Surprise: Linux officially supports nForce

Nobody in the Linux community seems to be aware that the Linux kernel now officially supports the nVidia nForce chipset.

I exchanged email with Scott, who is in charge of nForce software at nVidia. I had opened our dialog to express concern that the Linux kernel does not support the nForce chipset, unless you separately download and install the nForce drivers from the nVidia website.

His response is good news for the Linux community:

I believe your information may be dated. We moved our Linux networking and storage to an open-source model about a year ago. We now directly support the forcedeth, amd74xx, and sata_nv drivers in the kernel. We submit patches and updates for bug fixes as well as new chipsets. If you pull the current driver from kernel.org, even un-released chipset support is present.

Why doesn't anybody seem to know about this change in policy? It might have to do with the disclaimer at the top of forcedeth.c, pulled from the latest stable release of the Linxu kernel:

forcedeth: Ethernet driver for NVIDIA nForce media access controllers.

Note: This driver is a cleanroom reimplementation based on reverse engineered documentation written by Carl-Daniel Hailfinger and Andrew de Quincey. It's neither supported nor endorsed by NVIDIA Corp. Use at your own risk.

Scott said he will look into changing that language.