Differences between version 7 and predecessor to the previous major change of BinaryDriver.
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| Newer page: | version 7 | Last edited on Monday, November 15, 2004 5:05:58 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Monday, October 7, 2002 10:22:18 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-A Device driver that doesn't come with source.
BinaryDriver'
s are often used by companies that think that giving out the source to their driver gives away too much about how their hardware works.
Of course because they are compiled seperately
to the kernel, they tend to be bound to specific versions of the kernel, and you have to wait for new versions of your driver to be available before you can upgrade.
+A Device driver that doesn't come with source. BinaryDriver~
s are often used by companies that think that giving out the source to their driver gives away too much about how their hardware works. Of course because they are compiled separately
to the kernel, they tend to be bound to specific versions of the kernel, and you have to wait for new versions of your driver to be available before you can upgrade.
-All in all, Binary Drivers
suck :)
+All in all, BinaryDriver~s
suck.
:)
-In the linux
world, one well-known example is [NVidia
]'s binary linux driver
for their accelerated graphics cards. Perhaps understandably,
they don't want their competitors benefitting from the very
optimised graphics routines that the drivers contain
, but
the linux
community could not help
fix up
the inevitable bugs found
in early versions of the
drivers, some of which locked up machines
. Indeed, bugs
relating to the closed-source
drivers were so common that the linux
kernel folks added a special
"taint" flag that indicated
a binary
-only driver and refused
to even look at any bugs from
a tainted kernel.
+In the Linux
world, one well-known example is [nVidia | http://www.nvidia.com/
]'s binary [Kernel] [Module]
for their accelerated graphics cards. While it is understandable that
they don't want their competitors benefitting from their (purportedly highly
optimised)
graphics driver
routines, it also means
the Linux
community could not fix any of
the inevitable (and often system stability jeopardizing)
bugs in these
drivers. Indeed, issues
relating to ClosedSource
drivers were so common that the Linux
kernel folks added a "taint" flag that indicates whether any of the loaded [Kernel] [Module]s are released under
a non
-free license (which BinaryDriver~s necessarily are). They refuse
to even look at any issues encountered while running
a tainted kernel.
