Are there any graphic card manufacturers that release free open source drivers?

brynjarh · 08-20-2004, 11:51 AM

Just wondering..

kilgoretrout · 08-20-2004, 02:22 PM

Ati and nvidia have free as in no $$$ drivers for linux but they are not open as in you can see the code. Any truly open source graphics drivers I've seen were made by open source developers by hacking the hardware. The manufacturers are very secretive about the details of their hardware and refuse to release the hardware specs necessary to make a good driver.

UnTamed · 08-20-2004, 03:55 PM

While I hate ATI right now for their inferior proprietary drivers and I just switched to a nV card, I have to admit that when it comes to OSS drivers ATI's always been a lot more supportive than nVidia.

Full h/w 3d has been possible with the orignal radeon r100 since XFree-4.1.0 at least and the r200 code was merged into XFree-4.3.0.

Also I just read that ATI has merged some more code to insure basic fonctionnality for the r300 [...no 3d acceleration] and that should be included in the soon to be release next iteration of Xorg.

nafan · 08-23-2004, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by kilgoretrout
Ati and nvidia have free as in no $$$ drivers for linux but they are not open as in you can see the code.

The NVIDIA driver package, has a command line option which allows you to extract the source code only.

Code:

[root@server archives]# ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run --help
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run [options]
<SNIP>
-x, --extract-only
  Extract the contents of ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run, but do not
  run 'nvidia-installer'.
<SNIP>

It extracts the source code into a folder with the same name as the driver package, minus the .run extension.

i've only ever used NVIDIA graphics cards in my pc's and never had a peoblem with any of them under linux.