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."

Thats nice!

[pagercam2]

Its great that drivers are available for this new chipset, but is this really worth being a /. topic???

Woo-Hoo

[eriksson]

This is great - now I just need to get the XFree86 nv driver to play nice with my nForce2 w/ integrated video, and I'll be able to run a non-tainted kernel.

Has anybody else had problems with X on such a board? There's apparantly a bug somewhere in the rendering code that crops up because the nv driver doesn't use hardware acceleration as much as the nvidia driver. I filed bug #811 on bugzilla, but no resolution yet :(

nvidia ethernet drivers aren't backwards compat?

[zaqattack911]

I always thought most modern ethernet cards were compatible with some generic brands.. like ne2000.

Re:nvidia ethernet drivers aren't backwards compat

[4of12]

If I understand correctly, the Ethernet is built right onto the mainboard, with the chipset.

Audio processing went down this route a while back. Old soundcards aren't needed when the functionality was built into the chipset.

For high speed networking (like GigE), avoiding the PCI bus can potentially be faster.

Re:nvidia ethernet drivers aren't backwards compat

[MBCook]

Not only is skipping the PCI bus important for speed, but even for slower things (like 10/100 ethernet) not being on the bus is good. It means that the chip can talk to memory or the CPU without waiting for the PCI bus to be free for it to use. Basically, it gets to skip the bus contention.

A good analogy would be there are 5 people all trying to call one guy, and Mr. Ethernet is one of the people. By being in the chipset and not on the bus, he doesn't have to keep trying to call and getting a busy signal, he can just say his message. This is because Mr. CPU could talk to 3 or 4 people at a time (he's that fast), but the phone (PCI bus) only has one line. He just skipps the problem.

OK, that's a bit simplified, but the fact is that not waiting on bus contention is good. The ethernet doesn't have to wait for/fight against the sound card, the tv tuner, and the add in raid controller.

On a side note, while NE2000 is a standard, it's for ISA, and as far as I know the NE2000 PCI standard never got big. I could be wrong. And even then, that's like using VESA to controll your GeForce FX video card. You can do it, but you could lose alot of the performance and features that you paid for because VESA doesn't know about 'em.

Fail-safe mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

All true, however in the context of the story. Having GPL drivers means that people with ethernet connections to the internet i.e. Cable or DSL can connect and get the drivers they need from Nvidia's site. The VESA standard and the 'nv' drivers allows one to have the basic functionality to at least get the OS installed and get 'something' done.

When NVDIA's binary drivers are with every distribution, then the GPL driver will be of less concern.

Re:nvidia ethernet drivers aren't backwards compat

[Anonymous Coward]

I know integrated sound cards sap a much larger portion of CPU time then PCI cards, making them a poor choice for gamers. I've avoided using integrated Ethernet on the same principle. Should I reconsider?

Re:Thats nice!

[Cecil]

Yes. Yes it is.

Perhaps you don't understand the magnitude of not having ethernet drivers available on any Linux install, and having to download them from the Internet, which is difficult, since you have no ethernet connection.

Until now, I have considered my nForce boards impossible to install Linux on because I am not willing to spend days downloading, burning, and installing ISOs and installing all the development tools that I don't need, downloading the drivers, rebuilding the kernel to finally tweak the thing into working and then uninstalling all the development tools when I have a debian packages mirror sitting on my fileserver.

This is good news.