full specs. Given that Intel are expanding well beyond their CPU origins (Intel NICs are among the best I've worked with, graphics chipsets are pretty good, others generally work well), this is cool stuff. In the case of my most recent Thinkpad purchase (May 2011), it took updating to the latest kernel on Debian 3-4 months after purchase to iron out all the bugs (hangs/restarts), but since then it's been golden.
AMD aren't far behind, and since they picked up ATI (Radeon graphics), the Radeon support is also quite good.
S3 were making some noises about being very solidly behind Linux as of 4-5 years ago (bought me a round of drinks at a Linux conference, so their support is demonstrably liquid, if not solid). I've had pretty good experience with older Matrox chipsets, no idea where they are now.
My experience is largely desktop, server, and some light video viewing. Hard-core gamers may have other complaints, but my understanding is that you'll probably end up on Windows or a dedicated gaming platform in that case anyway.
Intel releases Linux support for every new graphics chipset they build, before the hardware ships. That seems about as close to "built for Linux" as you can get.
I said "that they build" quite intentionally. Yes, the third-party PowerVR-based chipsets have little to no Linux support, a problem going back to the original GMA500 (Poulsbo) chipset, and that makes it difficult to make a blanket statement that all Intel graphics chipsets work with Linux. I'd still argue that Intel has the best Linux support among graphics card vendors; on top of that, Intel drives the majority of new innovations in the X and Linux graphics infrastructure code.
I learned my lesson years ago and have stuck with Intel for my last four laptops. I haven't had any compatibility issues or manual configuration necessary since then.
I seem to recall at least one attempt several years ago at making an "open source" video card. Not sure if this is the one I remember, but it seems similar (from 2008):
Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience.
Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier.
While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.
As a result:
1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.
2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.
3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.
At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.
The real problem is that Optimus still sucks on Windows 7. Optimus causes problems for games, problems for nVidia's 3D Vision technology, even problems with PhysX. I could be playing so many games much more smoothly and at higher quality if Optimus would actually work well with games and other nVidia technology. Unfortunately, don't expect good Optimus support on Linux until nVidia gets their Optimus act together on Windows.
Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change.
I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree.
(Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)