Linus Torvalds Says ‘F**k You’ To NVIDIA

[Apoptosis]

This is pretty wild:



This happens at the 48min and 10 second mark:

One of the students asks for Torvalds’ thoughts on NVIDIA and its reportedly poor support for its Optimus technology in Linux. The purpose of Optimus is to allow notebooks to dynamically switch between an Intel integrated graphics chip and an NVIDIA one, as performance requirements demand.

Here’s his reply:

I know exactly what you’re talking about and I’m happy to say that it’s the exception rather than the rule. I’m also happy to very publicly point out that NVIDIA has been one of the worst trouble spots we’ve had with hardware manufacturers.

And that is really sad because NVIDIA tries to sell chips — a lot of chips — into the Android market and NVIDIA has been the single worst company we’ve every dealt with. So, NVIDIA, f**k you!

[kenc51]

LOL

http://russellwarner.deviantart.com/art/F-you-309064510

[Apoptosis]

NVIDIA made a comment on this to NVNews:

PR Response to Linus Torvald's Inflammatory Comments

Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience.

Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier.

While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.

As a result:

1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.

2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.

3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.

At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.

[kenc51]

This is a pointless PR response.
Releasing dirvers for GFX cards is one thing, Linux users paid for and want to use Optimus tech.
They already have the GFX card running just fine.