14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA developers have started to provide support for the open source equivalent of their drivers, making some important steps towards becoming a more Linux-friendly company.
Just a year and a half ago Linus Torvalds had some very harsh words (let’s call them words) for NVIDIA, but now things have begun to change.
“The following patches perform architectural changes to Nouveau that are necessary to support non-PCI GPUs and add initial support for GK20A.
“Although the support is still very basic and more user-space changes will be needed to make the full graphics stack run on top of it, we were able to successfully open channels and run simple pushbuffers with libdrm (more testing including rendering is in progress as we get more familiar with Nouveau's user-space interface),” reads the announcement from NVIDIA's Alexandre Courbot.
This is actually great news for the users of the Nouveau drivers, not because of this particular set of patches, but because it means that NVIDIA is following closely the development of the open source drivers and they will probably intervene more in the future.
Even Linus Torvalds gave NVIDIA another finger, but this time it was thumbs up, in a laudative gesture towards the company.