nVIDIA now has 3D drivers and OpenGL libraries for Xorg on Solaris 10. This brings the same level of functionality for the nVIDIA cards to Solaris that Linux and BSD have had already. Now, it’s ATi’s turn…
nVIDIA 3D OpenGL drivers for Solaris x64
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Go nVidia!
i guess that was an awaited feature.. are there some people using solaris those days? anyway i guess it wasn’t a that big change if you’ve alredy done linux and bsd (Xorg’s the same, leaves the kernel part to be done which may be similar)
It’s good to see Nvidia broadening their support. Hope they go for OpenBSD next.
Yes, there is some people using solaris those days. It is not because YOU are not using solaris that nobody use it …
So what kind of 3D apps do people use on Solaris anyway?
I wish they’d spend the time on making the Linux installation/setup/management simpler/better.
Or will these work on x86 solaris as well?
My Sun W2100z Opteron workstation will be so happy!
Looks like it’s only for the Quadro series of graphics cards — the high-end (expensive) workstation cards. GeForce cards don’t appear to have the drivers yet.
From the links posted:
” Includes both 32-bit and 64-bit support “
Looks like it’s only for the Quadro series of graphics cards — the high-end (expensive) workstation cards. GeForce cards don’t appear to have the drivers yet.
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Seems like it is only the quadro cards that get support in this release. I am personally waiting for nvidia to release something for their GForce line up.
there are also NVIDIA 1.0-7664 drivers for Linux x86/x86_64
thank you nvidia
thank you also for OpenGL 2.0 support
i didn’t say _nobody_’s using solaris i just don’t know of anybody.. seems opensolaris’ gonna put some users back there.
btw. a nvidia driver for linux/ppc is still outstanding (same for ati)
nVIDIAs package is only shipping with the /etc/driver_aliases entries for Quadro cards but I’m told by engineers in the Solaris X server team that the drivers are known to work with the GeForce cards as well.
Use prtconf and/or /usr/X11/bin/scanpci to find the PCI ID of your GeForce card and then do this:
# update_drv -m ‘”pciidfromscanpci”‘ nvidia
NOTE the ‘ and ” quoteing this is VERY important.
Come on, if they release drivers for Solaris x64, why not PPC Linux?
> Come on, if they release drivers for Solaris x64, why not PPC Linux?
Could it be that PPC linux has a significantly smaller install base than Solaris x86?. Just because Linus uses Mac as his main platform, doesn’t mean that there’s a big install base. How many Macs are running PPC + have Nvidia gfx h/w? – most macs still run MacOSX and use ATI graphics.
Novell, Redhat, IBM or Oracle don’t support LinuxPPC so why should nvidia?
Neither Matrox nor ATI release drivers for their recent cards. This was actually something I pointed out when ATI first open-sourced the drivers for R200. I said it’d only last as long as they were the underdog and NVIDIA was beating their performance. Now that ATI is playing in the same league as NVIDIA, viola, no more open source drivers.
>Novell, Redhat, IBM or Oracle don’t support LinuxPPC so why should nvidia?
As for Novell:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/sysreqs.html
and check SUPPORTED PROCESSOR PLATFORMS section.
As for RedHat:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/configuration/
and look at 6 row at the table.
As for IBM, check this:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/linux/power/index.html
As for Oracle, check this:
http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/dlgpage.jsp?p_dlg_id=3226884…
However, you are right in this case – Oracle still has only developer’s release ( while planning to have production release ) of their 10g database.
If the OpenBSD project pays them a large sum either directly for a port or indirectly through a nontrivial purchase arrangement, I’m sure they’d consider porting to OpenBSD as well. That’s basically what Sun has done, isn’t it?
Would be nice if these guys could release some silicon (faster than 90MHz) and their opengl libs for our use.
http://www.saarcor.de/
Real time ray tracing instead of traditional gpu’s.
Their screenshots don’t look so good but this product is in alpha.
