Nvidia Responds to Torvalds’ Criticism

Nvidia has responded to the fierce criticism of Linus Torvalds in a press statement. According to Nvidia, the company fully supports Linux, including with its proprietary drivers, and also contributes code for the ARM Linux kernel.

Torvalds recently lashed out at Nvidia during an interview with students. The Linux guru, among other things, described Nvidia as “the most horrible company we’ve dealt with” and criticized the closed stance towards developers trying to develop open source drivers, such as the Nouveau team. Torvalds’ outburst was triggered by a question from a student who had a laptop with Nvidia’s Optimus technology. The hardware manufacturer would not provide any support for this functionality within a Linux-based operating system.

In a reaction of Nvidia’s public relations department, the company says it has deliberately chosen to offer proprietary drivers for all supported operating systems, including Linux. Nvidia’s proprietary drivers would also offer broadly the same OpenGL performance as Windows and be regularly updated. Nvidia also states that it supports almost all its GPU variants in Linux, such as its GeForce, Quadro and Tesla GPU series. Finally, Nvidia points out that it regularly contributes code for the ARM kernel.

However, Nvidia makes no concrete promises that could improve support for Optimus technology in Linux. The company states that Optimus was intended for PCs with Windows 7 during release, and that the community itself can still use the power-saving features of Optimus under Linux with its own Bumblebee implementation. utilize† Nvidia is also said to have made some changes to its Optimus drivers to improve the ‘interaction’ with Bumblebee.