hybrid-graphics-linux team mailing list archive

[Eric Appleman <erappleman@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.

Source: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=184564