This week marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System. Erik Reid has been working on getting DRI support for NetBSD to work. Under NetBSD/i386 1.6P, a Matrox G450 has been reported to work, Radeon and Riva128 should be functional as well.
The NetBSD Project Celebrates its 10th Anniversary
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I worked with Erik to test out the DRI on NetBSD with my Radeon 8500. Native apps work fine (bzflag, gltron, etc.), but linux emulation is non-functional.
Also, quitting X and restarting it will cause my machine to reboot and/or lock up. Not good, not too bad 🙂
Adam
Congratulations and thanks for all the hard work.
I’ve never used X on it, and I don’t actually have much experience with it, but NetBSD seemed, based on my few days with it, to be one of the least painful OS’s made. I’ve got a CD ready to install NetBSD next time I come in to owning another old computer!
Congratulations. NetBSD is probably thought as the portable BSD. What it rather should get credit for is the stable BSD. NetBSD is _rock_ solid.
to be that stable like it is portable on other platforms too?
What about ppc?
-A
What sort of speed does DRI give, compared to the official drivers available from Nvidia and ATI (for Linux)?
Some, but real speed comes from taking advantage of the hardware on the GFX card. For that one needs specs, which isn’t open. DRI doesn’t solve that, it solves the problem about X drivers beeing in userspace.
Wasn’t expecting this to show up here..
nit: r128 is Rage128, not Riva128.
I should also point out that there have been many other much more significant improvements to NetBSD lately, including i386 and sparc SMP support, proper support for lwps, including a pthreads library, many security improvement(systrace, verified exec).. tons of stuff.
I’m still (very slowly) working on testing the linux emulation support for DRI. Certainly isn’t half as useful without it..
DRI does support hardware such as the Radeon8500, which is a pretty speedy card. It should perform on netbsd as it does in linux, though I 1) don’t have an 8500, and 2) don’t have a linux machine, atm.
Happy 10th Anniversary, NetBSD!
FYI, using the DRI drivers, the Radeon 8500 is as fast under NetBSD as it is under Linux.
OK, so the BSD version should be as fast under Linux. How fast are the drivers under Linux? What performance could I expect to gain in 3d apps with these DRI drivers?
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