Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 20th Aug 2009 09:43 UTC
Podcasts What else would we talk about other than the massively [popular|controversial] article about X.org last week. We try and address a number of concerns about the article and common lines of reasoning / misunderstanding. Lastly, we move onto something completely different with topics on Google Chrome on Linux, IE6 and the two details we know about RockMelt: Rock. Melt.
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Mark Williamson
Member since:
2005-07-06

"The solution to that is for Linux to change to LGPL and given perfect lengal clarity to developers and then develop a stable driver ABI/API so that the likes of Nvidia aren't constantly chasing a moving target."

Yikes!!!

Talk about THE most difficult solution to the problem. This will happen the day I go to work in my flying car.

Not that disagree with your idea but it is highly unlikely to happen.


I'd just note that FreeBSD has, AFAIK, a stable driver ABI (at least within each major release). Don't know about the other BSDs. It doesn't seem to have attracted massive hardware manufacturer support to their platform, though obviously there are other factors in play as well. Obviously, they do have a good complement of open source drivers so it's not like their hardware support is *bad*.

IIRC there are NVidia drivers for FreeBSD, or have been in the past. I'd be interested to know if the stable kernel ABI makes them a bit less painful to maintain over an install's lifetime...

Although on Linux it's got a lot since DKMS started getting shipped with my distro - the NVidia drivers get automatically recompiled when I boot with a new kernel even if I'm not using the packaged version of the drivers. Before that I used to have to do the recompile manually if I was unable to use a packaged version from my distro.

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