Posted on Saturday, August 06 2011 @ 23:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Besides boosting the Intel Sandy Bridge performance, the Linux
3.1 kernel is also great for open-source graphics in that it has
improved support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards via
the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. The Linux kernel has already
supported kernel mode-setting for these GPUs and then more recently
there was 2D/X-Video acceleration as well as 3D acceleration when paired
with the Nouveau Gallium3D "NVC0" driver. The accelerated support though
has required manually extracting the graphics processor's microcode
after the GPU was initialized by the proprietary driver. With the Linux
3.1 kernel, Nouveau can generate its own "FUC" microcode to circumvent
this problem. In other words, there is now "out of the box" open-source
support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 graphics cards.
Read more
at Phoronix.
