[Ardour-Users] Can anyone help with a Linux problem ?

Rob Quin robquin at uklinux.net
Fri May 29 13:31:34 PDT 2009


On Thursday 28 May 2009 18:36, Mark Knecht wrote:
> >> I'm sure you probably know this but the closed-source driver cannot be
> >> shown to be rt-kernel safe
> >
> > Some people reported that and others reported it's fine.
>
> How does anyone other than NVidia be able to report it's rt-safe? Only
> NVidia can see the code.



I don't have any useful suggestions on the topic of this thread but I would 
like to try and prevent this missinformation from spreading. This is the real 
situation.

The Nvidia code is copyrighted to Nvidia and not open source.
However the source is published by Nvidia and widely available so anyone can 
inspect it, On Debian you enable  the non-free repositories 
in /etc/apt/sources.list and then do

#apt-get install nvidia-kernel-source

and the source tarball pops up in /usr/src/ for you to unpack and inspect. I'm 
sure it is easy enough to work it out for your own favourite distro.

The Nvidia source is presumably not checked by the realtime people because it 
is not packaged along with the other modules in the kernel source so any 
patches that they came up with would not get applied when you patch the 
kernel source tree and would have to be done separately. (Can't blame them 
for not wanting to go there.)

The source doesn't always compile easily against the kerrnel source.
(If anyone needs more info then google it. If that doesn't work then mail me 
and I'll tell you what I know.)

I use the Nvidia driver because I have never yet managed to get dual monitor 
display working with the open source driver and I just hate doing audio work 
on a single head setup.




More information about the Ardour-Users mailing list