NVIDIA Adds Open-Source Gallium3D Support For the Tegra K1 17
An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's latest rare open-source contribution is adding Gallium3D support for the Tegra K1 SoC to the Nouveau Mesa driver. After they added support for the Tegra K1's 'GK20A' Kepler GPU to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver, it was just a small step to get it working with the Gallium3D user-space code as it builds upon work done by the Nouveau developers earlier with reverse-engineering the existing Kepler GeForce graphics cards. When it comes to desktop graphics, NVIDIA is still predominantly pushing their proprietary Linux driver but they have begun contributing hardware and information to Nouveau developers."
All the others? (Score:4, Informative)
Compared with?
Nearly "all the rest":
- Intel only has an official open-source driver on Linux (only Windows gets a proprietary one). Their driver works, although it has less features than all the binaries (older version of OpenGL support).
- AMD has very decent *open source* drivers. Althought their *closed source Catalyst* isn't as good as Nvidia's binary, AMD's opensource Gallium3D is very good. It has sometime problems with the latest cards (indeed currently, it has problems with the latest generation of GCN 1.1 Volcanic Island cards), but runs otherwise good, and for older cards is better to the point that AMD drops support for old cards in Linux Catalyst and officially points to the opensource driver for supporting older hardware.
Meanwhile:
- Nvidia might have the best closed source driver (though still not collaborating nicely with standards, but this situation is slowly evolving), with full latest OpenGL support, etc. with decent stability...
- ... the nouveau driver is very bad. Not the authors' fault, as they could only rely on reverse engineering to get it working. So it's good that nvidia is finally making some baby-steps in the direction of helping nouveau.