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We should note that nvidia has rewritten huge chunks of X internally (and that the blob provides these rewritten pieces), X isn't designed to support this kind

We should note that nvidia has rewritten huge chunks of X internally (and that the blob provides these rewritten pieces), X isn't designed to support this kind of thing in the first place, big distros have plans to move off of X in the semi-near future (1 yr+, but still relatively short amount of value for the investment if we assume X will begin to fall into disuse) and the move to Wayland will impose significant development overhead on nvidia anyway (since Wayland requires KMS, which nvidia doesn't currently support), and nvidia has been looking for extra Linux developers for a long time without luck (see job listing at http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61644 http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61644 ). Also consider that nvidia's primary market for Linux is big workstations, etc. (with OpenCL emerging), a field where Optimus support is not relevant. I have also been disappointed to see poor support for Optimus and related techs on Linux but when you look at the costs involved it's not too surprising that nvidia would be reluctant to implement support in its existing blob for the existing infrastructure. Fingers crossed that they're working on it for the Wayland/KMS timeframe.

trotsky 15y ago
Somewhat off topic, but do you know why KMS seems to be such a big hurdle for the 3d video vendors' drivers? ATI's binery blob driver also doesn't support KMS even though they seem to actively develop it. The open source radeon driver does, but it doesn't support a sufficient amount of OpenGL to allow commercial native linux games or wine+directx games to run. On the surface it doesn't seem like KMS support would be a big problem for people otherwise building complex graphics drivers. As an aside, I use a laptop with AMD's switchable graphics solution. You can set and forget it to either setting rather well, but if you actually try switching back and forth you start running into tons of bugs, instabilities, usability problems etc.

trotsky 15y ago

Somewhat off topic, but do you know why KMS seems to be such a big hurdle for the 3d video vendors' drivers? ATI's binery blob driver also doesn't support KMS even though they seem to actively develop it. The open source radeon driver does, but it doesn't support a sufficient amount of OpenGL to allow commercial native linux games or wine+directx games to run. On the surface it doesn't seem like KMS support would be a big problem for people otherwise building complex graphics drivers. As an aside, I use a laptop with AMD's switchable graphics solution. You can set and forget it to either setting rather well, but if you actually try switching back and forth you start running into tons of bugs, instabilities, usability problems etc.