nvidia questions

[David Gibson]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 05:41:10PM +1100, Matthew Hawkins wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Saul Thurrowgood wrote:
> > Any clues? (apart from not using binary drivers :)
> 
> Friends that have nvidia cards are experiencing similar problems.  One
> uses the nv driver and restarts the X server with the nvidia one only
> when they need hardware 3D accelleration.
> 
> I think the biggest problem is that nvidia have to have a closed-source
> driver, and they cannot keep up with Linux kernel development.  So their
> QA boxes will be running 2.2.18 while the users have 2.5.1-pre8 with
> devfs and all sorts of other goodies.  The second biggest problem is
> they try to cut development costs by code-sharing with the Windows
> driver, apparently over 80% of the code is identical in both, so they
> can't just fix Linux-related problems in the bits that will affect
> Windows as well.  I would assume the reverse is not the same since they
> have a larger focus on having stable Windows drivers, so problems can be
> introduced that way also.

And as someone who's written a real Linux driver based on code
designed to work on both Windows and Linux, I can tell you that
attempting to share the code is *really* not a good idea.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson