Speculation on future nVidia xrandr support (from Phoronix)

[oldcpu]

I found this Phoronix article an interesting read, albeit I confess I did NOT understand all of it: [Phoronix] RandR 1.4 Brings Per-CRTC Pixmaps; NVIDIA Support?](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODg3Mg)

I note when I purchased a laptop 2 years ago, I deliberately chose ATI hardware over nVidia hardware for 2 reasons:

1. nVidia had a bad reputation at that time for quality control with its graphic card GPUs, especially in laptops, and
2. nVidia xrandr support was poor compared to ATI and Intel, where in my case where I use my laptop in business meetings and xrandr support is important.

Having typed that, I am a BIG nVidia fan, and out of 5 desktop PCs in our appartment currently, 4 have nVidia graphic hardware. The desktop PC (in our apartment) without nVidia hardware we are about to give away (to our maid) and pretty soon we will have only 4 desktop PCs, all with nVidia hardware.

But there will come a day again when I once more look at a new laptop (as one of our current laptops is 2 years, and the other is 6 or 7 years old) and thus my wife and I are thinking Christmas 2011 (next year’s Christmas) may be time for a new laptop (where xrandr support is important for me in a laptop).

Thus this quote for the article was of interest to me:

@Phoronix

As another change done by Keith last night, with RandR 1.4, NVIDIA may finally be more prone to supporting RandR 1.2+ in their proprietary Linux/Unix graphics driver. While NVIDIA promised proper RandR 1.2 support for their binary graphics driver two years ago, it has yet to come with any screen manipulation still really needing to be done through NVIDIA’s extensions where implemented like with their NVIDIA Settings panel. However, last night Keith commented on a discussion (the message) he had with one of NVIDIA’s Linux engineers some years ago.

NVIDIA’s position was that they could not support the Resize and Rotate extension since their driver couldn’t access the mode-setting instructions provided by RandR as a whole, but rather each mode-setting step is submitted to the driver individually. Keith has changed this in RandR 1.4 by adding a new RandR request (RRSetCrtcConfigs) that allows the sending of all instructions over to the X driver in one step. Hopefully now we will see RandR 1.2/1.3/1.4 support finally coming to NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux driver in the near future.

[deano_ferrari]

Very interesting Lee! It would be nice to see all drivers fully supporting a uniform configuration interface. It makes things simpler for the desktop envorinment (and users). Thanks.