Linux with next generation cutting edge graphics drivers?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn May 22, 2012 8:06 AM EDT |
Linux is getting next generation cutting edge graphics drivers? That can't be right. Linux is always behind the curve on getting graphics drivers. I know this because all the naysayers who criticized my article on Linux hardware support told me so. Linux hardware support sucks and the drivers aren't there for a long time if ever, or so they told me. OK, enough with the dripping sarcasm already. This is good news and should maintain Linux domination on ARM based systems, mostly in the form of Android. I'd like to see Android get more competition in this area from other distros, but whether that happens or not this is still good news. |
| Khamul May 22, 2012 9:30 AM EDT |
It's nice, but ARM is a totally different world from desktop systems. There's no desktop systems using ARM, and Nvidia and AMD/ATI are the big graphics providers here, along with Intel for the low end. Thankfully, Intel driver support is excellent, but for anyone who wants higher performance, there's a lot of problems with the other two. |
| caitlyn May 22, 2012 9:55 AM EDT |
Actually, I have an NVIDIA chipset in my desktop. Nouveau works well enough and the proprietary driver is flawless. Recent Phoronix tests put the NVIDIA Linux driver on par with their Windows drivers for performance. ATI is hit and miss. Some chipsets/card work very well under Linux, some not as much. |
| jacog May 22, 2012 10:10 AM EDT |
The NVIDIA proprietary drivers are good. It might be true that they sometimes only implement support for some features of new hardware after Windows gets support, but usually it's not like the hardware launches with loads of applications already supporting said features. |
| gus3 May 22, 2012 10:41 AM EDT |
If I use the latest (295.xx) nVidia proprietary driver, I have to stay with the 3.2 kernel. My system locks *hard* if I try to use it with the 3.3 or 3.4 kernel. And yes, that includes the 3.4 release kernel. |
| Fettoosh May 22, 2012 11:42 AM EDT |
It is good news because when one vendor builds a Linux driver for their hardware, others will follow with theirs. It is the fear of being left behind and out. That is exactly what is keeping MS on the catch up. When Intel released their drivers, ATI was first then nVidia followed suit. When Linux was released on netbooks, MS felt obligated to follow suit with its OS. Had to extend XP lifetime since Vesta & Windows 7 were not capable. When Linux popularity on ARM became noticeable, MS felt obliged for its OS to support the ARM. When Linux was being used for smart phones, MS was forced to follow with its OS When Linux was being released with touch screen interface for tablets and desktops, MS is changing its interface on Win 8 and even abandoning its famous Aero. Linux is now leading while MS is just following trying to catch up. |
| Koriel May 22, 2012 3:21 PM EDT |
Can't use Nouveau at all on either of my desktops it crashes each system within five minutes of a fresh install of pretty much any distro that uses it as its default driver, the first thing I do after a fresh install is replace it with the Nvidia driver and then everything is ticketyboo. It can make driver installation problematic as I have had it crash on occasion even before I can get jockey fired up to do the official driver install. Wish they had stuck with the original nv 2d only driver as the default as that works flawlessly, don't know why the Nouveau driver dislikes my GF6800 and GF7300 cards. |
| caitlyn May 22, 2012 5:55 PM EDT |
If you blacklist nouveau without installing the proprietary driver most distros fall back to nv, the 2D driver. |
| BernardSwiss May 22, 2012 6:51 PM EDT |
@Koriel Weren't there quality issues with the GF6600 and GF6800 cards? |
| Koriel May 22, 2012 7:42 PM EDT |
Never had any problem with my GF6800 card under windows or linux it has performed admirably until the nouveau driver came along and the fact it does exactly the same with my slightly younger gf7300 card, to me points towards the driver and not the card, mind you both systems are nForce 4 Socket 939 PCI Express MB's so that might also be related to the problem since their is commonality there. |
| Khamul May 23, 2012 3:24 PM EDT |
@caitlyn: The Nouveau driver and the Nvidia proprietary driver are totally at odds with each other. I've used both on my desktop with an Nvidia GT100 (I think it was) and now GT220 card. Nouveau (for me at least, in Kubuntu) works extremely well: it didn't take any effort to install, it automatically detects my two monitors, and in KDE's control center I can easily set the two monitors up however I want. However, the performance absolutely sucks for anything 3D (and for other stuff too), and is basically unusable for even something like TuxRacer or GoogleEarth. The "fix" for this appears to be to recommend people to buy a very large, expensive, and power-hungry graphics card, so that by getting 10-20% of the available performance with Nouveau, you'll get something similar to what you can get with a dirt-cheap low-power Intel chipset. The Nvidia