Have it running on my GeForce 6800 GT under Solaris 10 x86-64 right now. Works great. Now to start some “Performance Validation Testing” :grins:
Man, Nvidia really shows everyone else how its done.
A few years ago I was very much an ATI fanboy until I switched over to Linux. What a complete nightmare trying to get my card to work! Even after I did, there were numerous visual problems with UT-based (UT 99/2k3 AA, etc) games and for some reason X would freeze every 15min – 3hrs. I finally gave in and bought a Nvidia 5600 256MB. Pretty low-end but it was on sale! Not only were the drivers easy to install, but also the Nvidia folks were always ready when it came to the latest breakages. Big thumbs up. Great to see them supporting Solaris.
Oh and nvidia-settings….icing on the cake.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y275/carbon-12/nvidia-settings.jpg
I concur with you. This is why I like nVidia, at least they think about the minority and release valuable drivers, unlike some other company we know…
I agree….NVIDIA has shown how it should be done….short of open-sourcing the actual code. The support has been wonderful. That’s why I am buying ONLY NVIDIA cards in ALL of my computers. It’s a good sales move too, no? Worked for me. ATI, eat your heart out….
Who’s paying for the Solaris nVidia driver?
Who’s paying for the Linux/PPC nVidia driver?
——————————
As for Novell:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/sysreqs.html
and check SUPPORTED PROCESSOR PLATFORMS section.
* x86
* AMD64
* Intel EM64T
* Itanium Processor Family
* IBM POWER (former IBM iSeries and IBM pSeries systems)
* IBM zSeries (64-bit)
* IBM S/390 (31-bit)
As for RedHat:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/configuration/
and look at 6 row at the table.
Supports x86 systems Yes Yes Yes
Supports Itanium2 systems (1) Yes Yes Yes
Supports AMD64/EM64T systems No Yes Yes
Supports IBM POWER, zSeries & S/390 systems
———————————
As for IBM, check this:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/linux/power/index.html
Learn more:
About Linux on POWER
Events
Linux on OpenPower
Linux on BladeCenter
Linux on pSeries
Linux on iSeries
———————————–
As for Oracle, check this:
http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/dlgpage.jsp?p_dlg_id=3226884…..
However, you are right in this case – Oracle still has only developer’s release ( while planning to have production release ) of their 10g database.
Oracle software for Linux on POWER
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I don’t see PowerPC in any of them – Don’t confuse Power with PPC. I guarantee you that Linux for Power won’t boot or load on a Mac.
Let me know when you can load MacOSX on an IBM POWER machine.
amd64 or emt64t or ia64, but not x64.
IA64 is an entirely different beast than x86-64.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD64
http://www.answers.com/topic/x64
Probably because of Microsoft’s naming scheme, x64 has joined the ranks of synonyms. IA64 on the other hand is just wrong.
> i didn’t say _nobody_’s using solaris i just don’t know of
> anybody.. seems opensolaris’ gonna put some users back
> there.
Maybe when you graduate high school and get a job you’ll discover that yes, outside of their parents’ basements people DO use solaris in the real world.
SLES for POWER does run on Power Mac G5s. There are reports that SLES 8 worked on some G3 and G4 machines.
Fedora Core runs on Macs, so I bet RHEL 5 will also work once it is released.
This has nothing to do with nVidia drivers, though, since Red Hat, Novell, and IBM don’t *support* Linux on any machine that has nVidia graphics.
Yes, PPC and POWER are different chips but very close families with large set of common instructions. Both of them used in pSeries workstations and servers. And single one distribution of AIX install just fine on any of them. I guess it uses processor detection at runtime. There are level ob abstraction known as Reference Platform, and if Your soft designed for it then You virtually can run it on any compliant HW. I bet that most pSeries as well as PPC-based Macs, as well as outdated BeBox all compliant with Reference Platform.
nVIDIAs package is only shipping with the /etc/driver_aliases entries for Quadro cards but I’m told by engineers in the Solaris X server team that the drivers are known to work with the GeForce cards as well.
