Kernel love for Nvidia and Nintendo

Posted at 3:06pm on Thursday February 25th 2010

We don't normally make a big fuss about kernel releases - after all, many of the changes are low-level and don't directly affect us mere mortals - but 2.6.33 is an exception. First up, this release includes Nouveau, a totally free, reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia graphics cards. Not only does this driver support more cards than the proprietary, closed one, but it can be updated and maintained by the community indefinitely.

Secondly, this kernel includes support for Nintendo's Wii and GameCube consoles. The gc-linux project has been working on this for a while, and now it's in the mainline kernel tree.

Here are the biggest changes:

Nouveau driver for Nvidia graphics cards
Improvements to the tracing infrastructure and perf tool
TCP Cookie Transactions to block denial-of-service attacks
In-memory compressed swapping through /dev/ramswapX devices
Better drivers for VMware's emulated GPU and network card
Nintendo Wii and GameCube support

See Kernel Newbies for a detailed look at everything new in 2.6.33.

You should follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter

Your comments

wii and gamecube?

Mikey (not verified) - February 25, 2010 @ 3:57pm

why would you need wii and gamecube support? can you instal llinux to them?

Nintendo Wii and GameCube

filip007 (not verified) - February 25, 2010 @ 3:58pm

Nintendo Wii and GameCube support what actually means that?

Alright, but...

Mnemonic66 (not verified) - February 25, 2010 @ 4:02pm

Nouveau supports more Nvidia video cards than does the proprietary driver, but does it support those video cards supported by the proprietary driver better?

Wii and Gamecube

Muzer_cbatli (not verified) - February 25, 2010 @ 6:12pm

You can indeed install Linux on the Wii and Gamecube if you install homebrew (which is extremely easy to do; you need only an SD card). I have been making a distro for it for a while...

Oh, and if you are planning

Muzer_cbatli (not verified) - February 25, 2010 @ 6:13pm

Oh, and if you are planning on doing it, use the tutorial on wiibrew.org - most other tutorials are either out of date or very dangerous, or both.

3D support

Habo (not verified) - February 26, 2010 @ 8:44am

Is that driver with 3D support? How to install it?

RE:3D support

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - February 26, 2010 @ 10:02am

Sadly, No, there is No 3d support in Nouveau, nor is there likely to be any. It is cool becauseotherwise older devices would go unsupported, but the proprietary driver gives better results.
also, a nouveau-enabled kernel will grab the card before the Nvidia driver, leading to problems if you actually want to use NVidia's own driver

RE:RE:3D support

Mike_IronFist (not verified) - February 26, 2010 @ 2:12pm

"No, there is No 3d support in Nouveau, nor is there likely to be any. It is cool becauseotherwise older devices would go unsupported, but the proprietary driver gives better results."
Not true, they're working on it with Gallium3D, hence why the Fedora project wants to have out-of-the-box 3D support for NVIDIA cards in Fedora 13.

"a nouveau-enabled kernel will grab the card before the Nvidia driver, leading to problems if you actually want to use NVidia's own driver"
That's a load of nonsense! Haven't you heard of X.Org? You know, the -entire- piece of code responsible for delivering a GUI to Linux users? THAT decides what display driver is used, and it's been that way for years.