GPL'ed Drivers For NVIDIA nForce Ethernet Devices

An anonymous reader writes "Manfred Spraul has released a GPLed driver for the ethernet device found in motherboards based on the Nvidia Nforce/Nforce2/Nforce3 chipsets. Drivers provided by Nvidia on the other hand, are closed. Andrew Morton has integrated this driver in the 2.6.9-mm2 release of his mm tree. And if you are using a 2.4x kernel, you may want to check out this post."

Re:Thats nice!

[schapman]

yes... im picking up an nForce2 board shortly, and its nice to know that when i install linux, I'll have an option. I have found in the past that certain manufacturers make crappy drivers (Creative + SBlive platinum + winxp) and its nice to see that the people out there w/ the skills are willing to contribute. Also, a pro-open source and pro-linux site like slashdot is a great place for these people to be recognized for their work.

NVidia policy for making drivers

[Drakon86]

Reverse engineering the binary driver for the ethernet chip and making a GPL'd source tree for anyone to review is great.
However, I don't think that it offers much except for hypothetical multiplatform portability. Without any specs it would be extremely hard to modify the driver and it's even harder to add new features.
Now I just hope someone has the time and skills to reverse engineer the NVidia video driver and GL libraries so that my 2.6.0-test9-mm2 kernel wouldn't give me pages of tracebacks every time I launch X using the nvidia driver. :-)