Use prtconf and/or /usr/X11/bin/scanpci to find the PCI ID of your GeForce card and then do this:
# update_drv -m ‘”pciidfromscanpci”‘ nvidia
NOTE the ‘ and ” quoteing this is VERY important.
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Thank you very, very much. Tis always a treat when a Sun rep post on OSNews. Way to goooooo!!!
Yes, I am back, but two little points to make:
1) The performance will still be as bad as a dog with no legs (not too sure who’s more insulted, SUN/nVidia or the dog) because Solaris still lacks an AGP driver – something that has been in development for how long?
2) Doesn’t support any of the consumer range of cards – no particular useful for those who wish to use it for something other than running on SUN machines. I don’t mind that little aspect, but it would be nice for SUN to stop lying about their intention to supporting other platforms, and simply admit they’re only going to support the hardware that comes with their computers – and no one elses.
I’m not being mean spirited, but when an operating system has been in development for more than 2 years, I don’t know, maybe one expects that basic things like AGP drivers would actually exist?! or is this just another example of SUN cutting their nose of to spite their face in regards to their fire-developers-a-thon – then at the same time scream for more patience in regards to added mundane and ordinary features that should have existed in Solaris 5 years ago!
well, solaris does run linux binaries (using same kind of tool), so i guess it is goo to play doom 3!
Doesn’t nvidia drivers have their own agpagart? At least the linux version does.
> 2) Doesn’t support any of the consumer range of cards – no > particular useful for those who wish to use it for
> something other than running on SUN machines. I don’t mind > that little aspect, but it would be nice for SUN to stop
> lying about their intention to supporting other platforms, > and simply admit they’re only going to support the
> hardware that comes with their computers – and no one
> elses.
A guy from Sun just explained here that it does, it’s just not supported. Which is more that you could say for, say Red Hat, which doesn’t support nVidia at all.
Also, it’s nVidia, not Sun, which has been developing it. So you’re missing the point.
> I’m not being mean spirited, but when an operating system > has been in development for more than 2 years, I don’t
> know, maybe one expects that basic things like AGP drivers > would actually exist?! or is this just another example of > SUN cutting their nose of to spite their face in regards
> to their fire-developers-a-thon – then at the same time
> scream for more patience in regards to added mundane and
> ordinary features that should have existed in Solaris 5
> years ago!
Like AGP? Solaris is much older than AGP, and besides there was no “Solaris 5” as such. SunOS was it called back then.
Also, solaris is a server platform, primary, than maybe a developers one. A few people use it for visualization too, and that’s about it. Now :
– Servers don’t even have AGP.
– Devlopers need just basic support, and an OS more like that on server for which they are developing for. And they mainly use only 2D.
– Visualization users do need fast graphics, but they use custom high-end hardware, like Quadro, or run it on Sparcs.
Supporting it for home users is pointless, regardless of the one who’s doint the support / development. Sun is trying to build the community around Solaris and Open Solaris, but that is still in start, and I don’t think they are aiming for home users either, more universities, and small companies.
@Kaiwai
1) The performance will still be as bad as a dog with no legs (not too sure who’s more insulted, SUN/nVidia or the dog) because Solaris still lacks an AGP driver – something that has been in development for how long?
Wrong. The nVidia driver has it’s own built in AGP code. So for example, I get over 13,000fps in glxgears, and over 300fps in a Quake Engine project I contribute to. Full AGP 8x ripped and roaring for me. In one of the future Solaris releases there will also be built in support in the OS for the chips that nVidia doesn’t already support internally in their driver.
2) Doesn’t support any of the consumer range of cards – no particular useful for those who wish to use it for something other than running on SUN machines. I don’t mind that little aspect, but it would be nice for SUN to stop lying about their intention to supporting other platforms, and simply admit they’re only going to support the hardware that comes with their computers – and no one elses.
