Nvidia has open source drivers at nvidia.com

[zbiggy]

I just visited driver page at nvidia.com and there is open source driver for nForce chipsets instead of binary one. This is step in right direction. However there is some little things which do not look well in my opinion. These open source drivers are just those available in kernel sources. I'm little disappointed. I hoped Nvidia programmers will put some power in these source files extending drivers features.

audio:
This hurts nForce1,2 users only. Open driver supports only codec. The APU and Soundstorm support is dropped. No hardware acceleration, no OpenAL library. What a pity, this was the only one proprietary fully hardware accelerated OpenAL in Linux.

net:
First look at source code shows that only some nForce3,4 users can use hardware acceleration. Why other chips are not fully supported?

As I said before I think this is step in right direction. I hope Nvidia will improve these open drivers by adding features known from older binaries.

[PrakashP]

Yes, this sucks. At least I got spdif out working with my nforce2 and alsa driver and as such I killed nvsound.

But sound is not in sync (I must put mplayer's A/V sync to -100 or -200ms), so as NVidia now supports the ac'97 alsa codec driver, what about fixing theis issue? Seen on Abit NF7-S 2.0 with kernel 2.6.18-rc4 and intel8x0 driver. Atr least the video doesnt stutter anymore. With nvsound there was some timing problem with mplayer.

What about releasing some specs to the APU? It doesn't seem like we don't get hw mixing and other goodies back? Or give specs to some Alsa dev under NDA, at least.

[Thunderbird]

If you would look closer you would have noticed that in fact Nvidia dropped nvnet (their closed source network module) for the reverse engineered forcedepth driver (the opensource kernel driver). Nvidia employees work on that now.

[Spyke]

I agree, would be nice to get hardware mixing on that nf2 APU.

[JoshPrismon]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

If you would look closer you would have noticed that in fact Nvidia dropped nvnet (their closed source network module) for the reverse engineered forcedepth driver (the opensource kernel driver). Nvidia employees work on that now.

Still, it's great to see them taking these first few steps.

[irondog]

This is really nothing. As said, NVIDIA just packaged some kernel code written by the community into a .zip archive.

Aren't these drivers available in these distro's? That's impossible, 'cause these files have been part of the kernel for sooo long. Will there be anybody who can use this archive? It seems useless to me.

[Thunderbird]

Some older kernels might not have the driver but that's not really the main point. The main point is that Nvidia has dropped their own closed source driver in favor of an opensource one. I believe they provide kernel patches for it aswell.

[_tf_]

[netllama]

irondog, what you've stated is untrue. The '1.11' zip archive that is available from NVIDIA's website contains versions of foreceth and sata_nv which are newer than what is currently available from an official kernel.org kernel. NVIDIA's developers contributed bug fixes as well as enhancements to the code that was posted. This isn't simply grabbing what was already in a kernel.org kernel and reposting it.

Also, the source to binary drivers is included for anyone who wishes to build it on their own.

Thanks,
Lonni

[JoshPrismon]

Originally Posted by netllama

irondog, what you've stated is untrue. The '1.11' zip archive that is available from NVIDIA's website contains versions of foreceth and sata_nv which are newer than what is currently available from an official kernel.org kernel. NVIDIA's developers contributed bug fixes as well as enhancements to the code that was posted. This isn't simply grabbing what was already in a kernel.org kernel and reposting it.

Also, the source to binary drivers is included for anyone who wishes to build it on their own.

Thanks,
Lonni

Thanks for your support. I actually have noticed some of teh changes coming in. The open source community is very thankfull for that.

[zbiggy]

Originally Posted by netllama

irondog, what you've stated is untrue. The '1.11' zip archive that is available from NVIDIA's website contains versions of foreceth and sata_nv which are newer than what is currently available from an official kernel.org kernel. NVIDIA's developers contributed bug fixes as well as enhancements to the code that was posted. This isn't simply grabbing what was already in a kernel.org kernel and reposting it.

Also, the source to binary drivers is included for anyone who wishes to build it on their own.

Thanks,
Lonni

That is nice. It really looks some things are different than in kernel release. I can also understand limiting nf2 support to codec as Nvidia does not support older chips anymore . So providing codec support is elegant way of dropping APU to give at least sound output via codec.

But cutting network features of not so old 430 chip (MCP51) is rather a mistake.
If network hardware acceleration was available in binary driver so whats the problem with copy-paste of source code to open driver? I hope my 430 net acceleration is not IP protected if nf3,nf4,nf5 are not and have such feature in open driver?

Why my 430 does not has at least bare minimum:
DEV_HAS_LARGEDESC|DEV_HAS_CHECKSUM,

At present the support for MCP51 network is almost on the same level as nf2 and worse than nf3.

One thing more: some people here are unhappy when some of us complains or whins. I'd like to tell that we are usually here to help Nvidia make improvements list so future customers/users (and we of course) will be more happy using Nvidia products. The more whining the more important missing feature is. Our whining keeps Nvidia Linux support superior. Other companies does not have such forum and lags behind Nvidia. It is simple if everybody is happy why improving something or fixing it?

We all here are in some way fans of Nvidia. Some of us are happy with present day, other are happy too but look also for better tomorow.

I appreciate big Nvidia efforts to improve Linux drivers and professional way in which Nvidia works on Linux drivers and keeps contact with Linux community. Nobody else on PC hardware market works in such way. That is why I buy only Nvidia hardware since year 2001. But still see room for improvement and write about it to let Nvidia what kind of 'cool feature' would like to have.

[fhj52]

Originally Posted by netllama

irondog, what you've stated is untrue. The '1.11' zip archive that is available from NVIDIA's website contains versions of foreceth and sata_nv which are newer than what is currently available from an official kernel.org kernel. NVIDIA's developers contributed bug fixes as well as enhancements to the code that was posted. This isn't simply grabbing what was already in a kernel.org kernel and reposting it.

Also, the source to binary drivers is included for anyone who wishes to build it on their own.

Thanks,
Lonni

I am a little bit confused. I was searching for info about the NV 2200 chipset MAC and looked at the download section for nforce professional. That link took me to the v.1.11 release page.
However, after looking at the files, the files are for support of MCP55 & nForce professional 3000 series according to the text files that are included. The nforce v.1.11 page does not mention that NV 2000 series are not supported.

Is the phrasing incorrect in the text file?

INTRODUCTION
============
This archive provides drivers for SATA and LAN controller of NVIDIA nForce 550/570/590 and NVIDIA nForce professional 3600/3400/3050.

Also, all of the drivers have a kernel version tagged in the name and apparently expect that specific kernel. The 2.6.13 kernel is not used by any recent(this year) distros so I am a bit confused as to how " bug fixes as well as enhancements " can be applied to current distros on systems that use the nforce pro 2200 and/or 2050 chipsets.
( I use openSUSE 10.1 and current kernel for it is 2.6.16.21-...)

Would you explain what happened to driver support for other nForce Pro series such as 2200 and 2050?

The SUSE 10 folder only has source for forcedeth. Is that a newer/fixed/enhanced version and should I build it for this 2.6.16.21 x86_64 platform?
Why is the sata_nv driver source not included? : ditto for the audio AC97 driver.

If the fixes/enhancements are already in newer kernels, than a statement to that effect on the v.1.11 page would help clear the smoke a bit.

Thanks!
Ric