Driver Update: Nvidia Linux Display Driver 185.18.14

Nvidia developers have released a new set of drivers for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD with 185.18.14 as the version number this time. These drivers can be obtained via the following links: Linux x86, Linux amd64/em64t, FreeBSD x86 and Solaris x86/x64 be brought in. The corresponding list of customizations looks like this:

Release Highlights:

• Modified VDPAU to dlopen libpthread.so (on all platforms), to avoid conflicts between the current libc and a compat libpthread.
• Linux: Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels.
• Linux: Moved kernel module loading earlier in the X driver’s initialization, to facilitate more graceful fallbacks if the kernel module cannot be loaded. Removed the LoadKernelModule X configuration option.
• Linux: Fixed an OpenGL driver crash while running Bibble 5.
• Fixed a Xinerama drawable resource management problem that can cause GLXBadDrawable errors in certain cases, such as when Wine applications are run.
• Fixed XineramaQueryScreens to return 0 screens instead of 1 screen with the geometry of screen 0 when XineramaIsActive returns false. This conforms to the Xinerama manual page and fixes an interaction problem with Compiz when there is more than one X screen.
• Added support for new horizontal interlaced and checkerboard passive stereo modes.
• Fixed a DisplayPort interaction problem with power management suspend/resume events.
• Fixed occasional X driver memory management performance problems when a composite manager is running.
• Fixed a bug with VT-switching or mode-switching while using Compiz; the bug could lead to a corrupted desktop (eg, a white screen) or in the worst case an X server crash.
• Fixed a bug that could cause GPU errors in some cases while driving Quadro SDI products.
• Fixed a several second hang when VT-switching while OpenGL stereo applications were running on pre-G80 Quadro GPUs.
• Added support for multiple swap group members on G80 and later Quadro GPUs.
• Fixed the behavior of the NV_CTRL_FRAMELOCK_SYNC_DELAY NV-CONTROL attribute on Quadro G-Sync II.
• Fixed a problem with Quadro SDI where transitioning from “clone mode” to “OpenGL mode” would fail.
• Fixed VDPAU to eliminate some cases of corruption when decoding H.264 video containing field-coded reference frames on G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, or GT200 GPUs. Such streams are commonly found in DVB broadcasts.
• Slightly improved the performance of the VDPAU noise reduction algorithm.
• Enhanced VDPAU to validate whether overlay usage is supported by the current hardware configuration, and to automatically fall back to the blit-based presentation queue if required.
• Fixed error checking in VdpVideoMixerRender, to reject calls that specify more layers than the VdpMixer was created with.
• Modified VDPAU’s VDPAU_DEBUG code to emit a complete backtrace on all platforms, not just on 32-bit Linux.
• Improved interaction between VDPAU and PowerMizer; appropriate performance levels should now be chosen for video playback of all standard resolutions on all supported GPUs.
• Fixed a bug in VDPAU that sometimes caused “display preemption” when the VdpDecoderCreate function failed.
• Fixed a potential segfault in the VDPAU trace library, triggered by a multi-threaded application creating a new VdpDevice in one thread, at the same time that another thread detected “display preemption”.