“FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 is now available for testing. Things had been going well with the 5.5 BETAs up to the point we suspended making them so we could focus on the balance of the 6.1 release so we think 5.5 is pretty much ready to go. Unless big problems are reported with this RC we will start the 5.5 release builds this coming weekend and do the release early next week.”
I always get a bit confused when they release a 6.x series and then a 5.x series. 5 will be more stable and 6 will have more new features, I guess.
5.5 is the last release in the 5 series. It’s an improvement over the 5.4 release. 6 is considered to be more stable than 5. They decided to release 5.5 for people who can’t or don’t want to upgrade to 6.
Thanks, now I understand 🙂
Hi,
Sorry this is slightly OT.. but HOPEFULLY someone reading this is in the know on this one.. Will there be an up and coming 6.x release that fixes the technical difficulties nVidia say exist in the kernel which stops them from release AMD64 accel drivers for geforce cards??
Thanks in advance folk
From what I’ve read, there isn’t going to be an AMD64 driver until 7.0.
I’m not technical enough to know whats going on.. But FBSD must be way out on the left field with what they do with their kernel to have created such an issue.. I mean, nVidia havn’t had any problems doing Win64, Solaris 64 or Linux64 drivers… What exactly is the issue, anyone know?
The kernel is lacking some features that are needed by Nvidia hardware, mainly PAT. Which is being ported but probably won’t be ready until 7.0.
What is PAT?
It stand for Page Attribute Table, according to an email posted on Nvidias FreeBSD forums the guy who’s porting PAT said “Well, I have the PAT stuff ported over to amd64 now and running and sent
a patch to my nvidia contact earlier this week for testing. I am hopeful
that there will be an nvidia driver for amd64 by the time 7.0 is released.” This was March of this year.
The issue is that MOST FreeBSD developers couldn’t give a rip about 3D acceleration on AMD64. It’s not to say that it isn’t important, or won’t be resolved by someone who makes it a priority.
Most BSD folks, like myself, are networking professionals and therefor far more concerned about system stability and correctness than playing games.
Nobody is “out in left field” with the exception of maybe yourself. If you claim no technical understanding, then perhaps you shouldn’t comment/make judgement.
Understand the system and it’s primary goal and function. FreeBSD, or any of the BSD’s for that matter, don’t put game playing as a top priority.
> Understand the system and it’s primary goal and
> function. FreeBSD, or any of the BSD’s for that
> matter, don’t put game playing as a top priority.
Decent support for current graphics adapters is not just a games issue, and making support much easier than on Linux, more integrated than on Linux, and more important to and welcomed by BSD kernel developers will surely be a differentiator for those who want a workstation OS and want to choose between Linux and BSD, whether raw FreeBSD or Desktop BSD or PCBSD.
Making BSD a player on the desktop is a stated objective now, isn’t it?
Thanks
Sorry if you misunderstood, but I did not pass judgement, I simply asked if someone in the know of the FBSD kernel knew what was going on… The term out on the left field simply means “doing something completly different to everyone else”, which is the way I saw the situation … The does not mean I said that it was wrong.
Also, please understand that my question had nothing to do with games, or gaming… HW accel drivers are important for a number of tasks.