NVIDIA has released a statement in response to Linus Torvalds harsh criticism over Linux compatibility and support of NVIDIA Optimus Cards and other issues. As you are already aware that during a recent Q&A session Linus said that NVIDIA was the single worst company they have ever dealt with. His frustration with Nvidia, which is felt by the entire Linux community, was evident when he said, "Nvidia, Fuck You!"

It was unlikely that Nvidia won't respond to the frustration displayed by the father of Linux, a technoloy which has created a new market for Nvidia in the mobile segment, a technology which rules the server space, supercomputers, embedded systems and much more.

As Phoronix reports, NVIDIA addressed the situation by saying "supporting Linux is important," and that it understands people's frustrations. It also said they are largely working with Linux's ARM support and that they have made a decision to support Linux by leveraging Nvidia common code, rather that Linux common infrastructure. This will not please everyone but providing consistent experience to users at all platforms is their priority and it does that. However, they haven't said anything about working and sharing code and support with Nouveau developers.

Addressing the issues with Optimus chips Nvidia said, "When we launched our Optimus notebook technology, it was with support for Windows 7 only. The open source community rallied to work around this with support from the Bumblebee Open Source Project http://bumblebee-project.org/. And as a result, we've recently made Installer and readme changes in our R295 drivers that were designed to make interaction with Bumblebee easier."

The company claims that:

1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.
2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.
3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.

At the end of the day, providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals.

So, it doesn't look like anything is going to change at Nvidia. Nvidia's support for Linux is interesting as the company joined the Linux Foundation in March this year.

When the company joined the Foundation Scott Pritchett, VP of Linux Platform Software at NVIDIA said, "NVIDIA is strongly committed to enabling world-class experiences and innovation with our GPU and mobile products.  Membership in The Linux Foundation will accelerate our collaboration with the organizations and individuals instrumental in shaping the future of Linux, enabling a great experience for users and developers of Linux."

Source: Phoronix