The GLVND infrastructure has finally been implemented

Jan 5, 2016 23:22 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, January 5, 2016, Nvidia announced the release of a new Beta version of its graphics drivers for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems, version 361.16.

According to the release notes, the Nvidia 361.16 Beta video driver includes the brand new OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Driver infrastructure, also known as GLVND, which is supported by the Nvidia OpenGL and GLX drivers.

Users are being informed that the presence of GLVND in the Nvidia graphics driver should not cause any visible changes, but it should affect the scripts that rely on the components of the Nvidia OpenGL driver that haven't been specified in Linux OpenGL ABI 1.0.

Additionally, the inclusion of the OpenGL Vendor-Neutral Driver infrastructure might also affect apps that rely on the availability of OpenGL/GLX symbols in the libGL.so.1 library, as well as third-party Nvidia video driver binary packages.

"This should not cause any visible changes in behavior for end users, but some internal driver component libraries have been renamed and/or moved as a result," said the Nvidia developers in today's announcement.

The nvidia-installer script was updated, bugs were fixed

Besides the inclusion of GLVND, the Nvidia 361.16 Beta graphics driver ships with an updated nvidia-installer script, which can now run depmod(8) and ldconfig(8) immediately after the user uninstalls an existing Nvidia driver.

Moreover, the VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) wapper and the libvdpau_trace.so.1 and libvdpau.so.1 trace libraries were removed from the binary package as they might be available in the default software repositories of certain OSes.

Last but not least, Nvidia 361.16 Beta fixes an issue in the EGL driver. You can download the Nvidia 361.16 Beta video driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind not to use it in your stable environment.