Hey.
You guys and Linus (well, he said: "Nvidia, f**k you"), were telling that Linux is having problems with latest Nvidia CPUs.
Well. My laptop will be kinda custom built. It would have then Nvidia GTX 880M (2x8GB) SLI. Is that on list of compatibility to OpenSuse and Arch? Is there a list which would point out which GPUs are supported?
There a built-in open source nVidia driver for Linux called Nouveau. nVidia also has proprietary Linux drivers for their gear which work very, very well. The proprietary drivers are much more efficient than the Nouveau driver. I run Nouveau on my laptop which has an nVidia GPU, and the proprietary driver on my workstation which has an 8800GT video card. I use the proprietary driver on that system because I run multiple HD displays and do quite a bit of video processing so it needs the best drivers available, which happen to be the nVidia proprietary ones.
FWIW, nVidia also has Linux SDKs for using the graphics cores for serious parallel number crunching.
Also, since nVidia is working with the Nouveau team at providing better support for their cards in the open source universe, Linus has withdrawn his extended middle finger from pointing at nVidia... :-)
So. Nvidia "installs" Noveau driver on Arch/OpenSuse Linux for "N GTX 880M SLI"... as I understand, is that true?
NVidia is a company that provides their propietary drivers (which in general work well) and they also help out the Noveau team). Installing the NVidea drivers will install the official propietary version (not Noveau).
You should try to install the propietary NVidea drivers for the more reliable support. If you are hiving problems with it, or if you prefer open source drivers, Noveau would be worth a shot.
Noveau has gotten a lot better in recent years.
The 880M card has been added pretty recently (last May) to the officially supported list from the Nvidia Linux driver version 331.67. This is pretty much the latest stable Nvidia driver (there are a couple of later Beta drivers). So, assuming you can install this driver, i.e., that you have either the know-how to install it manually or that your distribution of Linux is recent enough to offer it in its repositories of proprietary drivers, then it should work fine. Needless to say, such a cutting-edge graphics card will require such a cutting-edge (recent) driver, and such a recent driver will, in general, require a fairly recent kernel version, meaning that you should pick a cutting-edge distribution of Linux, such as Arch or just a very recent version of Ubuntu or OpenSUSE or whatever... The Nvidia site doesn't give a minimum for the required kernel version, but I would aim to get at least 3.10 or later, which most newest releases of Linux use (OpenSUSE is 3.11, Ubuntu is 3.13, and with Arch you would probably get 3.15-16 now (rolling), etc.).
N.B.: The Nouveau driver's team maintains a list of cards supported by their drivers. Your card (GTX 880M) is not yet listed there. I would assume that it won't take too long for the 800-series to be supported, as they already support the complete GTX 7xxM series and everything below it. I would say probably a couple of months. But in any case, you can just use the Nvidia driver.
By the way, Linus giving Nvidia the finger is old news... they've fallen in line with other companies now and produce good stable drivers to Linux now. This was helped in part by Linus' push on them, but mainly by the coming of SteamBox and Steam for Linux in general, which forced all graphics card people to take their Linux drivers seriously from now on.
Okay thanks Mike. I think I will know how to install Linux driver. Of course I will use most recent drivers and OS for it.
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