14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia developers have just published a new Beta driver for the Linux platform, and it looks like the company is preparing for some serious improvements, which should land shortly in the stable branch as well.
Nvidia doesn't release too many Beta versions for their drivers and they mostly push their immediate changes in the short-lived branch, but when they have really important stuff, they use Beta versions.
The current one is not a terribly large update, but it comes with some pretty important structural changes and improvements. It will be interesting to see them land in the stable version of the driver as well, but they will need some proper testing.
The main problem with Nvidia Beta drivers is that they don't usually land in repositories, despite their importance. It's likely that users who don't have Arch Linux, for example, will have to manually install this driver, and that's never a nice thing to do. It's a process that can leave you open to issues when new kernels land, and it's just an inelegant solution overall.
Nvidia 355.06 Beta driver is available now
As I mentioned earlier, the changelog is not all that big, and you can read it below, at the end of the article, but there are a couple of entries that should make this a very interesting release.
"Replaced the build system for the NVIDIA kernel modules and updated the installer package and nvidia-installer to use the new build system and kernel module source code layout. Added experimental full OpenGL support to EGL. Added support to make an OpenGL 3.0 and above context current without making current to any drawable," is noted in the changelog.
It's easy to see why this is an exciting version and why it needs a little bit more testing. If you want to give it a try, you can download the Nvidia 355.06 Beta driver from Softpedia.