The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would probably not have noticed the talk; since Linus decided to be curt, the talk got onto HN and people from Nvidia have no doubt noticed it.
Besides, whatever you think about it, Linus's approach was indubitably effective. We are, after all, talking about the issue right now!
But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware. And the fact that Nvidia is a hardware company with a strong Windows background, so open source software is quite a strange thing in comparison. It kinda feels like being between a rock and a hard place.
When it comes to mobile software, Nvidia has been doing more open source work and upstreaming quite a lot of our changes. A lot of work has been done in the kernel internals and arm stuff. Not a lot of customer facing stuff but very valuable work if you're trying to build ARM-based system on chips.
To whom? Certainly not your competitors.
Also what's wrong with releasing specs under NDA?
And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.
Many Linux kernel developers have offered to sign NDAs with Nvidia and many other companies.
And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.
How? It's easy to obfuscate certain details of driver code. Think of magic constants, for example.
Nevermind, we were both just doing it wrong. This should work:
(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)
You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.
The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway.
My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.
And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.
What is the problem?