what do people have against nVidia for their Linux chipset driver support

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: REMF
why are you calling me a troll?

what is innovative about the above is that nVidia is the first to bring these features into mainstream boards.

online gaming for example, your CPU should be running the game, not bogged down with network traffic and firewall checking.

With a linksys router you don't have to spend any cycles on firewalling. With a good network card you won't spend much on traffic.

3D sound in games: far better to have DSP's doing the calculations than the CPU.

My SB Live works just fine.

nVraid: the ability to span an array over PATA and SATA drives.

Useless.

i agree Padlock is an excellent addition, but for pity's sake put it on a powerful CPU! it isn't useful to me because i have no use for such an underpowered CPU. it is indeed an innovation, but it has zero impact on the techy prosumer crowd.

But unlike nVidia, it is a technology innovation. Now please, give me a good tech innovation instead of that "they brought a bunch of stuff other companies have been doing for years to me."

 

[MrChad]

The only innovation I can really credit nVidia for is their Soundstorm chipset, which brought real-time Dolby Digital encoding to consumer soundcards (of course, not too many people need or use this, but that's beside the point).

Other than that, nVidia's chipset was a big step up for Windows AMD users because their Windows driver support is excellent. I'm not a Linux user, so I can't comment on VIA vs. nVidia performance in Linux, but in Windows, nVidia chipsets were vastly more stable than VIA when they were first released. VIA has come a long way since then, fortunately.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Don't get me wrong, if nVidia was more F/OSS friendly I'd buy a bunch of their boards. If they opened up NIC and general chipset stuff I'd be happy. I don't need anything fancy, just the same level of support I get from VIA. Or Intel. Or a little bit less than I get from AMD. nVidia makes good products, they're just not friendly enough for me. :beer:

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer

Originally posted by: drag
Nforce boards have always used the snd-intel8x0 module for alsa sound.

Once it's loaded all the channels will be mute, so you would have to use alsamixer to adjust it.

That is what I figured when the PCI id of my chip showed up in the 8x0 source code.

Unfortunately loading the module does not give me a device. It's not the mute problem, there is no device driver loaded. /var/log/message didn't tell me another either.

As far as I can figure, this driver does not work with my revision of the board. And I didn't appreciate guessing the module either, Asus must mention that to get credit for providing a driver.

The machine has all PCI slots taken, among other things with a sourdcard. But I want the slot back so it would be great to make that onboard sound work.

Not sure what you mean.

If the driver loads, then it's probably finding something to hook into. Now if that works or not, I have no idea.

With alsa it's a bit different from normal Unix driver and OSS. No /dev/dsp for Alsa, except thru OSS compatability.

Check out /proc/asound and see if anything turns up in their. It should have something. /proc is something that is not a real file system, but it allows you to see what the kernel has to say on various resources... Also sometimes way to interact with the kernel. It differs from driver to driver. If you don't have /proc/asound then something is wrong with alsa (ie the module isn't going to work with that hardware as far as I can tell.)

And I didn't appreciate guessing the module either,

Should of gone to alsa-project.org right away.

No, it is actually not recognizing the soundchip, it does not show in /proc/asound (and I also have OSS emulation loaded, so I would get a /dev entry).

alsa-project doesn't mention which module to load either, you have to guess it is the 8x0 module, or you can grep the sourcecode as I did.

Is anybody here actually using Linux on the K8N-E Deluxe soundchip?

 

[drag]

nVraid: the ability to span an array over PATA and SATA drives.

I am doing that right now with 2 SATA Maxtor harddrives on a Sis SATA card and a WD harddrive on the onboard PATA controller.

They are 120gigs each running a Raid 5 software array with partitions that can be resized on the fly with Linux's LVM. I could do nice stuff like hot spares and even hotswappable harddrives. All very fancy and easy to setup. (and you have had that ability to do that for some several years now.)

alsa-project doesn't mention which module to load either, you have to guess it is the 8x0 module, or you can grep the sourcecode as I did.

What do you mean it doesn't show it? I provided a link directly the page that showed that nforce boards used the intel8x0 module a couple posts back.

It's simple. You goto alsa-project.org and you click on "sound cards". Then you select manufacturer and they have the nforce name, the name of the module, and a wiki were users added notes on how to get it to work the best they could get it and howto set it up.

Now if the nforce3 version of the board has something different, I have no clue, and probably the Alsa-project doesn't either until one of them buys a board and begins reverse engineering it, since nvidia sucks.

If you want to find people that use Nvidia products in Linux, Nvidia has a forums setup for Linux nforce users to help each other.

You can probably get very nice information. Also Gentoo forums are worth searching thru for stuff like this, they usually have good information.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Don't get me wrong, if nVidia was more F/OSS friendly I'd buy a bunch of their boards. If they opened up NIC and general chipset stuff I'd be happy. I don't need anything fancy, just the same level of support I get from VIA. Or Intel. Or a little bit less than I get from AMD. nVidia makes good products, they're just not friendly enough for me. :beer:

Agreed.

Nvidia's stuff just plain sucks for Linux compared to other motherboard types you can get for the same price. If Nvidia had good support, then they would be good linux boards.

Some Via setups realy suck so it's important to buy a motherboard from a good manufacturer. Sucky manufacturer=sucky boards.