proprietary driver is completely the opposite; the performance, as you say, is excellent. However, everything else sucks; it doesn't integrate with Linux at all, it's extra work to install and breaks every time a kernel update is applied (you need to do a dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-common or else your system won't run in graphical mode again), it doesn't use KMS so you have to use their special proprietary program running as root to configure your monitors instead of just doing it logged in as a normal user like any normal computer these days, etc. Intel graphics don't have this problem, since their drivers are all open-source; installing Mint or similar on a laptop with an Intel integrated GPU is a breeze, everything "just works", and you get great performance (well, great relative to the performance available from that class of GPUs) without having to massively overbuy, plus you get super-low power consumption, which is not only nice on a laptop, but it's nice in a desktop too so you don't have to have some big, loud cooling fan just for your GPU which makes your office environment unbearable even when you're not doing anything graphics-intensive. |
| Koriel May 24, 2012 3:19 PM EDT |
@Khamul A bunch of corrections. First of all on most modern distro's Nvidia driver does not break on a kernel install as most sensible distro's use DKMS see here for more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support for the kernel to build drivers on the fly and this has been the case for quite a few years. The distro's currently that use DKMS are as follows Ubuntu based distros, PCLinuxOS, ROSA etc. its a lot longer but these I know for sure as I use and test them regularly. I can only name two distro's that don't currently use DKMS by default and those are Mandriva and Mageia as they default to pre-built binary Nvidia kernels which is just silly in this day and age as they break as soon as you switch kernels. My Nvidia cards which i have been using since the year dot have been very stable with the Nvidia driver and I regular use it for playing WoW under wine and its 3D and 2D performance is outstanding. Not sure what you mean by it doesn't integrate with Linux as mine works fine with stuff such as XRANDR, Multiple monitors and SLI configurations, I use Nvidia settings as a normal user on Linux Mint 12, when it requires access to root privileges to save its configuration to xorg.conf it automatically asks for it on the save with a small pop up for the password this is hardly a huge problem even gksudo nvidia-settings hardly counts as a major hardship on distros that dont support the tighter sudo integration. The only distro's that require you to run the settings manager as root again are Mandriva and Mageia as they don't have sudo integration that handles the small pop up on Debian style distro's. Although PCLinuxOS does not use sudo they do make it available for download by enabling a special repository if you need it as certain programs such as nvidia-settings and truecrypt both require it to achieve full functionality although they will function without it, user-space integration is smoother with it. If your are having the problems that you mention then please don't blame the driver because it all works fine on the distro's I have mentioned. |
| Khamul May 24, 2012 3:35 PM EDT |
@Koriel: It doesn't work on Kubuntu. When I was using the Nvidia drivers, every time a kernel update happened, I had to manually run dpkg-reconfigure or else the reboot would fail. Also, modern Linux systems do NOT use xorg.conf files. Those became obsolete when KMS became the standard, and all good drivers support that. Nvidia does not. |
| gus3 May 24, 2012 3:35 PM EDT |
Koriel wrote:Not sure what you mean by it doesn't integrate with LinuxChanging the booted kernel version requires that the nVidia driver be re-built. It was enough of a PITA that I semi-automated the process in /etc/rc.d/rc.local, thusly:
# check for nvidia driver installation
grep '^ *[^#] *Driver "nvidia"' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 -a "`uname -r -v`" != "`cat /var/state/kern-vers-lastboot`" ] ; then
echo "Re-building nVidia driver"
for i in /path/to/NV*run ; do NVCMD=$i ; done
sh $NVCMD -s
[ $? -eq 0 ] && uname -r -v > /var/state/kern-vers-lastboot
fi
It ain't pretty, but it Works For Me(patent pending). It only takes into account the previously booted kernel version, not new driver versions that may be downloaded. |
| Koriel May 24, 2012 3:46 PM EDT |
CORRECTION to my previous post: LMDE does break (just tested it) if you change the kernel as to why I do not know as yet as the whole point is of dkms is to prevent this from happening but it appears the rebuild is not being triggered on this distro when a new kernel is installed, I wonder if this is the same for all Debian based distros. Linux Mint (Ubuntu based) and PCLinuxOS works as it should and does the driver rebuild, you can watch it do the rebuild if you expand the details tab as synaptic does the installs. It appears as if not all distros are implementing dkms correctly |
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