Also wrong, “supported” here means what you are allowed to file bugs on etc. Not what card can actually be used with the driver. For example, I’m using the driver with a GeForce 6800 GT. This is “unsupported” officially speaking by nVidia, but it works just fine, with full OpenGL 2.0 support…
As usual, you don’t research the whole thing before posting Kaiwai. Stop trolling please.
Dude! Who uses AGP anymore? PCI Express has been out for like six whole months
I thought kaiwai was a known troll on osnews. At least i find his comments always provocative. But back to the topic.
I’d give solaris a try now that it has most drivers and tools i need like (nvidia/audigy drivers and even my favorite fltk toolkit). Hell i even can run portage on it. It can be a nice alternative to my gentoo box which I use mostly for development.
Yeah, ignore Kaiwai. He is a known troll…
My glxgears performance is the same when using Suse 9.3 and Solaris 10 on the same hardware (dual boot).
RE: Anonymous (IP: —.ptt.yu) – Posted on 2005-06-03 12:56:06
1) Use italics for quoting, its not hard, basic HTML knowledge would do.
2) Take comprehension lessons, I said, and I quote, “mundane and ordinary features that should have existed in Solaris 5 years ago!”, which would mean I was referring to Solaris 8. Solaris 8 should have had many features that SUN is now raving on about. Sorry, basic hardware support isn’t a feature, its a basic necessity.
3) Solaris was NEVER developed as a server platform, it was primarily designed as a workstation platform to run on, known then, as low cost workstations running SPARC processors. It was only later when they started to branch out into servers when Solaris was created from the merging of SunOS and SystemV code licenced from the UNIX Software Lab (IIRC, which was later purchased by Novell). Solaris is a server AND workstation platform. Oh, and the workstations are used for high end, 3d accelerated egineering functions. Any idiot who has used a SUN SPARC Workstation will know its niche in the market.
4) There are SUN programmers here, who will tell you that they worked on the code. But hey, why not let facts get in your way of a damn good rant, scream and whine.
RE: Shawn (IP: —.everestkc.net) – Posted on 2005-06-03 15:11:16
1) How am I a troll? I have been posting on this site, under the same handle for well over a year and a half. I’m not a one hit under troll, I don’t need to hide myself behind ‘anonymous’ and anyone who wishes to contact me, can quite easily do it – in fact, I have actually had some quite polite discussions with people here, via email.
2) Do you have a list of the support AGP chipsets? I’d that that there wouldn’t be much considering the number that are out there.
RE: Rayiner Hashem (IP: —.res.gatech.edu) – Posted on 2005-06-03 15:47:46
LOL, we’re probably still waiting for that to appear in the driver list
Na, it works, but it would be interesting to see what the performance is like compared to Linux or some other platform.
RE: cc (IP: —.adsl.hansenet.de) – Posted on 2005-06-03 20:22:46 / joe (IP: —.adsl-dhcp.dsl.gvtc.com) – Posted on 2005-06-03 21:31:48
Interesting, these only people who seem to have a problem with me, are the same people who got their nickers in a bunch over my statement saying that Apple married opensource and proprietary applications to develop a product for the end user. Hmm, interesting, quite happy to have ‘freedom of speech’ forthemselves, but screw anyone else – is the opinion held by those, and many other posters here.
Dear kaiwai, i really appreciate you stroking you knowlege penis that hard and telling us how dumb and imcompetent sun is and that you know everything better than everyone else. I will give you a medal for that and also for that that you post under kaiwai the whole time so i know what post i schould skip. That means i dont suppres your freedom of speech unless you feel like you have to obey my order to stop writing here and get a life.
And that is coming from a person who waits till the last minute, once the article has gone off the front page of osnews.com – nice way to duck a debate – btw, are a Republican? seems to be the kind of tatics they employ – duck, dodge and bullshit.