Kernel Log: progress with free graphics drivers, three new stable kernels

"Not much has been heard in recent months about the open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA GPUs, properly known as "xf86-video-nv" but usually shortened to just "nv". Recently, however, NVIDIA man Aaron Plattner released version 2.1.14. Although innovations are few, some of the changes mean that the driver now handles a great many later graphic chips that were previously only supported by the Nouveau driver or the proprietary NVIDIA driver. These include various GeForce 7950 cards, the GeForce models 285 and 295, and many other graphics cards in the 9000 series.

"A week ago, in his blog AMD's John Bridgman announced some progress with work on the open source driver code to give 3D support to the R6xx and R7xx GPU series used with Radeon graphics hardware in the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series. He said it seemed to be behaving properly on 14 of 63 tests, drawing incorrectly on 24 and either not drawing or crashing, on the remaining 25. Apart from there still being some work to do to fix these bugs the driver performance is also reported to be ("mind-bogglingly slow")."

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