On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 12:34 PM, jdd
does this mean than nvidia drivers are now free?
There are three drivers you should know about when dealing with Nvidia graphics cards. The "nv" driver is an open source driver (MIT license) that Nvidia originally developed/wrote and later depreciated in 2010. It only works up to Tesla microarchitecture GPUs (e.g. the GeForce 300 series). This driver only provides 2D acceleration. This driver provides no 3D acceleration. The "nouveau" driver is a community driven project which brings 2D and 3D accelerated drivers to GNU/Linux. It is licensed under the MIT License and is compatible with the GPL. This driver requires immense amounts of reverse engineering by the developers since Nvidia does not release internal hardware specifications to the open source community. The "nvidia" driver is the closed and official proprietary driver released by Nvidia. There is a lot of pre-compiled binary blobs, etc. The "nv" driver was never really meant for daily use by end-users. It was more so a bridge to allow users to easily install GNU/Linux and then download the proprietary driver from Nvidia. Nvidia even included obfuscated source code at one point. "nvidia" performance is slightly better than "nouveau" performance from the last time I checked, but your end use and application should direct you to research which driver suits your philosophical and performance needs. Brandon Vincent -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org